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Natural Selection 2 is the sequel to the popular Half-Life mod Natural Selection. It is built on our own engine and will be distributed through Valve's Steam platform.

Report RSS Build 203 Released

Build 203 is now live on Steam. Our focus for the past week has been getting the build in shape for PAX East. Please let us know about any significant bugs you find in this build. We have a day or two to do some last minute fixes before Friday when we show off NS2 to a whole new audience!

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Balance

  • Onos Gore back to 70 Puncture damage (miscommunication).
  • Reduced Onos hide armor from 6 to 5. This lowers his effectiveness against early game, pre-upgrade/Rifle Marines, while affecting him less late-game. There are other balance/map-control issues that are still to be addressed, but this should improve the game in the short-term.
  • Slowed Gorge healspray rate of fire by about ~25% and increased energy cost slightly.


Features

  • Added a button to go back to the Ready Room (F4 by default)
  • Added Skulk view blood effect when hitting a Marine.
  • New Victory/Defeat screen artwork.
  • Added land sound effects.
  • Added a precaching mechanism for surface shader to avoid multi-second pauses during gameplay caused by compiling the shader for the first time.


Fix

  • Reduced texture stretching on the infestation.
  • Fixed bug where surface shaders were not always properly cached.
  • Fixed crash bug when called Model:AddMaterial with a nil value.
  • Fixed a bug where a dead player could enter a Hive and crash the server.
  • Normal armories will show weapons in red which require an advanced armory to purchase.
  • Fixed bug were jumps from wall would sometimes have no effect, even when you were close enough to a wall.
  • Added protection against script passing a bad value to Model:GetAttachPointCoords.
  • Fixed an exploit where you could gain crazy speeds as a Skulk with just 1 jump in crevice.
  • Fixed animation glitches after building a Structure.
  • Fixed bug where sometimes a Harvester wouldn't be connected to the initial Hive through Cysts.
  • Fixed 1s delay between when a Commander places a structure and when it shows up.
  • Fixed bug where Structures would incorrectly display the wrong animation for one frame when they were dropped by the Commander.
  • Fixed a bug where the Skulk run animation is shown when jumping off walls.
  • Fixed bug where you would "slide" as Skulk when landing on a surface.
  • Fixed r_mode normals and depth not displaying properly when anti-aliasing is enabled.
  • The Skulk leap animation will now play when the Skulk jumps and then leaps.


SDK

  • Increased console history size from 5 to 50.
Post comment Comments
Dieger
Dieger - - 612 comments

it would be awesome if valve helped develop NS3 :)

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Icedecknight
Icedecknight - - 974 comments

NS2*, Nah they have everything covered so far, why would they need the help?

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Mkilbride
Mkilbride - - 2,784 comments

Eh.

I don't think being years later in release is "covered', but that's up the developers to decide.

Anyone remember 2009 release date? I do.

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Spooboy
Spooboy - - 2,028 comments

Yeah, they should really release a beta or something /sarcasm

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Mkilbride
Mkilbride - - 2,784 comments

Lol.

I'm just saying.

First they claimed 2007, then just scrapped Source, then they said 2009, and it's 2012 now, and they say it will release this year, but even Build 203 here, playing it, I still see at LEAST half a year left, and that's IF they develop faster than they have in the past.

Performance is still nowhere near where it needs to be. If they even -think- of releasing it with current performance levels, it will do unrepairable damage to the game.

Even if you got that GTX680 and Sandy-Bridge E 6 core's @ 5GHZ, you're likely to dip to 30 FPS and under at times on 2008 graphics and maps smaller than Counter-Strike.

Needs massive performance upgrades.

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slayersarge
slayersarge - - 138 comments

Give Onos DEVOUR! do it! Everyone would buy this game like crazy if you added it!

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Darklord42
Darklord42 - - 252 comments

How about one measly devour per Onos? I'd imagine it would be full after that. Not enough to throw off any balance to the game, but enough to add insult to injury. :)

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