I've had a thousand times worse experiences with so many other game developers and distributors. I love NS2 and have nothing but glowing things to say about UWE; yeah there are some bugs but given what they've achieved with the numbers they have, it's a bloody impressive effort!!
Also, because we (Australia) graciously extradited Hugh to UWE I'd kindly request that all marines be equipped with the Aussie flag... just because...
I've had some success avoiding the 32-bit OOM issue from setting the environment variable TCMALLOC_RELEASE_RATE=10 before launching the game from the command line.
Thank you for taking the time to write that out. I am aware that the beacon not effecting all players was supposed to have been fixed, but it happened to me personally last week.
Hotkeys for structures that are actually tool tips in disguise
Not a bug. I mean the tooltips that appear in the same position as actual functions for the commanders. For example on the infantry portal, there is a button there that cannot be pressed but says it has the hotkey A (I think) and explains that marines spawn here. I actually remember learning to comm and thinking that I needed to press this for marines to spawn.
There's other examples of this on other structures. Tooltips disguised as hotkeys. Wrong way around in my initial description I guess.
As for AI unit pathing and collision. The pathing its self needs work yes, and I'm sure it's always being worked on. But I think the collision actually annoys me more. It just looks unfinished when group moving them. They pause, reverse, and then move through each other in sequence when navigating any corner or when they reach the waypoint. I just like to watch them sometimes. Especially when there's structures in the way.
I don't think players should spawn in tres dropped eggs. Even if there is nothing else.
The devs have stated that they will not be spending any time working on minimal infestation.
That's disappointing. Do they get statistics on how many people actually use minimal infestation? I am very curious on that percentage. It's 99% of the competitive community at least. Also curious considering that streamers like RedDog, who has just had a very impressive stream showcases this buggy mess in every stream to the masses.
I think my point still stands though. And I know that personally I want the success of the reinforced program to go towards tightening up the game, instead of adding new content that continues to warp priorities. I understand it's more difficult to sell 'NS2 - Less Buggy Edition' than a 'NS2 - Pilot an exo inside another exo!' update, however.
But what about the bugs that weren't introduced in Reinforced? The ones that have been in the game since release. Since early beta even. Since I started playing this game.
Sometimes, those bugs are due to mods who override the fixed lua files with older ones. Others are due to the extremely weird and hard to track down nature of some of them. In general, the long-term bugs are more often annoying rather than game-breaking, so they just not as high of a priority as other issues, primarily crashes, performance, new features, and/or balance.
Maybe that will be the first number build to not appear all along the game at the top left corner of the game ? (we're nearly one year after the initial release and i don't see the point letting that here after the alpha/beta stage)
Maybe that will be the first number build to not appear all along the game at the top left corner of the game ? (we're nearly one year after the initial release and i don't see the point letting that here after the alpha/beta stage)
Hugh, can you say anything on the new AV or the extreme marine jumping?
I guess i understand if this question remains unanswered for now by devs. But i do hope UWE doesn't consider it final.
I've been a big fan of NS since Halloween of 2002. I think that what you guys have accomplished with NS2 has been nothing short of amazing. Not just the game and the launch, but the audacity of the old-school model of "pay up front once, we'll improve the game for free."
I play NS2 on my laptop, which isn't a high-performance computer. I wasn't able to play it on my laptop at all until build 249, so I've been acutely aware of the performance improvements you've made to NS2. Gorgeous and Reinforced have been amazing updates, especially given how they're free. However, I can't play NS2 without the right performance on the computer I have, so I'm glad you're focusing on bug fixes and performance improvements again.
But please, don't kill yourselves with working on it. I know that what you're doing (and have been doing!) is a lot of work. Work like that often comes with a price in your personal well-being. Please, don't stress out or sacrifice work-life balance for the sake of your players. You've shown that you care about us, please understand that we care about you too.
[*]Unresponsive commander menus that require a panel switch - Have 3 commander UI reports open, and none of them specify this issue but i have seen it. Most notably is selecting something and then moving the commander camera around a bit or waiting.. rendering selecting and dropping inoperable. Any further info / reproduction steps will lead to it getting fixed.
this bug is in Ns2 for ages, i reported it many times to sewlek an others. The only respons i got "we can't fix it because we can't reproduce it".
