Please post comments on the topic Development Blog Update - Unknown Worlds Podcast #24 - NS2 First Prototypes here

you see, i just open my mouth and they post something you can actually see.
Good job guys, finally something, would be happy if you would post more like this

The mockups look really nice guys, I especially like the idea of not having more weapons but having add-ons. Though personally I'd still like to see a full-fledged flame thrower model! The intuative commander screen that auto groups and shows squads etc is also an awesome idea, anything that means you know more info at a glance is genious in my book.

Oh and do you want us to start sending you pencils and paper so you guys can actually write your ideas down?

Just a thought.

Hey guys, great stuff, cant wait to get the texture pack from you along with props. We have been discussing the idea of buying weapons and how you will split up the marines resources so the players have money. Have you put much thought into how to do this so that its not based on kills and stuff, but based on the teams resources. Great looking concepts tho, I really cant wait for this game. Keep it coming fellas.

Ooo, looking nice. I actually like the idea of blurring out the background a lot, adds that extra touch that makes a good game great if you do that kind of things. Also, I think menu can become a bit more intuitive, but it's just a mockup, so I'm sure you'll improve from there. Keep these coming, please!

Love the mockups, and if you do add a Gorge Suit

If Gorge suit is not in NS2 I will be very disappointed.

awsome moch ups visually they all look amazing. Unfortunatly i you cant really draw too many practiallity conclusions from them until youve play tested built versions. I agree that in multiplayer games fewer weapons is probably best, or at least on competative games.

For the alt fire for the granade launcher you could consider a solid heated metal slug. It oculd fire in a straight line in shoot through multiple enemies but have a slow rate of fire. If the primary fire is an arching explosive and you want the nade launcher to be an option for players who which to get stuck into combat the secondary fire may have to be something with out blast damage or a shockwave, since this could cause splash damage and may encourage the granade laucher welding trooper to stay on the edge of combat like he does in ns1.

The gorge suit is obviously a mint idea, could you make one as merchendise, cos id like to buy one

EHH GORGE SUIT.

Yes Please.

Squad blobs:

Selecting an individual marine inside the squad blob might be difficult. As would targeting aliens and buildings inside the blob area.

Automatic squad formation might get annoying, unless there's a strong mechanic that forces marines to stick together, or a strong disadvantage to not being in a squad.

I'm still iffy about letting marines buy their own weapons. Having the commander supply them was always kinda cool.

--Scythe--

Probably my favorite Podcast yet, just because of the thought that those "mock-ups" could be the real thing. The new Commander HUD looks really interesting, i do love the fact that players can "auto" group, i think it would greatly help the commander lead the players to complete objectives for the overall game victory. and wahooo more depth with the game, introducing a second resource, i hope that means that the maps will be more spacious and become more dynamic, allowing players go about their ways without following a certain defined path.

I would have to disagree with the Alien HUD, its just too much of an eye sore, but the idea of separate energy bars is great. putting in the gestate menu as the "5" button fits, plus reducing the overall pop-up menu usage.

The buy menu, soo beautiful to my eyes. very visually pleasing, even with out the menu textures. Making the marines individually enhancing their weapons will definitely enhance the game-play. How would the gun-despawn system work out? will the spawns immediately despawn as the player wielding it dies? or will the gun be left on the ground and have a despawn timer? The "hidden "abilities" is awesome, allowing the players to discover new tactics. The "Flechette" rounds should be a great upgrade to the NS1 shotgun, I hope you guys do put in "Challenges" like TF2 and COD4 has, and one of the "challenges" should be to kill X amount of aliens with the Shotgun using FLechette, killing the alien as the SG round bounces off of a wall.

and yes I would like to know more, A lot more

Finally some pictures!
Very nice.

Oh and the chat in the first picture is priceless.
Flayra complaining about "rates"
and J making the ultimate move to get "yoclanned"

I'm a big fan of the metaball-esk marine selection. Very cool squad system, i will use that in the film.
By the way Charlie i found a music guy that does incredible work and wants to work on the film and I am sure would be into working on a game if you want to check out his stuff I can send it to you.

Its very exciting to see pictures even if they are mock ups.
Send me a line if you need anything, i would love to help if i can.

To be perfectly honest, I am getting a bit concerned, mockups is far different than screen shots, as one represents work to be done and other work already done. Please correct me if I am wrong, but we are past concept stage of development, right? How are things coming on an Alpha build of the game?

