Since the holidays we’ve seen an influx of both new and old players coming back to NS2. We continue to receive lot of positive feedback to many of the changes we’ve made over the last year. With this update we’re focused on some maintenance but also continuing to improve smaller features in the game to enhance the player experience.

Beyond update 314 we’re looking at ways to help players quickly find and play games. We’ve noticed more and more people at peak times around the globe are idling in the server browser, trying to join the populated servers. This long wait can cause them to quit; an improvement is clearly needed. To that end, we’ve been working on ideas on …

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 …

With the summer sale now in full swing, we decided to take a lighter approach to the update this week. Minor tweaks and improvements over last week’s patch should address some of the feedback we heard. Moving forward, we are adjusting our patch cycle to be bi-weekly. This allows us to start tackling some larger features and helps with our testing schedule.

As many of you know and for those of you that don’t, each update to NS2 comes with not just hours of development time but lots of bug and gameplay testing. Our playtesters are community volunteers and give many hours each week so that you can enjoy the fruits of our labors. Our EU Playtest Lead Asraniel has …

Happy Summer Marines! We are ushering in the sunshine with update 303. This is a lighter patch focused on some bug fixes and a couple tweaks and additions to the game. With this update we are introducing a new post-round feedback system, this will help provide us with more details about your games and comparing round data to support future changes.

The last six months has seen a lot of changes and experimentation to the game and we aren’t done yet. We are working on developing plans over the next week to continue to build on the new foundation that we’ve created over these last few months. Be on the lookout for some exciting new opportunities and changes to come.…