Happy Summer everyone! We are back with another update and this time our focus was based on the theme of Fix and Polish. There are plenty of changes throughout the log below to sink your teeth into, so I won’t go into detail and let it speak for itself. Enjoy!

Update 316 Changelog

Gameplay

• Onos
  • Boneshield has been redesigned and repurposed:
    • No longer regenerates armor in any circumstances
    • Now allows movement (speed of 3, which is roughly half) while active
      • Celerity bonus does not increase Boneshield movement speed, but still provides all speed bonuses otherwise.
    • All Frontal (approx. 110 degree forward-facing cone of Onos) damage from bullet-based weapons is reduced by 80%. With default FOV settings, if the attacker is

Summer is finally upon us and with that the forthcoming mighty Steam Sale. Sales usually bring in a lot of new faces to the game and over the years, we have worked hard to make changes that help those new to NS to learn and enjoy the game as all of us do. Please welcome these new players as they become familiar with the game.

With Update 315 we have consolidated the PLAY menu, updated the server browser and added new help screens for players. While in game you can now bring up an overlay that explains your individual player or lifeform controls all based on your key binds. We hope that this feature will help to better explain abilities …

Greetings!

My name is Chris “IronHorse” Gates and I wanted to announce a couple of things to the Natural Selection 2 community today.

First off, UWE has brought me on board as staff with the title of QA Manager, with the goal in mind to ensure only the highest quality updates are shipped. When things are broken or you find a bug, you no longer have to play telephone to get the right developer for the right job – I’m your guy! You can find and message me on the forums, through steam, or better yet our Discord server. Having worse frame-rate this patch? Experiencing a weird map glitch? I want to know all your woes, friend! Send them …

The Halloween event and free weekend went great, but it was not without its issues. Luckily we were able to resolve the issues without needing to do a steam update by using our extension system (these are the Lambda, Delta, and Omega extensions you see when you join a server). We try to limit our use of the extension system to avoid conflicting with mods, and that is the main reason we are patching this week, and why it is a light one. With this maintenance patch we are integrating those fixes into the main game, clearing out the extensions, and attempting to deploy the badge customization UI for the second time. We also realized that not enough people knew …

As we announced in last week’s Changelog, we’re releasing a patch this week! This patch contains all the tweaks and updates we held back from build 308, in favor of having more time to solely focus on the issues that came up after the LUAJit update.

Included in this update is the brand new Marine Commander tutorial. This will teach potential new commanders the basics of commanding and the marine tech tree. So if you wanted to get a basic understanding of commanding without being in a live game, there is now a way to do so.

But that’s not all! Thanks to the tremendous work of Trevor, with the help of a group of volunteers from the community, the …

A few weeks back Remi wrote up a blog called “Enter the Roadmap” and today we take the first step down that road with the release of Build 308. One of our biggest hopes is to finally take NS2 to 64bit but there are many hurdles along the way, a big one being LuaJIT. FSFOD and the other programmers have been hard at work on an upgrade to the newest version of LuaJIT and testing, testing and more testing. The upgraded JIT allows for more of the overall NS2 code to be jitted, and additional trace stitching which provides more opportunity for improving existing performance logging.

This update was delayed for further testing a couple weeks ago, but …

Progress! These last couple weeks we have been working towards some of our larger goals for the game. We have had multiple public and private test sessions with the upgraded Luajit changes and it is very close to public release. Dependency on Awesomium has been removed and should help with stability and memory leaks. HIVE 2.0 will be launching in parallel to the existing HIVE sometime over the next week using extensions. This will allow us to test our new system in the public and see how well the algorithms and data collection are working and allow us to make some final tweaks before removing the old version entirely (more detail on this in a separate blog post soon).

Looking …

Our latest build continues on the path of refinement and stability, and although small there are some nice changes in this patch. Those of you with antivirus woes when opening NS2 should no longer have an issue as all our windows binaries are digitally signed and secure. As stated in the blog post earlier this week, we increased the size of the melee attack on both the skulk and fade and this change is no longer an extension but part of the vanilla code. We have also decided to slightly bump up skulk HP requiring an additional 2 bullets to make contact.

Behind the scenes we are continuing our work on HIVE 2, which is coming along nicely and should …

It’s been two weeks since our last update, be honest you missed us! Moving to this model has allowed for us to make some much needed changes to our way of implementing and testing changes to the game. This update may seem light, but it has some good fixes and more enhancements to our server browser including a friends filter. This filter will allow you see what servers your steam friends are playing on and get you connected to them.

One of the new additions I mentioned above is “Playtest with the Dev’s,” a weekly opportunity to jump into the beta of next update and play a series of games and give your feedback on the upcoming changes. We strive …