Understand that people do mockups for alot of diffrent things. By having the mockup here it probably means a) Things are already done but they want to show us the mockups first or b) (more likely) the commander mode isnt done and they are doing mockups to conceptualize what they want the commander mode to be, before they do the heavy lifting of actualy coding it. Its likely that they have a running NS2 game, probably with a commander mode, but its extreemly basic and only provides a top down view and MAYBE a few buttons. They are trying to figure out what they want it to be, rather then just building on what they already have.

How set are you guys on marines buying weapons? Will resources be divided up similarly to the aliens in ns1? Will we have to buy jet packs and all that jazz?

I'd like it a lot if the commander bought weapons, but marines had to retrieve them from the armory. That is after all how armories usually work. You could even write it in that the armory manufactures the weapons, instead of having them dropped from the sky by Thor or Mars, the god of war.

You gotta realize the hardest part in making the game is the idea and the textures. I'm sure that JJJ1 has been going all out with textures, and he probably already has an entire collection of them, its just that it can't be implemented yet making it unnoticeable (no maps). Also the balance and concept is the second hardest. The engine from what I understand is probably operational (Source is already proven technology), now all they need to do is finalize their ideas. Blizzard has been working on StarCraft 2 since Warcraft 3 came out (in 2003), its mid-2008 now...... The game is fully operational, yet they are still taking units out and keep modifying them. And from past experience, I know that Blizzard makes some of the best games. Kinda shows whats important to them. I rather have them not even be in alpha stages yet because that reassures my confidence in the NS2. Quality over deadline.

I think the mock ups are very nice and have a great style to them. I think the icons of what the player needs by their name is also a fantastic idea and I hope that it makes it into the game.

I also agree with less menus being a better thing. While it is an important mechanic to the game (as suggested), sometimes you see confusing menus remove the player from the game playing experiences.

J: I'm selling spawn

OK the steamworks thing was rather disturbing, that Crispy knows more about it that developers using Source So far as I see it the idea is to lower the entry barrier for game developers to sell their game over steam (so valve can take a slice for distribution and put more consumer eyeballs infront of the valve store ads).

Two seperate resource types sounds interesting, should definite allow for more startergy. I can't belive more people aren't talking about this.

Are you thinking like 1 type of res allows commanders to build and the other type allows marines/aliens to upgrade? or is it more like you need a certian amount of both res types to buy anything (with vary mixed proportions depending on the purchase, like warcraft's gold and lumber)? I just thought of a 3rd possibility, classic res (for purchases) and power (used to maintain active structures, like turrets), more of a CnC thing... Steam power as a resource would be fun, good excuse for lots of atmospheric particle effects

Another resource idea I know you tinkered with during the development of NS was having a limited pool of resources that it was possible to exhaust. So prehaps both res types are spent the same way, but one res type comes in a slow feed that will never run out and the other has a fixed amount in the map (scaled to # players?) that you can extract at varying rates depending on stratergy.

I had some concerns about marines spending all the commanders cash on HMGs, but then I thought about it some more and realised you can manage res distributiosn in the team to make sure this doesnt happen.

The alien HUD seems a bit disconnected and floaty, for what was described in the fluff as part of the creatures eyeball. I didn't "get" what it was all about until I heard it described in the podcast, so I guess n00b players wont either It might be more intuative when a player is interacting with it.

Could a commander clicking on chat names have his view center on the marine that was chatting (if alive)? I think that would be really usefull. The squad mini summaries, might be more usefull if they showed player health/ammo levels rather than facing and distribution.

to summarise:
mmmm eye candy

Nice... but sorry i want some screenshots... or even videos. I know you are doing your best, but NS2 seems too far away... after all these years.

Is there a plan to add body dismemberment to the engine?

You know, shoot an alien and pieces start flying out of it, or munch a human and he loses an arm.

Plastic people are just less fun )

GORGE SUIT! STEVE HOLT!

Nice to see progress, however I've got some concerns:

- I would opt for leaving the power of giving out JPs, exoskeletons and gorge suits () to the comm - why? The future audience of NS2 will probably hear about NS in general for the first time and might not understand how team-based it is - more importantly, how fulfilling orders is important, even when you don't like the guys who's commanding atm. If they can buy weaponry and equip themselves with no constrains, than why bother listening to the comm? New players might choose chasing skulks and ruining the experience of others. If comm would have part of the equip essential for mid-game (and fun!), it might make him more important in the eyes of others, but still leaving the fun of blasting aliens in the way one likes up to the players.

