UWE @ Unloud, Childs Play and Patch Notes news

Umloud, Child's Play and Unknown Worlds

When you run, clamber or fly through the corridors of Tram or the tunnels of Mineshaft, you could be forgiven for taking the experience for granted. Your avatar is free of your physical self, your experience separate from the real world around your PC. Yours is a playground in which your physical limitations are irrelevant.

That irrelevancy allows Child's Play to improve the lives of countless children. When in a hospital, or other physically limiting situation, children benefit greatly from engaging with games. They are a distraction, a challenge, a stimulation, a social experience and a source of great fun.

When Charlie and Max first founded Unknown Worlds, they measured everything in burritos. How many burritos will that new PC cost? Can we afford a new Windows license, or even office space with an actual window? The development of Natural Selection 2 was always tight, dollar signs casting a long shadow over every decision.

Therefore, it is with the most immense pride that Unknown Worlds was a premier sponsor of Umloud, a Rock Band themed charity event in San Francisco, hosted by Tim Shafer held on the 6th December. All the proceeds from Umloud went to Child's Play.

No one in the office dared dream that one day UWE would be in a position to give back to the gaming community in such a meaningful way.

It was a blast, for a great cause on stage performing - Steve on vocals, Charlie on guitar, Brian (The Chops version) on drums and Hugh on bass.

Build 233 is now live on Steam!

Warning! Be careful with the new Spark Editor 'Vertex Weld' tool. Save your work before using it. As it is a new implementation, there may be stability / file integrity issues with it.

Feature

• Added the name of the player being followed while waiting to spawn to the screen.
• Added server browser filter option for passworded servers.

Optimization

• Improved the performance of lighting calculations.
• Changed fullscreen passes to be rendered using a single triangle rather than a two triangle quad to eliminate overshading pixels along the diagonal.

Fix

• Fixed bug causing text in a message box on the main menu to overflow outside the box.
• Fixed bug in the sv_ban command when banning a player not currently on the server.
• Fixed bug causing the Fade to "teleport" to the ground while Blinking into walls and the ceiling.
• Leading and trailing whitespace characters are ignored in the server list filters.
• Filtered out duplicates when mounting mods.
• Eliminated duplicate log messages when mounting mods for consistency checking.
• Fixed bug where returning nil from GetAttachPointCoords would result in uninitialized data being used.
• Fixed issue where having non-ASCII characters in the Windows user name would cause the game to not save mods, settings or cache files properly.
• The Command Structure health will no longer be displayed for enemy structures when they spawn in a nearby room.
• Fixed crash after alt-tabbing.
• Removed the "Attack" button from the ARC as it is not needed and was causing some problems.
• Fixed crash during precaching when a cinematic couldn't be loaded.
• Signaled Steam to stop refreshing the server pings when connecting to a server to avoid cases where the routers NAT table overflowed.
• Fixed issue where LaunchPad didn't properly specify the -game command line parameter when running NS2.
• Crash when acquiring physics models from different threads.
• Fixed bug where collision detection would fail on bodies which had extreme off-axis scaling applied to them (affected Harvester flinch animation)
• Fixed bug allowing the Alien Commander to cancel research on a lifeform egg at the end of research, gaining back the resource cost but not canceling the research.
• Fixed bug where ARCs didn't fire at targets when they had an attack order. They still need some work for actually listening to attack orders though. #3921.

Improvement

• The "Update" button in the server browser now changes text when finished updating servers.
• Steam overlay based web views moved over to in-game web view.
• The load progress is now displayed as a percent instead of a count.

Editor

• Removing the shift-hover-select thing that just spams undo items. Some other polish/fixes.
• Fixed crash/bugs with copy/paste then undo.
• Hardcoded hotkeys 0-9 for viewport settings (perspective, lit/unlit, etc.)
• Made Tool Settings dialog taller to not hide stuff..heh.
• Added an origin cycle mode to put the gizmo at the first selected object, so you can move a group of props without bad grid-snap.
• Fixed editor bug where you could create empty props.
• Fixed bug when undo-ing face merges.
• Welding vertices will now auto-cleanup things like degenerate edges, duplicate edges (that were formerly different), etc.
• Made camera acceleration an option (tools|settings|general|display settings). off by default now.
• Fixing some issues with deleting faces, undoing, etc. Details: FaceIds are NOT reliable when faces are deleted, so each vertex now stores Face pointers rather than IDs.
• Work in progress checkin for fixes to welding. Just adding some un-used stuff for now.
• Fixed some bugs introduced by adjacent faces optimization.
• Move operations, with/out texture lock, should now be a lot faster and smoother. Using a adjacent-faces-set per vertex instead of doing global face search.
• On second thought, completely removing scale tool restrictions. Mappers use negative values.
• Changed some scale tool parameters so it's less restrictive when sizing small-ish objects.
• Added weld-selected-vertices command. Activate Select Tool, select a group of vertices, then Edit|Weld Selected Vertices (at the bottom of the menu)
• New "knobs" for texture mapping (and other) spinners. purely mouse-movement-based. Up/down arrow keys still work if cursor is in text box. CTRL and ALT modifiers work on both.
• Fixed lost-focus for hotkeys.
• Feedback about how many faces were affected by texture replace.
• Added ALT shortcut for texture replace; added F, C keys to move up/down when in first person camera.
• Fixed annoying scrollbar reset with prop/texture browser windows.
• Added Texture Replace tool (red paint bucket, all the way to the right of the toolbar)
• Removed (-1000,1000) range limit on texture shift spinners. This fixes some of the texture lock-move blank-field issues..
• Grid snapping for texture gizmo. There is some weirdness with snapping, but it works.
• Ctrl + doubleclick on face now adds a whole body to selection.
• Paint(Texture) Tool now has moving handles, in addition to rotate and scale.
• Switching to hash_set instead for faster "used asset" lookups.
• Texture browser now has "show used only" filter as well.
• Props browser now has "show used props only" checkbox. Same thing for textures browser coming soon.
• Custom colors now saved to *.level files.
• Custom colors now saved between selections. Next todo: save per-level custom colors to disk.
• Autobackup filenames now include level name, e.g. ns2_refinery.autobackup2.level.
• Tooltips for tool bar buttons now display bound hot key. Bug: If you change them, the tooltips won't update until restart. Ah well.

SDK

• Added the ability to specify default values for settings in a render_setup file.
• Added Clear Level menu option in the Cinematic Editor to clear out the currently set level file.
• Fixed issues with COLLADA files that contained instance_material nodes.
• Fixed issue where COLLADA files that referenced textures with spaces in the file name would not be properly loaded if the file name used a relative path.
• Fixed loading of COLLADA models in the Viewer.
• Enhanced the sound picker with a hierarchical folder display.
• Added support for hearing sounds effects placed in the level in the Editor.
• Added support for displaying cinematics in the Editor.
• Added support for displaying web pages in game.