Looking at the future of NS before the holidays

Unknown Worlds began 2012 wondering if it would exist in 2013. We end it wondering what gameplay experiences we can bring you in 2014 and beyond! The success of Natural Selection 2 has opened up paths and possibilities.

Before talking about those possibilities, let’s talk about responsibilities. No game is released in a perfect state. Any developer that does not have a list of ‘release bugs’ and ‘missed features’ on launch day is kidding themselves. NS2 is no different. What separates an unfinished game from a solid game is the degree to which it is supported post-release. Developers must take responsibility for caring for their product once it is out in …

On November 10th, just after the release of Natural Selection 2, a huge competition final took place in Cologne, Germany. It was Archaea vs Exertus, it was 4 hours, it was seen by 70,000 unique viewers. This is the long awaited highlight reel from the event. Subscribe to youtube.com/unknownworlds for more of them!

If all goes to plan, NS2 will be returning to the ESL studio in March for the finals of the 90-team ‘Natural Selection League’ being held by ensl.org. It’s going to be even bigger and better than the November event, and we can’t wait to tell you more.…

Build 233 is up and running! Servers will update over the next 24 hours. This is a bug-fixing, performance and stability patch, with some big improvements to Spark tools!

Warning! Be careful with the new Spark Editor ‘Vertex Weld’ tool. Save your work before using it. As it is a new implementation, there may be stability / file integrity issues with it.

Feature

• Added the name of the player being followed while waiting to spawn to the screen.
• Added server browser filter option for passworded servers.

Optimization

• Improved the performance of lighting calculations.
• Changed fullscreen passes to be rendered using a single triangle rather than a two triangle quad to eliminate overshading pixels along the diagonal.

Fix

• Fixed bug causing

When you run, clamber or fly through the corridors of Tram or the tunnels of Mineshaft, you could be forgiven for taking the experience for granted. Your avatar is free of your physical self, your experience separate from the real world around your PC. Yours is a playground in which your physical limitations are irrelevant.

That irrelevancy allows Child’s Play to improve the lives of countless children. When in a hospital, or other physically limiting situation, children benefit greatly from engaging with games. They are a distraction, a challenge, a stimulation, a social experience and a source of great fun.

When Charlie and Max first founded Unknown Worlds, they measured everything in burritos. How many burritos will that new PC …

Hello again… this is Brian Cummings, Technical Artist at UWE. This post is to bring up a few things that I am working on to help those interested in getting custom models and animations into their mods for Natural Selection 2.

Last year I made a blog post that had four video tutorial guides explaining how to export your own custom models for the Spark engine. I explained how to use Launchpad and the Viewer, how to setup and use Builder, how to export models from 3Ds Max 2009, and how to build your own .model_compile and .material files.

Since then, we’ve added some new features to Launchpad for publishing mods to the Steam Workshop. And also the format of …

Hey everyone,

We just released Build 232 on Steam. We keep cranking out the patches, to address some issues that are still popping up. We just noticed that Explore Mode wasn’t working…oops. So we fixed that and queued some other balance changes as well. Speaking of balance, I wanted to take a moment to explain a bit about these particular changes, as well as our evolving balancing process.

Now that we have thousands of games played on every patch, and we have so many new players joining the game every day, we really need to make sure that our changes are solid. If we mis-step, it can result in a lot of painful games until we get the next patch …

19 days after launch, here is our third patch. This is the first patch in which we have made a major attempt to address balance. When NS2 launched, first 100,000 games displayed a remarkable win loss ratio: 49% Marine wins, 51% alien wins.

This balance began to swing towards the aliens after the first week, without us making any changes to the game. This is a fascinating phenomenon in game balance: As the community gets better at the game, you become better at exploiting wrinkles in the fabric of its design. The discrepancy continued to widen to an unacceptable 40% marine wins.

So, here is build 230. Charlie has been watching the balance situation very closely – Consulting, playing, watching …

We know, we are naughty. We tried to get 229 out last week, but it was a recalcitrant brat. Basically, we fed it to Brian’s beard in order to straighten it out. The end result of that is that 229 is now live on Steam. And that you are actually playing the waste by-product of feeding game lua code to a grown man’s facial hair.

Think about that.

For those of you who made it through that thought, here’s the changelog! Lots of fixes and improvements. All the pyromaniacs amongst you will be particularly happy to see that the flame-thrower will no longer burn you while you use it, and leaves fire everywhere after… Firing.

Some people who have been …

This past weekend was huge for NS2, with the ESL European Launch Tournament exploding in front of 48,221 unique viewers and a peak of 4,037 concurrent viewers.

But the most important part of NS2 development, and the part we never lose sight of, is improving the game itself. That means fixing bugs, improving balance, adding new features and generally spit shining wherever the game does not yet shine.

To that end, our second post-launch patch (which we call a ‘build’) is about to be released. Back when NS2 was in Beta, we would release publically release new builds after a thorough, but intrinsically limited internal testing process. Sometimes, serious bugs would get through that internal testing process.

That was ok …