For example you have the obs on hotkey 1, you see skulks rushing your base and press 1 and S for Beacon and nothing happens.
You click it with the mouse and nothing happens again.
Nothing is working till you switch the menu and reclick the obs with the mouse.
And tbh there are so many minor features which are missing, i would like to see a big patch for these thinks.
And thanks to Ironhorse for that Post of yours. I would like to see this kind of post (bug report) more often.
Sometimes im not sure if i need to report a bug, because its in Ns2 for like over 10 builds.
Sometimes it seems like its "working as intended" but it shouldn't.
Heroic developer story aside, the question remains why such a broken build wasn't thrown back into the beta-pit when those numbers were so "unacceptable".
This said, why is 256 suddenly internal beta now? Could it get any worse?
I've had some success avoiding the 32-bit OOM issue from setting the environment variable TCMALLOC_RELEASE_RATE=10 before launching the game from the command line.
Nice find! From what I could read, it seems there's occasional issues with tcmalloc delaying the of larger memchunks to the system, some ppl even suggesting numbers in the 10000 range to enforce faster release cycles (which might be overall slower, though).
But I suspect that with such a heavy use of LUA, which the engine does, excessive memory fragmentation like it's happening here will be a problem that's not going to be solved easily.
Read this patch report on blues news. TBH you only have yourselves to blame UWE. You didn't have to push new content out to a deadline; you needed to fix existing bugs and issues, not introduce more. You needed to playtest future content not release to your fans who enjoy the game (seriously - none of the playtesters had extra micro stutters? mouse lag? greatly reduced fps? load times on SSDs looking like 4200 bigfoot drives?). You need to entice new players, not alienate them on free weekends.
All you are doing is pouring chlorine into the pool of existing players whilst inviting more people to jump in. Sure a huge resilient chunk will remain but the rest get burnt and wont come back no matter how safe you say the pool is now.
I wish you the best of luck for NS3.
edit: I'll probably look back in a few weeks to see how things are but even now there are far fewer servers available than a couple of months ago - and that is EU!
[*]Unresponsive commander menus that require a panel switch - Have 3 commander UI reports open, and none of them specify this issue but i have seen it. Most notably is selecting something and then moving the commander camera around a bit or waiting.. rendering selecting and dropping inoperable. Any further info / reproduction steps will lead to it getting fixed.
And thanks to Ironhorse for that Post of yours. I would like to see this kind of post (bug report) more often.
One of the worst things with the game industry is the lack of quality. Developers are forced to release stuff way before it's ready due to various reasons, such as marketing. Look at Total War: Rome II or Aliens: Colonial Marines. The date was set, they had the hype going and enough pre-orders had been placed, so some boss made a decision that it was time for release regardless of the state of the game. Shouldn't indies be more independent of stuff like that?
One of the worst things with the game industry is the lack of quality. Developers are forced to release stuff way before it's ready due to various reasons, such as marketing. Look at Total War: Rome II or Aliens: Colonial Marines. The date was set, they had the hype going and enough pre-orders had been placed, so some boss made a decision that it was time for release regardless of the state of the game. Shouldn't indies be more independent of stuff like that?
Aliens: Colonial Marines wasn't bad because it was rushed, it was simply not given the budget or team that was required to meet the incredibly high standards that the preview videos had given.
As for Indie studios being independent of timeframes; I'd go as far as to say that Indie studies can often be MORE at the mercy of timeframes. Unlike larger companies that can seek additional funding/staff/resources, Indie developers have a far smaller reach back potential and are thus more inclined to release a game earlier and seek funds. It's why you see a lot of indie games doing ALPHA access these days.. free money kind of :P
I want to ask. When you start the game an error "Couldn't initialize the render device." How can I fix it.
Start > Run > %appdata% > Natural Selection 2
Inside this folder either delete system_options.xml or find <device> and replace that line with
<device>D3D9</device>
Also very concerned about the server performance this build. Constant red plugs and tick rate tanks on many public servers I know are running on hardware more than above NS2s high requirements. A server box I have access to reports a CPU usage of a whopping 10% and still gets seemingly random tickrate tanks.