Another thing about the JP/ES, is that they provide other means of transportation, with different speeds (I acknowledge the fact that ES might be faster then HA), which might cause a hive-rushing squad to split up, due to the fact that ES will go down the corridor, new players in JPs will do the same route but 3 times faster and players who discovered the map will choose a different route through the vent.
I think it is crucial for the comm to choose the tactic of the attack and as a consequence - whether it will be JP/ES/both attack.

I'm worried that in NS2 instead of "GIMME A SHOTTY COOM!" we will hear "PLEASE CHANGE TO JPS PEOPLE THERE ARE ONOSES ALL AROUND"

- if mines would have to be bought by marines, than on public servers people will rarely buy those to cover building, saving res for HMG's instead. It would be sensible to have comm buy it as well.

- the buy menu is the consequence of NS players complaining about running with LMG 90% of the game? To what extent will the add-ons change the look of the weapon? Will it be attached in the front under the barrel in all of the situations (those are usually hardly seen in FPS view, especially on big guns like HMGs), players might end up again running with LMG most of the time. As it was mentioned on the forums (oh, by me even! :]) how about making the add-ons bigger with different ways of attaching them, which would make guns look different (e.g. grenade luncher to look like a collar with a magazine below, which would be put onto the barrel, changing the visuals of under-the-barrel-parts as also the sides (e.g. with sth which looks like an aiming device for nades) and upper part of the weapon.

Didn't you have this impression when changing the model / sounds of a weapon in HL mods, that they work.. um.. better? If you would have a LMG in front of you, the new add-on functionalities may not seem as good as they really are

- I don't know if I got this right: add-ons are not assigned to any particular weapon, i.e. you can have an add-on (e.g. flamer unit) on LMG, SG and HMG?

- I also had different first impression with the alien HUD, but after you gave explanation it seems good,



What I do love:

- second resource! wohoo! awesomely accommodates the space in comms tactics / duties left after giving away the trouble of weaponry to the marines

- new cool add-ons!

- good to see minimalistic / transparent HUDs! btw. about the comm view - maybe make a button in the middle of the upper chat bar which would expand/decrease the chat window to some pre-set height, apart from the scroll of course?

- mockups is a wise thing to do!

i have to disaggree with the buy menu. or if theres going to be a buy menu, let the comm control the individual marine's money. imagine a beacon-rush situation, "OK GUYS, HERE COMES THE BEACON" "HURRY HURRY BUY WEAPONS" 5 mins later "HURRY UP THEY ARE EATING THE PG"

About the resouce system, and the buymenu.

I think the best way to keep the old ways and also integrate the new buymenu you should do the next thing.

From the "resourcetowers" only the commander get the resource. If a marine kill an alien, he get that resource, not the commander. So if he killed enough aliens, then he can buy weapons and upgardes for his self. But if the team need extra resource then the player can donate his resource to commander, or to another player.

Example like in World in Conflict. Every body gets Tactical Aid points in the fight. But you can give your point to other players, so together you can call in better airstrikes, ariborne, scan, nuke etc.. If you press the TAB button the scoreboard is show up and you can see the names. Next to the players name there are 2 button. A number 1 and a number 5. Number 1 give the player 1 TA point number 5 give 5 TA point. Thats all. And i think this is a very simple and good system.

The way to settle this is to have 3 ways of managing economy: libertarian (each one gets what he earns by killing enemies), communist (resources are divided equally) and welfare (a certain ammount of income is taxed from the rich and given to the poor).

tbh the thing that drove teamwork for the marines in ns was the commander being the sole distribution system of tech and weapons. With the marines being able to buy their own weapons when they want it, it would be almost impossible to organise sg rushes etc in pubs. i could only see the weapon purchasing working in clan matches where the team is all working together. IMO this buying feature will just be a hindrance to marine team play and i could see it as being the major downfall of ns2

I imagine the commander will still be in-charge of the research, so their will still be begging for weapons, just less micromanagement. I just hope the marine purchases aren't just $click$ *blip*, they really need some build time between to match the aliens gestation times, otherwise it strikes me as mightily unbalanced.

