Natural Selection 2 News Update - Beta Build 225 is Live
Max
Technical Director, Unknown Worlds Entertainment Join Date: 2002-03-15 Member: 318Super Administrators, Retired Developer, NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, Constellation, Subnautica Developer, Pistachionauts, Future Perfect Developer
Technical Director, Unknown Worlds Entertainment Join Date: 2002-03-15 Member: 318Super Administrators, Retired Developer, NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, Constellation, Subnautica Developer, Pistachionauts, Future Perfect Developer
Comments
Had a few plays, overall...patch seems solid, nothing major with some pretty good optimisations.
Thanks UWE!
Meh pls set minimum fps to 30 xD . Nobody can reach 200 anyways :)
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->"transferring it to tracks that will transit Tram, all attended by workers who have their quarters in Docking"<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
and now
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Increased workers per tech point to 5<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Are there going to be random workers walking around???
It looks very cool, but didn't expect it to be final based on those screenies as it looks impractical. I like the loading screens though, looking very professional and the map edition is great.
Looking forward to what you have for us with DI, a flatter mesh with occasional blob I think everyone would be happier with. The current infestation just looks so flat, and even a little 'uneveness' in the Z plane would dramatically add a lot to it. It would 'relieve' the eyes in respect to what they want to see, so to speak.
But I am sure you guys have it under control, looking forward to it!
(1) Come on, UWE, this is a matter of a single copy & paste. Show yourself on Steam NEWS!
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/kFSNYh.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
(2) This problem will sort itself out eventually; nevertheless the effort should be another simple copy & paste on your side.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/M3iLrh.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
(3)
Give the Exos a (StarCraft's) Goliath robotic voice when they use voice commands like "Weld me" or "Need orders"
(4)
Make sure that the tutorial videos play inside the game and don't catapult you out of NS2.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/hJ37b.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
I like it.
It's the same colour it was in NS1. Grey or black wouldn't fit the aliens. The infestation matches their colours and is supposed to be living, like a fungus
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/zFMm1.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/7oCde.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/RyR2J.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Remember those loading screen screenshots are from lit areas. When the power is cut the infestation isn't bright.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/jbTGm.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
and now
Are there going to be random workers walking around???<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That would be awesome!!! Those workers are in the concept art after all.
As far as I can tell, we've been calling the macs and drifters 'workers' throughout the dev process. So those two lines directly conflict each-other (3 per tech point / 5 per tech point). There's plenty more to be upset about (plenty of undocumented changes) but I don't want to be that guy and not in this thread.
I always got the impression from the concept art that the workers were "pre-infestation". I mean, stuff was happening in the refineries, etc., before the aliens showed up. When you concept a map, you don't just throw up a building that no one has ever used before.
But hey, this whole cap on workers beats me, too. An ns-wiki search for "worker" turns up nothing, and there's no reference to 'workers' on the drifter/MAC pages. So it might be something EXCITING AND NEW!!! or a typo. Have to wait and see.
There was originally a 3 per tech point limit, which was later bumped to 5.
VV Suck it VV
OMG HUZE NINJA
1. Tram south tunnels and north tunnels have tons of seem texture problems (invisible faces?) where you can see out into the skybox or into other rooms.
2. Firing 1 shot with the shotgun (7 left in mag) and reloading makes the sound of reloading 2 shells even though one sound should play.
3. Firing the left minigun of the exo either alone or in conjuction with the right minigun causes the viewmodel walking animation to stop and you just slide around silly like.
Video of the 3rd bug
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj0SL6GSt9w" target="_blank">Video of Exosuit viewmodel animation Bug</a>
Harvester hit detection is still whack, shooting at the base is the only way to get guaranteed damage.
the tutorial video is linking to
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0cS53HQBAg&feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0cS53HQBAg...eature=youtu.be</a>
but I think the maximized version would be better
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/v0cS53HQBAg" target="_blank">www.youtube.com/v/v0cS53HQBAg</a>
here you can see why:
<img src="http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/3116/ns2tutorial.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
'Added maximum limit of Drifter / MAC (3 per tech point) to prevent unreasonable spam'
and the second (presumably sometime after the first bullet point after a balance issue was noticed)
'Increased workers per tech point to 5'.
Tested in-game the limit is indeed 5 per tech point, not 3 so that's further evidence that workers are indeed Macs/Drifters. I have a report from Young Trotsky that he was able to buy 16 in total and that the game reports 16 idle workers with 3 hives so there may be some mild exploitability or simply a small reporting bug if things are done quickly. After further testing he reported: 'Now I just slowly rebuilt and it hit the limit at 15/15 but there are actually only 12 on the map'. So there is clearly some further tweaking required there.
<u><b>As for other undocumented changes:</b></u>
<ul><li>The post 224 Armor and Weapon upgrade graphics now include bars to help determine their level for the marine HUD. </li><li>Commander overlays now include a */n worker limit graphic in the center top alongside the previous tres and rt count information. </li><li>Loading screens now display a representation of the map you are loading both through screenshots of that level and the maps overlay. </li><li>Yet more location name changes and touch-ups to the map overlays have occurred (for example, in ns2_summit: removal of the snow mounds represented on the overlay in crevice, slight adjustment to the placement of the name crevice itself). </li><li>Added smoke effects to alien command view, and further button graphic changes for both alien and marine comm. </li><li>Increased the volume of ARC deaths. </li><li>Introduced swipe delay for Fades after blink (likely unintentional, could have been 224) </li><li>Alien upgrade icons are blacked out if tower has yet to be built (again, 224 is a possibility)</li></ul>
To be fair to the team it's crunch time, in all honesty I don't imagine later patch notes will miss things out like this (and some of these are really mundane) but this:
<u><b>Optimization</b></u>
<ul><li>Improved performance on the client and server</li></ul>
Is just about the most frustrating patch note they gave, what did you do guys? Please? Even some note of what sort of perf gains (big or small? fps? netcode? What!?) would have been useful. You have the information internally, don't dumb down the patch notes in these sections for our sake. For the people that don't care it's easy enough to glance over and for those of us that do there's few things more frustrating than being left in the dark.
Sorry but I simply disagree, in any development pipeline EVERY observable (or assumed) change should be logged internally, otherwise when something breaks it's a nightmare to backtrack. I'd normally put money on their internal list being much more extensive than this, but the top two entries conflicting in the way they do leads me to question that.
Also, consider this: The longer a change takes the more likely someone is going to spend documenting it. A fix takes a lot of effort, so it will of course be reported (see which is the largest section?). But even the small changes take effort and time many, many multiples higher than it will take to document them, sorry but tiny slowdown is worth it and in this case I think it's more likely that they just didn't want to spend the time translating jargon into something the public can read easily.
Where it used to say 0ms waiting for GPU, now it goes up to 8..
What happened from 224>225 that might cause that..
@ 0:16 is when I'm, just clicking after a short blink, nothing happens.
There are clear delays in several of the initial blinks, as well as other parts of the video.
<a href="http://youtu.be/YYqqEuDc-kU" target="_blank">http://youtu.be/YYqqEuDc-kU</a>
One thing that I noticed: Sometime skulks hit me while looking away from me... I stood behind a skulk which was biting and he killed me somehow o_O This happened several times.
Oh, and in Tram is a problem regarding jetpacks:
Using the vent at Departures Hive as jetpacker, you might come out of the map (Exit next to Stability Monitoring). There you get stuck walking outside of the map...