I want to ask. When you start the game an error "Couldn't initialize the render device." How can I fix it.
Also very concerned about the server performance this build. Constant red plugs and tick rate tanks on many public servers I know are running on hardware more than above NS2s high requirements. A server box I have access to reports a CPU usage of a whopping 10% and still gets seemingly random tickrate tanks.
There have been talk about the reinforced badges.. they may give some performance problems when running dedicated server.. Lua error spam in the console.. Any news for server hotfix or how to disable badge support? Do we really have to wait next weekend
I want to ask. When you start the game an error "Couldn't initialize the render device." How can I fix it.
get a new high-end computer.
i'm not shitting you. that's the best piece of advice any ns2 player can and will ever give you.
ayo don't mean to be a jerk but if you see my signature I've got a machine from the future yet I'm facing issues here and there... UWE will get to it and that's all I need to hear
I'm a software developer myself, I had to argue about such things with project managers, too. Of course they usually ignore stuff (which is when you get them to write you an e-mail...
It sounds like you are applying a terrible experience in a workplace wholly unrelated and unlike Unknown Worlds to your assumptions of how Unknown Worlds functions. I don't understand your logic, or why you would even choose to try to formulate such an assumption.
All the other stuff in that article is just marketing bla-bla...
This kind of rude, dismissive attitude and flippant dismissal of an attempt to be level with you is exactly the kind of behaviour that reduces the motivation of anyone from UWE to make such attempts in future.
you...what how was that rude? How can an observation be rude?
Telling us first that you didn't read the article before posting your opinion, and second that it's just 'bla-bla,' means that we have no motivation to engage with you.
huh, funny. When someone comes up to me and tells me that I spoke too much or didn't give a correct image of what's going on, I'm going to take that critic and better myself. But that's just me, I guess.
For example, my brain is going to instantly skim over and ignoreevery post you make on these forums from now on. It's not conscious and it's not personal, it's just a fact that because you were rude and dismissive, my natural social human nature is going to choose to ignore you so I can spend time discussing the topic at hand with polite people.
huh, I'm confused now. I was not rude. Maybe dismissive, but not rude. Your ignoring on the other side, is exactly that: Rude and dismissive.
Read this patch report on blues news. TBH you only have yourselves to blame UWE. You didn't have to push new content out to a deadline; you needed to fix existing bugs and issues, not introduce more. You needed to playtest future content not release to your fans who enjoy the game (seriously - none of the playtesters had extra micro stutters? mouse lag? greatly reduced fps? load times on SSDs looking like 4200 bigfoot drives?). You need to entice new players, not alienate them on free weekends.
All you are doing is pouring chlorine into the pool of existing players whilst inviting more people to jump in. Sure a huge resilient chunk will remain but the rest get burnt and wont come back no matter how safe you say the pool is now.
I wish you the best of luck for NS3.
edit: I'll probably look back in a few weeks to see how things are but even now there are far fewer servers available than a couple of months ago - and that is EU!
I think we are blaming ourselves here. We're not blaming anyone else in the blog post, unless I misread it. We screwed up, and we do apologize. We hope you'll come back to the game and find it fixed up. Believe me, as engineers and craftsmen, we take no pride in releasing sub-par product.
Read this patch report on blues news. TBH you only have yourselves to blame UWE. You didn't have to push new content out to a deadline; you needed to fix existing bugs and issues, not introduce more. You needed to playtest future content not release to your fans who enjoy the game (seriously - none of the playtesters had extra micro stutters? mouse lag? greatly reduced fps? load times on SSDs looking like 4200 bigfoot drives?). You need to entice new players, not alienate them on free weekends.
All you are doing is pouring chlorine into the pool of existing players whilst inviting more people to jump in. Sure a huge resilient chunk will remain but the rest get burnt and wont come back no matter how safe you say the pool is now.
I wish you the best of luck for NS3.
edit: I'll probably look back in a few weeks to see how things are but even now there are far fewer servers available than a couple of months ago - and that is EU!
I think we are blaming ourselves here. We're not blaming anyone else in the blog post, unless I misread it. We screwed up, and we do apologize. We hope you'll come back to the game and find it fixed up. Believe me, as engineers and craftsmen, we take no pride in releasing sub-par product.
