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Hugh

Cameraman

8:55PM

Do the "Perfomance-Jam"!!!

male_fatalities wrote: » They took a risk using their own engine, didn't work out. It worked out spectacularly well, and the future of UWE is brighter for it. The financial, technical, creative, and intellectual freedom that Spark has granted UWE is immeasurably valuable. Judging the engineering value of an entire game engine by the behaviour of a particular game's late game performance when entities are exploding out of every pore on a is utterly ridiculous.

Squeal_Like_A_Pig

Squeal_Like_A_Pig

Janitor

8:08PM

UWE to replace Vanilla NS2 with Sewlek's balance mod in the near future

Just to clarify a little bit, at the moment UWE is planning on moving forward with implementing the Balance Mod into Vanilla NS2 in some form, unless there is a huge outcry, which at the moment there does not seem to be. And as Hugh points out, this is a massive undertaking, and does come with a lot of risks. What has been more up in the air is the release date for that, and which features are going to make the final cut, and that is where we are trying to solicit as much feedback from the community as possible. So I think the best thing to do is assume that we are going to incorporate a large amount of the mod into the game at some point soon, and if you want to have a say, play it. And play it a lot, not just a single game before passing judgement. And please don't just read the changelog before passing judgement, either.

Hugh

Cameraman

7:57PM

UWE to replace Vanilla NS2 with Sewlek's balance mod in the near future

(Remember - My post wasn't passing a judgement on whether Balance Mod is a good or bad thing, only pointing out that it is a BIG THING and that there is no UWE 'Master Plan' - So we should all discuss more!) Also @Comprox is a boss.

SteveRock

7:50PM

Do the "Perfomance-Jam"!!!

Hi all, We're all aware of the performance issues and are doing our best. In a sense, every week is a performance jam for us. We're always trying things and open to new ideas, and some things work out and some things don't. Believe me, we're not happy about the game's performance either. --Steve

Hugh

Cameraman

6:57PM

UWE to replace Vanilla NS2 with Sewlek's balance mod in the near future

There is a lot of misinformation flying around about what UWE is and is not going to do with 'Balance Mod.' Here is clarification, and the whole truth. First up, well done @thelawenforcer for starting this discussion. Let's not mince words: Balance Mod makes huge changes to the game and it may as well be considered a new version of NS2. Having discussions about it is very important. Though your post title could have used a '?'! Balance Mod is a mod. There is no 'official plan' to replace Vanilla NS2 with Balance Mod. It is a creative experiment by Andi that has produced wonderful, useful, pertinent discussion about how to design asymmetrical multiplayer games. Most people at UWE have no idea what is in Balance Mod, or how it differs from Vanilla NS2. It is very much a 'skunkworks' project. There is no master plan. At no time has everyone at UWE sat down and discussed if we want to make such a huge change to NS2. Making a huge change like replacing Vanilla NS2 with Balance Mod would not be simply a case of swapping out some Lua code: 1. Entire official tutorial systems would have to be ripped out and replaced 2. The collective NS2 playerbase would have to relearn how to play. That includes pubbers! 3. Balance Mod has not undergone the rigorous and continuous playtesting that Vanilla has and does. The immediate impact on the programming crew would taking time away from other projects to join a bug-hunt. 4. The sum total collective learning resources of the NS2 community would be rendered outdated. Thousands of YouTube videos, dozens of recorded competitions, tens of thousands of hours of livestreams, carefully crafted community tutorials. That's not to say it won't happen. Or it will happen. Or that parts of Balance Mod will or will not make it into Vanilla NS2. No one knows, and that's why forum threads like this are important. There are big questions to ask about which direction NS2 is going to go in, and what we as a community want to experience when we double click that little Hive icon. In a discussion like this, it is easy to come to the conclusion that 'everyone' agrees with you. Seeing a post you agree with getting lots of 'Agrees,' or noticing lots of forum threads promoting your view. Reading an articulate poster pick apart an argument you do not like. But the fact is none of us know what 'everyone' wants. Step outside this forum to r/ns2, and the vibe is difference. Step from r/ns2 to facebook.com/naturalselection2 or @NS2 and the vibe changes totally, again. Join a pub game and people will give of yet another vibe. All those opinions are valid. All those people love NS2. Those at the coal face, discussing Balance Mod here on the forums, need to consider carefully who 'everyone' is and what 'everyone' wants. What is best for the NS2 community as a whole?

