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 …

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 …

Hi everyone. I thought today would be a good day to take a moment and discuss some recent changes to the game. For almost a month, the dev team has been dabbling with combat mechanics. One of them was something we had been considering for some time, player hitboxes. As you can see from the before and after image below, the original hitboxes / hitreg have always been frustrating due ironically, to the precision of the hitboxes. Most games don’t have hitboxes that are as precise as NS2, which ran counter to the fast pace of the game. It felt unfair to miss skulks because of matchstick legs, or not be landing hits on a lerk while shooting center of …

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 …

Some aircraft spend lots of time flying at low altitude and great speed. They often employ ‘terrain following’ radar: Systems that bounce electromagnetic radiation off the surrounding environment. The return signals are processed to compute a safe and optimal flight path.

Humans can do a decent job at looking out for the treetops. Crop dusters get around just fine without fancy radar systems. Yet when the sun goes down, or the aircraft gets faster, our eyes start to fail and our brains can’t keep up.

NS2 development is descending. We’re getting closer to the terrain, hiring a new development team and devoting resources to new objectives.

We’re also speeding up. There won’t be any more grand plans. No months of …

Ed. Note: The context for this article can be found in the post “Let’s try something new.”

My name is Ghoul. You may have heard of me.

This is my first post as a member of the new Natural Selection 2 Development Team. I wanted to start with thanking you guys. Without your passion for Natural Selection 2 we would never have reached this point.

I can fully understand you desire to know all the why’s, what’s and how’s about the new team.

But we are still in progress of setting up and haven’t got time to talk as team since the announcement to decide on all those why’s, what’s and how’s yet.

I assure you that as soon as …

Ed. Note: The context for this article can be found in the post “Let’s try something new.”

Hey everyone, it’s great to chat to you all about NS2.

For the last 1.5 years, NS2 has been developed by an incredible team of Community Members who have put amazing time and effort into making NS2 better, for the love of the game & the community as a whole. The CDT ‘Community Development Team’ has made great strides with the game, especially given the fact it was all during free time. I’m certain our community is exceptionally thankful to all the people who have contributed to NS2 in some way.

We now have the opportunity to energize the player-base and push forward …