At the very least have your PR guy reflect that view then. All I can find in the newspost is the grandiose praise for your ambition of undertaking a massive project. For example how am I supposed to interpret the following:
We know from our data that the game is not breaking down for most people, but it is breaking down for an unacceptable number of people. The fact is, we bit off more than we could chew – Hitting the Reinforcement deadline with the ambitious feature set we set for ourselves proved a little bit too much.
Well, screw that. If we can’t chew it, we’re going to swallow it whole. Natural Selection 2 was not born of taking the ‘safe route,’ this game does not exist because Unknown Worlds bowed to accepted definitions of what is ‘possible.’ It may well be that we were too ambitious with Reinforced. But we were also too ambitious with launch, with Gorgeous, with building the game in the first place.
Combined with the fact that UWE has a long history of somewhat questionable releases and promises, I don't really know what to believe.
The ambition is certainly respectable, but I'm having extremely hard time praising it as long as you're repeatedly failing to meet your promises and provide a stable and functional product to your paying customers. It's a real shame because on paper the company is doing a wonderful job with free updates and all that, but in practise I constantly find myself questioning your motives and understanding of where your company is going.
I know I'm being very whiny on these forums and I genuinely feel concerned about insulting people who are doing their best and working overtime to make their dream indie game come true, but at the same time things like this make me feel very uneasy supporting the company or trusting any information coming out from you.
That being said, I think I'm done with the forums. I feel I can't contribute much positivity here and the things I don't like are probably not going to change. I'll see through any responses in this discussion, but after that I'll let you have some peace from my everpresent whining.
Comments
Fixed.
Thank you for taking the time to write that out. I am aware that the beacon not effecting all players was supposed to have been fixed, but it happened to me personally last week.
Not a bug. I mean the tooltips that appear in the same position as actual functions for the commanders. For example on the infantry portal, there is a button there that cannot be pressed but says it has the hotkey A (I think) and explains that marines spawn here. I actually remember learning to comm and thinking that I needed to press this for marines to spawn.
There's other examples of this on other structures. Tooltips disguised as hotkeys. Wrong way around in my initial description I guess.
As for AI unit pathing and collision. The pathing its self needs work yes, and I'm sure it's always being worked on. But I think the collision actually annoys me more. It just looks unfinished when group moving them. They pause, reverse, and then move through each other in sequence when navigating any corner or when they reach the waypoint. I just like to watch them sometimes. Especially when there's structures in the way.
I don't think players should spawn in tres dropped eggs. Even if there is nothing else.
That's disappointing. Do they get statistics on how many people actually use minimal infestation? I am very curious on that percentage. It's 99% of the competitive community at least. Also curious considering that streamers like RedDog, who has just had a very impressive stream showcases this buggy mess in every stream to the masses.
I think my point still stands though. And I know that personally I want the success of the reinforced program to go towards tightening up the game, instead of adding new content that continues to warp priorities. I understand it's more difficult to sell 'NS2 - Less Buggy Edition' than a 'NS2 - Pilot an exo inside another exo!' update, however.
Are you for real?
I guess i understand if this question remains unanswered for now by devs. But i do hope UWE doesn't consider it final.
I play NS2 on my laptop, which isn't a high-performance computer. I wasn't able to play it on my laptop at all until build 249, so I've been acutely aware of the performance improvements you've made to NS2. Gorgeous and Reinforced have been amazing updates, especially given how they're free. However, I can't play NS2 without the right performance on the computer I have, so I'm glad you're focusing on bug fixes and performance improvements again.
But please, don't kill yourselves with working on it. I know that what you're doing (and have been doing!) is a lot of work. Work like that often comes with a price in your personal well-being. Please, don't stress out or sacrifice work-life balance for the sake of your players. You've shown that you care about us, please understand that we care about you too.
this bug is in Ns2 for ages, i reported it many times to sewlek an others. The only respons i got "we can't fix it because we can't reproduce it".
For example you have the obs on hotkey 1, you see skulks rushing your base and press 1 and S for Beacon and nothing happens.
You click it with the mouse and nothing happens again.