The squad bubbles are a very cool compromise between the restrictiveness of spawning in squads while giving players the option to group and the commander a way of keeping track of them. The tire tracks idea was also very good. Additionally, I would consider letting a comm drop through the UI now that it's transparent, since there's never a case (that I can think of) that a comm needs to click on a UI element while holding a medpack.

The buy menu also sounds like a nice bit of polish, but there are a few things that have me personally concerned: the more you guys talk about the game, the more I get the mental image of the two sides being almost entirely symmetrical. You can't differentiate with graphics only, and the fact that the objective of the marine side's gameplay (to kill at range) differs from the objective of the alien side's gameplay (to ambush) doesn't negate how bland the game is going to feel from first person if the two sides a) comm alike, b) upgrade alike, c) spawn alike, d) move alike, e) expand alike.

It seems like you're moving very aggressively toward a, b, and d from what the podcasts have explained. You need to focus as much on making the first person experience enthralling as you did in NS1 where you had drastically different upgrade systems between teams (especially in earlier versions), airspeed control (as well as bhop, which isn't the same thing) was handled very differently on both sides (where marines had to be thinking of potential rail hops and aliens had wall jumps and all sorts of acrobatics), aliens would upgrade with a very unique system of hives and chambers, while marines were more free form being restricted by time and res, etc.

The advent of a minimap marked an obvious developer attitude change toward empowering the individual over balancing the teams, so I guess you have to now take that mentality to its logical conclusion with marine buying of upgrades and so forth, but I think a lot of the gameplay features were lost in doing that, and also in polishing the game with features such as the acceleration rate of blink (for +movement's implementation) and the removal of the permagorge system.

I'm not saying that these changes are in themselves bad, or that NS2 needs to upgrade and comm exactly like NS1 - only that I very much enjoyed the diversity of gameplay in NS1, and it feels, from what I'm hearing in the podcasts, that most of that is going to be stripped away in NS2 - I hope there's a lot of other diversifying features being developed that I'm just not seeing.

Pen and paper? You're living in the past!
NOTEPAD.exe is where it's at.

Awesome mock-ups. I hope you manage to achieve that kind of style or quality, or better. Whatever else I might have liked to say has already been said. No point repeating it.

See, we need more of these. This is the kind of news we want


I'd prefer a representative currency system. ie. Resources = Bullion. Credits = Currency. Marines earn credits. The team earns resources. Spending personal credits means you're also spending your team's resources, but you're limited by how much credits you possess and can spend...

Actually, the way I see it, individuals buying weapons themselves would be worse for competitive players than pubbers. A lot of pubbers are only playing for a "quick fix", while competitive players generally prefer the game mechanics to be more complex. I really hope the buy menu is only meant for some sort of Combat mode.

Apart from that, stuff looks/sounds good/interesting. 2010 is going to be a good year.

Not enough time to read what everyone else said here

Did anyone else notice the "Nuke" in the weapons upgrade menu in the first mockup...? Could this be the EMP blast thing?

EMP blast would surely be silly, you would just kill off computers, lights and stuff that you, as a marine need to get around the level. But, saying that, you could also use it to open electronic doors and shut down rouge computers that may have defences within the map. Just an idea.

I think we should all refer to the Gorge Suit as the G-Suit. Gorge Suit just sounds silly...

I like the blurring on the menu. Looks good enough to eat!

Bouncing shells on the shotgun sounds fun! But it depends on how it will look in game... I also love the fact that you used the pod/add on idea I suggested somewhere on the forums. Could we see some other shells for the shotgun. Say an Inferno Shell (bursts on impact and has a chance of setting it’s target on fire) Or maybe an Armour Penetration Shell (AP Shell), that would go through think walls.

All in all it looks very nice. Would like to see some more alien stuff next week!

Keep up the good work guys!

That's the point! Listen to the podcast, mate! It should clear things

Hom, on the other side, it would be cool to spy on Kharaa in a gorge suit like in TF2

"Don't mind me, I'm just gorging, char, char, char"

EDIT: reminds me of Allo, Allo! episodes when the two british airmen were disguised as a cow

we miss max

Awesome! I like that you guys finally gave us some NS2 matrial =)
But how about that "Welding Bot" (or what ever the name is),,, Are you going to include that?? (It whould be awesome )

sounds like a great idea, but it would require the commander to have free control of his res to distribute amongst his marines and upgrades/meds/ammo.

ex.
- game start -
Comm: "SHOTGUN RUSH"
- comm allocates most to all res to marines so marines can purchase shotguns -

I also agree with everybody about the Comm role of play. The Commander needs to the most important part of the marine team, with the micromanagement of resources to leading players to their objectives, versus the alien side where as there is no leader figure and it is more of a "For the greater good" kind of feel and gameplay

Don't you mean - the shotgun starts with flechettes (darts) and then you upgrade to regular shot which is known to bounce off of surfaces?

