NS2 Build 208 is now live on Steam!
Alien Commander love
- Fixing the alien commander economy so the player must make a trade-off between attacking, expanding and teching up.
- Cysts and Drifters cost energy
- Hives don't start with any Drifters
- Tweaked Hive, Harvester, upgrade structures, hydra and egg maturation times (generally shorter)
- Reduced cyst connection range somewhat
- Increased Drifter move speed to make them feasible near combat
- Hives can be dropped without needing infestation (to allow fast expansion)
- Added Enzyme Cloud - a new Drifter ability which allows the Commander to cast a cloud into battle which speeds up the rate of fire for all aliens inside it
- Simplified alien commander UI
Balance
- Think I overcompensated with mature harvester health (now it's +10% instead of +20%)
- Bumped up harvester and Hive health to be closer to NS1.
- Changed Bile Bomb damage to 55 and increased splash damage radius to 6.
- Reduced energy cost for Gorge abilities to make him more responsive and interesting.
Changes
- Improved Gorge bellyslide
- Removed mini-cysts because they were confusing and redundant with regular Cysts (they also tended to break cyst chains when the Gorge died)
- Nutrient mist now affects single target
- Gorges can now build structures off infestation
- The outgoing voice volume is louder.
- Updated Drifter tooltip text.
- Reduced player FOV used to detect other players for the minimap.
- Touching enemy cloaked unit will now uncloak them.
- Med/ammo packs cost now Command Station energy.
- Unbuilt structures start now with an armor fraction (was health fraction only before)
- Increased jetpack maneuverability and removed backwards flying penalty.
- The Axe will now show a crosshair hit indicator.
- Cysts / Hives generate now infestation on walls and ceilings.
- Shade cloak is now a passive ability and requires no energy.
- Players can no longer get cloaked by shades.
- Ammo/med packs cost now armory energy.
- Gorge structures won't die anymore when the owner Gorge enters the Hive.
- Infestation does not grant LOS anymore (won't generate Hive sight / minimap blips)
- Decreased 'randomness' of Shotgun. (predefined bullet spread pattern that rotates randomly around the players view axis)
Fix
- Smoothed out skulk movement (removed hyper responsiveness when landing on ground, changed sticky force to depend on wall normal)
- The health will no longer display on the Welder for unsocketed Power Points.
- Fixed bug where key the backward and right keybindings would be correct when first running the game.
- Make sure LeaveMenu is called when exiting out of the main menu.
- Properly deactivate and activate mods when updating them. Fixed refreshing of the mod list so that it refreshes the list of all subscribed mods as well as all downloaded-but-not-subscribed mods.
- Fixed bug where unpack was called on a table with holes when notifying the Marine of new upgrades (can lead to unpredictable results)
- Fixed memory leak when removing a source from the file system.
- Fixed a rare bug where sometimes an Alien player would not be able to spawn after a Hive was killed.
- Fixed problem were ARC continues charge up effect after losing LOS.
- Added shade minimap icon.
- Fixed bug where spectator camera flips when looking straight up/down.
- Raised arc splash damage origin a bit to fix problems with tiny ledges at the ground.
- Command Stations show now correctly a range indicator when you attempt to drop an infantry portal.
- Fixed bug that allowed you to use shadow step while stabbing.
- Disabled jetpack smoke trail effects for the local player which were causing FPS problems.
- Fixed bug where nano shield/construct trigger sounds where played at the Command Station instead of target position.
- Fixed initial infantry portal floating.
- Fixed crash when calling RenderMaterial.GetLayer with an invalid index (now generates a script error)
- Fixed bug which allowed you to place mines on clogs.
- Fixed a bug that caused the Fade to occasionally get stuck when blinking.
- Fixed a bug which allowed you to drop a Command Station on an infested techpoint.
- Fixed issue where hot loading script would cause errors due to mixins being recreated.
- Fixed bug where blend times for the animation graph did not take into account the speed of the animation.
- Fixed potential crash bug when sending strings as part of network messages.
- Fixed crash when a font couldn't be rendered due to the system being out of video memory.
- Various crashes related to collision objects being destroyed.
- Fixed bug where nutrient mist was not correctly affecting researches.
Improvement
- Reduced network traffic regarding minimap blips.
- Improved spit effect.
- Sped up heal spray by 34% to make more responsive (adjusted energy cost and healing correspondingly)
- Fixing the Alien Commander economy so the player must make a trade-off between attacking, expanding and teching up.
- Marine way point lines are now color coded (red: attack, green: defend)
Optimization
- Reduced the number of times pose parameters were updated for a model.
- Reduced the overhead of accessing a member variable from script.
- Reduced the amount of animation code that is executed on the Client.
- Decreased amount of bandwidth needed for each player a bit.
- Disable PhysX visualization unless debug draw enabled.
SDK
- Fixed issue where materials in the Viewer did not properly receive the time parameter.
- Fixed hot loading in the Viewer.
- Fixed crash when Undoing a Copy and Paste operation in the Editor.
- Added the ability to speed up an animation in a model_compile file by including speed <number> after the animation name.
- Added a simple implementation of GetRandomPointsWithinRadius in Pathing code.
Sound
- Hive rooms now have an alien rainforest sound in them.
- Extended the distance you can hear active Extractors
- Hooked up various MAC sounds.
Yesterday we went live on Twitch.TV to do our second developer Q&A. This week, Cory was the star and answered lots of questions about art, mapping, and the release date of NS3.
If you can't make the live stream times, you can also subscribe to the Unknown Worlds YouTube channel to receive all updates on all our shows!
The developer Q&A happens every week on Tuesday, 11.30am US-PST, 3.30pm US-EST, 7.30pm GMT. You can shoot questions at us live on twitter @NS2, and in the Twitch chat itself.
Today, Charlie and Hugh launched our new 'Live Developer Q&A' show on Twitch.Tv. We will be hosting this show on Tuesday every week at 1130 PST, 1430 EST, 1930 GMT. During the show, you can tweet us questions (@NS2) and also ask questions live in the Twitch chat.
Each show will also be put up on YouTube, and here is the first one. Keep in mind this was our first effort, sound / video quality will be much better next week!
PS: This was the 500th NS news post. The first ever NS news post was made on the 14th of September, 2001 - 11.5 years ago.