Build 158 first impressions.

Dickbeard the Pirate

Booted it up and jumped right in to the closest server. This is at 60 ping.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCUDQo9mtcs" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCUDQo9mtcs</a>

[R8]DJBourgeoisie

Thats pretty much how it was for me as well on someones 6 player dedicated server. When i wasn't spawning stuck in a wall on aliens having to type kill in console over and over, I was being roasted by the flame thrower by someone camping in our hive or blown up by the grenade launcher. I think I left the server with something crazy like 2 kills and 28 deaths... I honestly am not having any fun at all, the bad performance magnifies all of the frustrating things (spawn camping / over powered grenade launcher / flame thrower that when you are hit with blinds you completely) that need to be addressed in the game. For a game that I thought was supposed to make NS more accessible to new players right now I find it more confusing and frustrating than ever. I have played in a handful of games over the past 2 days and have a similar experience each time.

sickboy

@OP: Yeah, I think that's pretty much everyone's experience. Mine was less rubber-bandy and more freeze-frame. Walk fine for a few seconds, then freeze for a second, rinse and repeat. This was on 32, 20, and 12 player servers. The 12 player servers were fine in 157, assuming no gorges spammed hydras.

The issue also occurs with no hydras, such as at the beginning of the game. May get exacerbated exponentially the more hydras there are, but it was pretty unplayable even without them (at least as a 'rine where you gotta aim pretty accurately, not including flamethrowers). Unfortunate since I had a few great, full matches with 157. This is definitely the first time I ever wished a patch would have been held off until Monday since a fix won't be out over the weekend :P

But hey, that's the breaks of betas. At least we didn't crash any servers with 32 people and hydra spam. Certainly a step in the right direction in that regard. Now if we can combine the relative smoothness of 157 with the hydra optimizations in 158 we'll be golden!


**side note: LMG helicopter is back (or did it ever leave?). SOISOISOISOI my marine brethren!

Codeine

yea its pretty bad

sheena_yanai

dunno, i think its quite playable, no rubberbanding here, playing on 160+ ping servers.
gameplay wasnt as much degraded by hydras as before, yet i dont really want to drop more than 3 of them.
maybe its just a server thing, ive seen good pinging ones with 8 players or so which were crawling and lagging already in the ready room

FocusedWolf

I just commed a lengthy 12 player game, to the point where all the aliens gave up. Anyway no crashes and was in the process of getting 3 ccs :P. At one point though their was some sort of lag. There were no turrets at all and enemy team said no hydra. So perhaps a subtle bug? It came on quite suddenly, like when someone drops like 15 hydra.. but i'm not sure what it was (my series of 5 macs had noticeable movement lag... so maybe a bug in pathing). Or perhaps the tons of other structures lying around everywhere? It was a very involved game... i mean i got so tired of the aliens constantly taking out the power node and armory in east that i sent a fleet of like 7-10 macs to weld that power on (had to repeat this like 5 times) and additionally i had like 6 armories built in that room :P

Interesting factoid about the game was, for like 5 games prior, many comms were getting killed establishing the initial ip and therefore loosing the game and getting annoyed as a result. Eventually we got it going and we fended off the base rush. Anyway we were on the verge of loosing the game. No more ips, and i was in the west. Just finished building the cc myself when i was forced to dive in, or loose it. Main base ips were dead... in fact all were. The saving grace was, from the second cc, i was able to spawn a mac at the first (empty) cc, and get a stealth ip up and restore the dead power node. My freekin team rage quitted long before this, thinking that the game was surely over, and i had to call them back to the game. I was like... "ya bunch of quitters... get back in the ips up" lol. Naturally the flamer was on my todo list, and all went smooth after that :P

slayer20

I played 5 vs 5 and it was an awesome game.

Very little lag that only lasted a minute. I think the Alien Commander afk'd because when Marines had flamethrowers, I jumped into the Hive and had to upgrade all our melee and defense as well as place structures to defend the hive.

Anyway, the game was great. I don't really like that the flamethrower covers your entire screen when you're on fire though. It usually doesn't matter as a skulk because you die like right away, but higher lifeforms this can get annoying.

yimmasabi

This is the first time that I see my ping is below 50 in a EU server. Wooww ! Normaly it was over 150.
And in US servers it is about 80 pings. There is a great improvement on those pings if there is no diveder number in code :)

It is also better then half-life.

nervcore

which is why when they finally change the 1st player afflicted by flames effect, the fade's survival rate should really go up by quite alot.

Sturmwind

Well, not being someone prone to giving easy praise, i have to say, that this is the best build for me so far.

Some random points: 

<ul><li>significant fps increase | less "bogging down" then in earlier versions </li><li>hydra- / turret-spamming doesn't insta-kill the game any more</li><li>actual game-strategies are emerging - whip-rush anyone ;-)
(still totally imba gameplay, but hell, you actually can have fun playing)</li><li>8+ person-games tend to actually last 30+ minutes</li></ul>I'm  finally starting to belive, that <!--coloro:#ffff00--><span style="color:#ffff00"><!--/coloro-->this might actually be a playable game in 2011<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->

barryb

I have to say the jump in performance is marked. If the team keep this up, happy days! Good work guys.

Barry

Bloodhouse

At the moment NS2_Tram is a bit of a fun thief. Stick with rockdown for less lag and rubberness.

PseudoKnight

Base performance hasn't changed from 155 to 158. (~40fps avg rockdown; note: my system is not GPU-limited, so improvements may still have been made there) I'm glad they're shifting priorities back to performance again. I hope that'll allow them to increase the server tick and network rates eventually, something a fast-paced multiplayer game sorely needs.