Nothing is working till you switch the menu and reclick the obs with the mouse.
And tbh there are so many minor features which are missing, i would like to see a big patch for these thinks.
And thanks to Ironhorse for that Post of yours. I would like to see this kind of post (bug report) more often.
Sometimes im not sure if i need to report a bug, because its in Ns2 for like over 10 builds.
Sometimes it seems like its "working as intended" but it shouldn't.
Really? What the heck, it happens every single day for me.
This said, why is 256 suddenly internal beta now? Could it get any worse?
Nice find! From what I could read, it seems there's occasional issues with tcmalloc delaying the of larger memchunks to the system, some ppl even suggesting numbers in the 10000 range to enforce faster release cycles (which might be overall slower, though).
But I suspect that with such a heavy use of LUA, which the engine does, excessive memory fragmentation like it's happening here will be a problem that's not going to be solved easily.
All you are doing is pouring chlorine into the pool of existing players whilst inviting more people to jump in. Sure a huge resilient chunk will remain but the rest get burnt and wont come back no matter how safe you say the pool is now.
I wish you the best of luck for NS3.
edit: I'll probably look back in a few weeks to see how things are but even now there are far fewer servers available than a couple of months ago - and that is EU!
Stickied for all.
Aliens: Colonial Marines wasn't bad because it was rushed, it was simply not given the budget or team that was required to meet the incredibly high standards that the preview videos had given.
As for Indie studios being independent of timeframes; I'd go as far as to say that Indie studies can often be MORE at the mercy of timeframes. Unlike larger companies that can seek additional funding/staff/resources, Indie developers have a far smaller reach back potential and are thus more inclined to release a game earlier and seek funds. It's why you see a lot of indie games doing ALPHA access these days.. free money kind of :P
sigh
i didn't think a simple RSS post on my news feed about UWE fixing bugs could end up being so pathetic...
get a new high-end computer.
i'm not shitting you. that's the best piece of advice any ns2 player can and will ever give you.
Start > Run > %appdata% > Natural Selection 2
Inside this folder either delete system_options.xml or find <device> and replace that line with
Also very concerned about the server performance this build. Constant red plugs and tick rate tanks on many public servers I know are running on hardware more than above NS2s high requirements. A server box I have access to reports a CPU usage of a whopping 10% and still gets seemingly random tickrate tanks.
Your not alone, it's got horrendous.
As long as you meet minimum requirement, you may need to update your DirectX, Visual C++ and all that.
ayo don't mean to be a jerk but if you see my signature I've got a machine from the future yet I'm facing issues here and there... UWE will get to it and that's all I need to hear
huh, funny. When someone comes up to me and tells me that I spoke too much or didn't give a correct image of what's going on, I'm going to take that critic and better myself. But that's just me, I guess.
huh, I'm confused now. I was not rude. Maybe dismissive, but not rude. Your ignoring on the other side, is exactly that: Rude and dismissive.
Hypocrisy much?
I think we are blaming ourselves here. We're not blaming anyone else in the blog post, unless I misread it. We screwed up, and we do apologize. We hope you'll come back to the game and find it fixed up. Believe me, as engineers and craftsmen, we take no pride in releasing sub-par product.
At the very least have your PR guy reflect that view then. All I can find in the newspost is the grandiose praise for your ambition of undertaking a massive project. For example how am I supposed to interpret the following:
Combined with the fact that UWE has a long history of somewhat questionable releases and promises, I don't really know what to believe.
The ambition is certainly respectable, but I'm having extremely hard time praising it as long as you're repeatedly failing to meet your promises and provide a stable and functional product to your paying customers. It's a real shame because on paper the company is doing a wonderful job with free updates and all that, but in practise I constantly find myself questioning your motives and understanding of where your company is going.
I know I'm being very whiny on these forums and I genuinely feel concerned about insulting people who are doing their best and working overtime to make their dream indie game come true, but at the same time things like this make me feel very uneasy supporting the company or trusting any information coming out from you.
That being said, I think I'm done with the forums. I feel I can't contribute much positivity here and the things I don't like are probably not going to change. I'll see through any responses in this discussion, but after that I'll let you have some peace from my everpresent whining.