Natural Selection 2

caz32;22294779' said:
Just watched the trailer on the website, it looks incredible! the last time I saw it was alpha footage its came a long way.. tempted to pre-order now!

Do you think the game will be popular?

I don't think it will ever have a large community.

Its a shame but the game lost too much momentum due to the gap between ns1 and 2, not only that but its been in a 'beta' stage for around a year now, maybe longer. The last time i tried it around 5 months ago it was still unplayable and a lot of features hadnt been added in yet.

From the looks of things, its better now but i've no desire to play it. The original game was one of my favourite games of all time and it was free, which is pretty much why I bought ns2 so I could support the devs(and why it doesn't bother me that I didnt get my moneys worth)
 
From the looks of things, its better now but i've no desire to play it. The original game was one of my favourite games of all time and it was free, which is pretty much why I bought ns2 so I could support the devs(and why it doesn't bother me that I didnt get my moneys worth)

Unless you've gone off gaming in general i don't see how you can't get your moneys worth, even if the main game isn't to you liking there should be plenty of mods coming, even classic ns1 no doubt, combat should appear quite soon if you like that.
 
Radiation they did say at Rezzed they intend to support the game for a long time to come with a lot of new maps n mods, they also hinted of a new enemy type, outside maps and more alienistic insides ;)
 
It's very much playable now and it's a beauty!, I had a hard time getting a place on the gaming table at rezzed :D
Agreed. It's getting very very close to what NS1 was, and will surpass it, no doubt. Performance is much better than it was, the feel of the aliens is very good (not quite perfect, yet) and plenty of new content + polish coming in the next few months leading up to release.

I loved NS1 big time up until v2, then came back for a lot of Combat during v3.
 
Managed to play 2 rounds as the aliens in my first go at this game. I was a little confused at first but started to enjoy it. The server we was on was pretty laggy but it didnt stop me enjoying it.
The graphics are very nice, i really like the second map i done, it really reminded me of aliens (film) with marines putting up sentry guns. I tried out most of the alien classes (apart from the flying one) they all seemed good in their own way.
 
I asked them regarding poor performance in some areas and worst with marines, sometimes it drops to 40fps as a marine

Yes, performance is a known issue with the game but we are currently starting a big push on it, and it will improve significantly before release.

The game would definitely have performed much better at Rezzed, primarily because the computers were all connected over LAN. In it's current state NS2 puts quite a heavy load on the servers, so your online experience will be dramatically effected by server performance, which will in turn lower your own client performance.

The majority of the performance hit is on the gameplay code side, not as much on the graphics side, and it is much easier for us to focus on optimization now, as we've just gotten to a feature complete stage of the game. Over the course of the development there is a lot of fluctuation, as new features are constantly being added that can have huge impacts on server or client load, or both, so it really required nailing down all that stuff in order to properly work on ways of making all that stuff faster.

We've also put a lot of work over the past few weeks/months creating a robust set of profiling tools, to help us clearly see exactly what areas of the game are causing the biggest issues so we can really target the most problematic areas. We also recently just brought on a new programmer whose sole focus is optimization.

It can be quite a shock to go from playing the game on a LAN setup at a show like Rezzed to then playing online, but we've tried to be up front with people playing the game at those shows, so they know that getting involved in the beta stage of NS2 will be a little rougher, but to know that the game will improve leaps and bounds over the next few months. We fully expect it to be running as well as it was for players at Rezzed by the time we hit release.

--Cory
 
This patch features a couple of new alien upgrades and some performance improvements.
Now you are probably thinking: "Great! The game is running at 200,000 frames per second and will never need performance improvements ever again!" and now you are thinking "How does he know what I am thinking?". But guess what? The game isn't running at 200,000 fps yet so we are still making it faster!
Also, we have installed brain monitoring software into your head with this patch so we can always know what you are thinking in order to understand what it is you want from NS2, faster!
Features

  • Feign death upgrade.
  • Adrenaline upgrade.
  • Commander ping.
Summit

  • Fixed Gorge stuck issue in Computer Lab.
  • Smoothed out player collisions in the Reactor Core vent.
Balance

  • Upped energy cost of Vortex to 60.
  • Reduced gravity on Leap so Skulks have more of a fighting chance against jetpackers.
  • Reduced fully-mature Hydra health by 12.5% and shifted some hit points into armor.
  • Lowered initial cyst health further to prevent dropping in combat.
  • Increased Shade cost to 15.
  • Decreased spores damage per second from 16 to 13 to adjust for bigger and more transparent spores.
  • Sped up Lerk (13 from 11) and reduced his armor (50 to 25).
  • Infestation Spike lifetime now 5 seconds instead of 12, cooldown is now 10 seconds instead of 5.
Changes