I'm pretty sure Valve/Turtle Rock will be using match making for L4D (heard something about it, as well adding match making to TF2, for PC). Also, not sure if you guys mentioned this or not (didn't hear it), but if there's a couple of players that aren't any where near each other or any other squad, would they be placed in like a 'neutral' group? So if you needed you could quick click all the people who are alone or something?

I'm getting the impression that marine res flow will be split into 2 pools: One "team" pool for the commander to spend on team upgrades and structures, and another "individual" pool for the marines to spend on weapons and equipment.

That's all well and good so far, but realize that a lot of the strategic diversity available to Marines in NS1 came from being able to tilt marine res flow towards one of those goals at the expense of the other -- ie, one team could spend a lot of money on weapons and gear while getting very few upgrades, and another team could invest their money into structures and team upgrades early and hold off on the weapons till later. Those two games would then play out very differently because of that strategic choice made by the commander.

I'm worried that this strategic diversity could disappear if marine res flow is locked into a particular distribution pattern, like say 50% goes to the team pool and 50% to the individual pool. The particular type of weapons and upgrades purchased might be different from game to game, but every marine team would always then have to spend exactly half its money on equipment and half on buildings/tech.

Therefore, the marine comm should at the least have some way of controlling how much of his income flows into each pool. He should also be able to dump team money into individual pools when players need weapons fast, like for a team push or something, or have some other way of letting the comm get heavy weapons into players hands when necessary.

lol

nice mock-ups tho, i like the individual energies for alien weapons - very simple but adds a new dimension to using alien abilities

I think a buy menu isn't good solution.
Many Marines will cry when they lost their weapons...

See this post in the 'Marines buying own weapons' thread. In short:
- Commander spends 'team res' for structures and tech
- Marines spend 'personal res' for advanced weapons/personal upgrades
- Marines gain personal res from rfk, building, spotting Hives and other supportive actions like healing/repairing
- The commander unlocks weapon 'tiers' or 'categories' using team res (e.g. 'explosives', 'support', 'shotguns')
- Each tier gives a basic starter weapon/item that all players can equip for free
- Individual Marines can work towards unlocking more powerful weapons that they keep until they die, and get back again when they spawn
- All weapons can be picked up from the floor

Summary:
- Joe Public gets a basic gun per category to play with, and can try out a better weapon until they die if picked up. Similarly, higher skilled players can gift their more advanced weapon to a friend if they are new
- Players always have access to a selection of weapons, and can further personalise this selection
- Commander still chooses the direction he wants to take the team in
- Splitting resource systems into separate pools gives you more control over balancing different sides of the game (the FPS versus the RTS). It modularises game features so they can be balanced and tested individually.

Best to read the whole post as it has some examples.

To play devil's advocate here, it could just be that they have a good reason to not have any advanced plans for how Steamworks could be leveraged to UWE's advantage. E.g. they've gotten very good vibes from Valve about selling NS2 via Steam so they know they will be able to count on Valve's support when it comes to that, allowing them to focus their limited manpower on the development instead of trying to run things concurrently. Though, I do have to admit I was hoping for more than a verbal shrug!

Now it becomes interesting =)
Great mockups! I really like the idea with the bubble for the different squads.
I think you should release NS² via steam and sell it in DVD boxes too
I'd like to get my hands on one of these rather than just downloading it from steam

Anyway keep up the good work! =)

What is this ro0m in this pic ?



In the background, what ro0m is that ? maybe a ro0m from Jailbreak HL2 MOD ?

Why does that seem like an advertisement?

...so, yeah I downloaded Jailbreak: Source this morning (0.4 just released) and I think I'll give it a shot.

This is only an idea. this is NOT an advertisment

OW OW OW!

Commander mackup is verry nice ! Esp. i like chat console with colors and small fonts !
Also Buy menu is good ! Squads with colors are also good !

But i heard those pics are photoshop works not taken from prototype NS2 engine arent they?
So game will be too late for us ! May be in 2020 !!!

The room is a test done by one of our 2TR alpha mappers.