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 and even upgrades to new players. Alien egg spawning has been adjusted to scale with players which should lead to better spawning and encourage alien hive expansion too! Some additional improvements were made to gorge tunnels to allow for quicker and easier placement. See more about the gameplay changes in the changelog below. We are also aware of some stability issues that players were experiencing in the previous update. We have worked to resolve those with this release and hope that this provides a better experience for those of you dealing with this problem. Update 315 Changelog Gameplay

• Alien Egg Spawn
  • Every hive spawns an egg every 13 secs instead of only one hive at a time.
    • Scales down with the team's player count:
      • 6 players: 13
      • 9 players: 8.6
      • 10 players: 9.75
      • 12 players: 7.5
  • Every hive can spawn up to 2 eggs (was 3).
  • The hive's egg hatch tech spawns 2 eggs (didn’t scale previously).
    • ² Scales up with the team's player count:
      • 6 players: 2
      • 9 players: 3
      • 10 players: 3
      • 12 players: 4
• MG
  • Increased base damage to 8 from 6.
  • Decreased damage bonus against players to 150% from 200%
  • Decreased costs to 20 pres.
• Gorge Tunnel
  • The gorge tunnel is now less “picky” about it’s placement so you can drop it in areas with slightly rougher terrain.
• Made wall walking less unpredictable for skulks
  • Skulks can sneak around sharp corners on the ceiling much more reliably now.

Tweaks / Improvements

• Added a new Play Menu
  • Replaced "Play Now" and "Server Browser" links on main menu with a single "Play" button.
  • Menu creates more visibility of the arcade tab by giving it a nice, big button, alongside the server browser button, training button, and play now button.
  • Can't decide on a server to play on? Try out the big, flashy Play Now button. You can't miss it!
• Added an in-game help screen
  • Displays useful (and silly) information about the weapons/abilities you have currently equipped.
  • Modders: see SDK section below for how to "play nicely" with the help screen. (don't worry, it's easy! :) )
• Bots
  • Optimized performance
    • Lowered performance costs of each bot by about 80%
    • Optimized path finding (Thanks to Katzenfleisch)
    • Optimized memory routines
    • Optimized decision making routines
  • Improved the commander bots
    • Marine Commander Bots drop now med and ammo packs on request
    • Alien Commander Bots drop Mist on request (both for players and structures)
  • Added a player vote to add commander bots and start the game
    • The vote will autostart 5 minutes after the first player joined a team if there are still commanders lacking to start the round
• Optimized the Effect Manager so the update routines of all kind of in-game effects are on average about 40% faster.
• Slightly improved the design of the server detail window of the server browser
• Standardize and improve the cooldown HUD display of all alien abilities (contributed by twiliteblue)
• Fixes and improvements to the Caged menu background. (contributed by ieptbarakat)

Fixes

• Fixed an issue causing server crashes while processing move packets.
• Fixed some race conditions between the render and main thread causing client crashes on texture allocation.
• Fixed an issue with the physics culling while the concede sequence is playing.
• Fixed that the skulk plays running animation after leaping (contributed by twiliteblue)
• Fixed that the research progress in the commander UI was reset when a player logged out of the Command Station and back in again (contributed by Keats)
• Fixed that badges connected to steam items did not unlock correctly
• Fixed a script error that occured when you blinked as Fade in 3rd person camera mode (contributed by twiliteblue)
• Made ready room players mortal and fixed a script error that occurred if a player died in the Ready Room (contributed by Las)
• Fixed that css files using the old css format did not work properly (contributed by Brute)
• Fixed a script error that occurred when Marine.GetMaxSpeed was called without that given Marine owned a weapon (contributed by Las)
• Fixed that the Flamethrower always dealt extra compound damage to burning structures instantly instead after 2 seconds.
• Fixed that the warmup mode started the game after limit of 12 players was reached (Thanks to Person8880 who fixed this via the Shine mod previously)
• Removed the leftover links to the deprecated hive website in the main menu

SDK

• Declared some missing optional constants for the ScoringMixin and BaseModelMixin
• Added proper support for Lua style multi line comments
• Help Screen
  • When the help screen is displayed, all other GUI elements are hidden (to avoid ugly overlapping and undesirable effects).
  • Example mod showing how to properly implement this: Dropbox, Github
• Cinematic Editor: Fixed a hang caused by zooming in too far into the graph window.
• Overview: The program will not whine as easily for mismatched minimap_extents dimensions.
• Added a function GUI.Message(string), which is the exact same thing as Shared.Message(string), except that it is accessible from inside a GUIView VM.
• GUIView objects can now be set to render "always" (past behavior), "once", or "never.". Useful for scenarios where a gui view is rendering something complex to a texture, but only needs to do it once.
• GUIView render targets are now cleared with transparent black, instead of opaque black.
• Added two new functions, Client.GetLastRenderResetTime(), and Client.GetLastPresentTime(). These are useful for determining if certain resources need to be reloaded/rendered. For example, see "lua/menu/FancyGUIViewManager.lua".
• DynamicRenderMesh objects are no longer emptied when the game is alt+tabbed.
• GUIItem: Added GetTextureWidth() and GetTextureHeight(), which return the width/height of the texture, in pixels, or -1 if there is no texture assigned to the GUIItem.
• Added numerous enums, a few constants, and a boatload of associated Client functions to integrate Steamworks Lobbies functionality (see docs/ClientLoaded.json)
• Added a function GUIItem::GetCanFontRenderString(string fontName, string text) which allows you to determine if the given font name is capable of displaying all characters of the given string (eg some fonts only have numbers, or maybe the string has non latin characters, etc.)