  • Toned down the celerity screen effect.
  • Changed MACs and drifters to not collide with players anymore, instead they will get pushed away.
  • Matched weapon and drop pack life time so players won't encounter constantly empty weapons.
  • Armory/prototype lab buymenu shows now as default the currently active weapon instead of a blank screen.
  • Marines drop now all their weapons which cost resources when dying.
  • Drifters now uncloak when casting enzyme cloud.
  • Blinking Fades can no longer trigger mines.
  • Ink clouds now cancels any scans from the Marine Commander.
  • Alien vision now lowers energy regen rate.
  • Removed cyst build time.
  • Reduced amount of flaps required to gain proper speed (around 50% less key presses required)
  • Fade changes (full damage during blink, no max blink time, increased health)
Fixes

  • Fixed script error caused by using sv_status at the dedicated server console.
  • Fixed first person death effect triggered multiple times and causing FPS issues.
  • Fixed error caused by attempting to join a server without first selecting one in the server browser.
  • Handle the +connect command line option correctly (allows to join Steam friend's game)
  • Fixed bug with echo costs not being subtracted correctly.
  • Fixed bug where structures could be echoed off infestation.
  • Fixed blink sound effects getting played twice for the local player.
  • Fixed shadow step sound getting played twice for the local player.
  • Fixed bug where you would slow down in mid air with jetpack when crouching.
  • Triggers now correctly send out events to overlapping objects when enabled.
  • Shade is allowed to cloak itself.
  • Disabled spacebar to switch camera modes for team spectators.
  • Removed camera animation when switching spectator follow targets.
  • Fixed collision, physics and nav_debug console commands not working.
  • Fixed build effect remaining on screen after construction has been completed.
  • Fixed bug where bilebombs were dealing more damage to players than intended.
  • Fixed bug where slowdown on land was not applied properly.
  • Fixed bug where uncloaking stopped all sounds.
  • Fixed bug where cloak effect was not canceled when switching to Marine team.
  • Fixed bug where you could heal backwards through walls.
  • Fixed bug where distress beacon is not canceled when observatory gets vortexed.
  • Unsocketed power nodes can no longer get parasited.
  • Fixed Commander hotgroups and problem when comming both sides in a single game.
  • Fixed problem where the giving orders required 2 clicks after unit selection.
  • Right click and Escape now correctly cancels any Commander action/ghost model.
  • Various crashes related to collision objects being destroyed.
  • The Bloom graphics setting now works correctly.
  • Non-armed weapons now update their position before being dropped.
Improvements

  • Add lock icon for passworded games in the server browser.
  • Added priorities for team alerts, so messages like "Command Station is under attack" won't get lost when a less important structure was attacked right before.
  • Changed Marine waypoint line to "breadcrumb" arrows.
  • Added heal indicator to armory.
  • Added life form icons above pre-evolved eggs.
  • Health bars of players appear now color coded for Commanders when parasited/poisoned.
  • Changed land sounds to be triggered client side only.
  • Added the ability to ban players by Steam ID that are not currently connected to the server (Thanks devicenull!)
  • Fixed control select and added double click select for Commanders (selects all units of the same kind on screen)
Optimizations

  • Improved server performance by moving many structure animations to only play on the client.
  • The Infantry Portal no longer attempts to stop the spin effects every tick.
  • Ping updates are sent less often.
  • Damage indicators now use less network bandwidth.
  • Disable PhysX visualization unless debug draw enabled.
SDK

  • Added PerfAnalyzer tool.
  • Fixed bug where playing a cinematic attached to a view model in the Cinematic Editor would not display properly.
  • Added the ability to specify help text for properties in the editor_setup.xml file.
  • Fixed issue where the camera would start out below the ground plane in the Cinematic Editor.
  • Added support for sphere, box and plane emitters in the Cinematic Editor.
  • Fixed bug where setting the visible property for physics emitters to false would not hide them.
  • Added the ability to serve static content from the built in web server.
  • Added Ring Buffer implementation to core scripts.
  • Added sv_listbans command.
  • Provided more feedback on the sv_ban related commands.
  • Fixed script error caused by not providing a duration to the sv_ban command.
  • Added sv_unban to remove players from the ban list.
  • Removed obsolete FlashPlayer bindings.
 
That gorilla video reminds me of:
2a517d6a.jpg
 
I guess I will have a go at it again. I had a go when you last said to try it out Neil, but it still wasn't at the stage I would consider it playable as I was still getting rubberbanding.
 
I guess I will have a go at it again. I had a go when you last said to try it out Neil, but it still wasn't at the stage I would consider it playable as I was still getting rubberbanding.

Even in the previous version it wasn't that great, plus they don't reply to any of my tweets.

Getting seriously dissapointed in purchasing two copies ( me/brother ), I don't play it anymore nor does my brother. The performance/bugs from the rezzed event was completely different to the home download version :mad:
 
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