Build 201 & New Purchase Options news - Natural Selection 2

This weekend, we transitioned the Natural Selection 2 store over to Humble Bundle, Inc. The Humble Bundle guys are local friends of ours and they have gotten so good at processing sales with their bundles that they offered to handle our store transactions as well.

This means we now support non-Paypal transactions, which many of you have been asking for. You can now buy NS2 via Paypal, Amazon Payments and Google Checkout. You can also buy NS2 as a gift, which is something we've been wanting for a long time. Having these pros handle game keys and the billing support of our customer service will free up a nice chunk of Brian and my time, so we can focus more on the game.The store is still technically in beta, but so far it's working better than our system ever did. So we expect game keys to be sent out much more reliably from now on!

NS2 Build 201 Change Logs

This was going to be a much smaller version but turned out to be kind. Of. Big. We're cranking to get ready for our big public debut at PAX East in two weeks and we wanted to make sure everything is working great before then.

• All-new marine HUD.
• Added marine "Banner" notifications added for important events such as game start, power loss, and Hive death.
• New alien "banner" notifications to tell you game objective, research complete, evolutions lost, etc.
• Unchained alien lifeforms from hives. Now Fade and Onos are available at Hive 1. However, not all abilities will be available (ie, Blink only available with 2 hives, etc.)
• Lowered costs for many marine upgrades to help 'smooth out' tech tree and give more viable game choices.
• Added "emergency" egg spawning where aliens spawn much faster when many are dead (addresses alien "egg lock")

Fix

• Fixed hitches/poor performance caused by streaming ambient sounds from disk
• After dropping a med/ammo pack there will be now 0.75 seconds delay before you can select another unit with left click. this prevents accidentally selecting a Marine when dropping multiple medpacks (and would kick you out of the assist menu)
• Already evolved upgrades in the Alien buy menu appear in red in case the upgrade is inactive (for example all Carapace Shells are destroyed and you have the Carapace upgrade)
• Added camera tilt for death animation and first person blood effect.
• Removed crosshair text, instead you will see now a health circle.
• Fixed issue where label transitions in the animation graph would not be prioritized over explicit transitions if they had a longer blend time.
• Fixed bug where the reference pose for a model wasn't taken into account when generating the navigation mesh.
• Fixed a bug that caused players to get "pulled back" once they start to accelerate (related to spit slowing to 90%)
• Fixed bug where the collision geometry was incorrect for some static props.
• The Builder now uses the correct 3rd person model.
• Fixed a bug where carapace would not be granted automatically in case you had it before and re-build a carapace shell.
• Fixed bug where evolve costs were calculated wrong.
• Fixed bug where harvester build time is not affected by catalyst.
• Fixed bug with minimap not showing all units for spectators.
• Fixed a bug where bilebomb direct hits would not cause full damage.
• Fixed a bug where Lerk could continue firing Spikes even when at 0 energy.
• Fixed bug where spore cloud effects are sometimes not visible on the client.
• Fixed bug where ARC was doing twice as much damage as it should have (1800 instead of 900)
• Commanders see now the health percentage at the health bar instead of overall percentage (before it was health + armor combined, which caused confusion when dropping medpacks)
• Fixed bug where sometimes the animation graph would move away from the initial node too early after resetting the graph.
• Fixed bug where bitmap fonts were not properly centered vertically.
• Fixed bug where builder first person effect is not disappearing.

Balance

• Reduced Onos speed a bit and increased Stomp range to fit the visual effect.
• Reduced jetpack cost from 20 to 10.
• Changed mines to detonate other mines within 3 meters (was 4)
• Reduced mine arm time from 0.22 to 0.17 seconds.
• Reduced Rifle melee damage from 35 to 20.
• Removed Frenzy and Swarm (no longer fit anywhere, and make Fade too harsh)
• Increase cyst/mini cyst build time from 1 second to 4/6 seconds.
• Reduced Command Station cost to 15.
• Increased Command Station health from 2000 to 3000 health (so Marines don’t have to constantly respond to attacks or leave Marine in base always)
• Reduced Robotics Factory costs from 20 to 15.
• Added upgraded 'ARC Robotics Factory' (costs 10, upgrade time 40 seconds) which is required to produce ARCs.
• Reduced ARC cost from 20 to 10.
• Reduced prototype lab cost from 40 to 30.
• Reduced jetpack research cost from 35 to 25.
• Reduced advanced armory cost to 20.
• Adjusted Lerk bile bomb damage, energy cost, etc. so it doesn't take too long to bring down structures, but also so they aren't taken down instantly (thanks SabaHell and Sr Lance!)
• Reduced Fade Swipe damage from 70 to 65 (increases # of hits to kill an unarmored Marine from 1 to 2 and a Armor L2 Marine from 2 to 3)
• Decreased Catalyst time from 10 seconds to 5.
• Adjusting Fade shadow step to be more about tactics instead of a big combat advantage. Reduced duration from 0.08 to 0.45.
• Increased time in the dark after power is down from 10 seconds to 15 seconds.
• Changed sprinting back to b199 values.
• Added new Skulk jump sounds to give better feedback on successful timed wall jumps.
• Fixed Onos bug where you could build up momentum during camouflaged + walking.

ns2_tram

• Added resource node between Server Room and Warehouse.
• Completely reworked server room layout and detailing.
• Reworked layout of Marine Start and made some visual changes.
• Updated with new sound/reverb changes by Simon.

Sound

• Main menu music loops nicer now.
• Nicer Skulk wound and death sounds.
• Nicer resnode idle.
• Nicer sound for spikes hitting marines.
• Skulk jump speed feedback sounds.
• Main menu music loops nicer now.
• Nicer Skulk wound and death sounds.
• Nicer resnode idle.
• Nicer sound for spikes hitting marines.
• Skulk jump speed feedback sounds.

SDK

• The "displayannotations" command now toggles on and off, "true" and "false" are no required.
• The "displayannotations" command now accepts 2 optional parameters, version number and map name to override defaults.
• Added "kick" dedicated server console command, use "status" or "list_players" to find a steam ID and then type "kick 8231531" for example.
• The IP addresses in the status/list_players console command now prints in the standard "127.0.0.1" format.
• The "say" chat console command now works from the dedicated server.