Hugh

Cameraman

5:57PM

Anyone else sick of this invincible structure bug

ezekel wrote: » Reload bug! There has never been, never will be any bugs with weapon reloads. Or rifle sounds. Or sentry gun sounds. Or anything in NS2, really. /me slinks away

Sewlek

The programmer previously known as Schimmel

2:30PM

Sewlek's Balance mod

current1y wrote: » You can any time switch between upgrades still right? What prevents people from switching from cara to regen then back to cara whenever they get chipped? Now instead of falling back to the hive or crag spot they just heal up around the first corner. its faster to fall back to the hive and heal there than evolving (and being extremely vulnerable as egg)

matso

Master of Patches

May 19

UWE to replace Vanilla NS2 with Sewlek's balance mod in the near future

Bacillus wrote: » Salraine_Chi wrote: » 1. Bhop in any shape or form. No comments on the actual gameplay and what it needs, but I wish people would get over the bloody fear of the word bhop. You probably couldn't sell pure gold if it was labeled as bhop because people go NONONONO!! every time the word is even mentioned. You don't like something about bhop? Fine, let's see if we can cut that bad part off and see if we can make the thing work for you. If you can coexist with a game with wallhop in it, I'm fairly sure you can coexist with a game with well designed bhop system in it. bhop has a long story of being a weird, difficult and unituitive way of abusing a bug in the hl1 movement code to move faster than originally designed. So using that name does give lots of people the creeps. I'm quite certain that NS2 does not need bhop in that sense of the word, and I'm pretty sure that is what people are complaining about with the skulk movement system - they do not want a weird, difficult and unintuitive way of gaining extra speed. Compare the way to get extra speed as a marine - you press the sprint key. As a skulk you need to ... well, try explain how to do it in 5 words... well, that's too much to require. But IMHO, you really shouldn't need a 10 min tutorial video showing you how to move your mouse, touch walls at exactly the right angle and which keys to press and release in the right order in order to be a decent skulk. A fun, self-explaining and easy to learn, hard to master movement system? Sure, I'm all for that... but I would not call that a bhop system.

matso

Master of Patches

May 19

UWE to replace Vanilla NS2 with Sewlek's balance mod in the near future

Therius wrote: » matso wrote: » Res wrote: » Robotix wrote: » There are glancing bites on structures (at least, there are on Phase Gates and Extractors). For Phase Gates, you get glancing bites whenever you bite the actual phasing portal and not the structure. Are you talking about in the balance mod or in live game? I know glancing bites on structures is in live game... and it's annoying. Can easily tell when the damage numbers go up in increments of 25 or 50 instead of 75. Or you can just turn a local server, turn on cheats, alltech, build a pg and bite it. Then you can watch all those nice, clean 75 pts hits show up. Try as you may, you won't be able to get a 25 or 50 to show up. Glancing bites for structures were removed ages (3-4 months? ago). But the legend lives on. So are you saying that when you see a 25 or 50 as a skulk biting a PG, it's actually a 75, no matter the value of the draw damage function? No. The damage number is real. With a bit of further digging, the culprit turns on to be NS2Stats. NS2Stats overrides the PerformGradualMeleeAttack() method in order to extract some stats from it, and it uses the old unpatched version. So if you play on a server with NS2Stats installed, you DO get glancing bites on buildings. Sorry for the confusion, and my apologies to anyone that started to doubt their eyes ...

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