Happy New Year! It has already been an exciting start to 2018 for UWE and we look forward to bringing you more exciting and interesting game experiences. The core of NS2’s development has always been the community. So many people from around the world dedicating time, opinions and skills to help make this game what it is today. Five years in and we are still working with dedicated members, new and old, to make the game better and more enjoyable.

Today we release Update 321, bringing you some of the first new gameplay features to come in 2018. First we wanted to look at some of the alien features that haven’t felt complete. Onos Stampede is a great way to …

Happy 5th Anniversary to NS2! Five years ago… Wow saying that makes me sit back in my chair a moment. It’s crazy to think that much time has passed, it seems like only yesterday we launched. So much happened to make the game become a reality even before release on Steam and even more has happened since.

We wanted to do something special for the Anniversary patch beyond just celebrating and we think we have done just that for Update 319. To say this update includes a lot of under the hood work would be an understatement. In fact, Update 319 includes changes to over 80,000 lines of code. Ghoul has been working for some time on making as much …

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 …

Following on from the March and April entries, it is time to update Planet Earth on what is going on with Natural Selection 2. This is a retrospective look at development in May. To keep the length under control, (April’s entry was a bit overboard!) this post will stick to three topics: Environments, Technical, and Game. Let’s start with Biodome!

Environments

Michael, (‘Olmy’) has been cranking on Biodome. The map is striking, thanks to its new art set and ‘flora’ focus. The accompanying images show some of the stages environments go through, from idea (1, above), to rough 3d layouts (2, below), to texturing, lighting, detailing and prop placement (3, two below).

Biodome will be an absolute blast, but …

Pixels are addictive. There are never enough. More definition, higher resolution, greater pixel density. But what to do with all those high-resolution screens? Phones, Eyefinity setups, NVSurround, 1600p monitors… Is there any content out there that can really do them justice?

Yes. And it is Natural Selection 2. Here are extreme resolution versions of several iconic Natural Selection 2 images. At Unknown Worlds, we lovingly refer to them by certain names that just came about naturally. For example, Cory might suggest using ‘Onos v Marine’ on a certain part of a PAX exhibit.

Together, these images take up 43.4 million pixels!

Onos v Marine

 Download link – 16.7mb PNG – 5,800 x 3,000

The Onos v Marine …