Natural Selection 2 Update Released

[Dirty]

In the battle that is the shipping of a big patch, we do our best to achieve total victory. The bane of our development lives is the hotfix. Hotfixes are horrible. They suck up disproportionate amounts of development time, they are inefficient uses of development resources, and just generally suck.

 

But try as we might to avoid them, sometimes they are needed. Gorgeous needed one, and here it is! 241 is small and wont make big differences to the way you play. It will fix some hidden nasties that snuck out it the Server process, and some bugs causing consternation to people using babblers, wall jump, and fullscreen windowed mode.

 

At their release, Babblers were a little bit useless. This uselessness boiled down to the fact that they were too slow to keep up with their host Gorge, catch friendly players hit by the baitball, and close distance with marines. Now, they are much faster, and much more useful.

 

Winrates in Gorgeous have been exceptionally good. After 25,798 games (on Sunday), the probability of a marine win in a randomly sampled game was 0.507, our best result yet, and a big improvement on build 239′s ~0.41. However, some of this improvement came from a bug causing Skulks to lose momentum when they hit the ground. That is fixed in 241, so we expect the probability of marine wins to decrease back below 0.5 for now.

 

Servers will update over the next hour or so, so if you cant find games at the moment, sit tight. Here is the full changelog:

 

Improvement

 

Added super-sampling when generating reflection cube maps to improve quality.

 

Balance

 

Increased Babbler run speed from 5 to 7.

 

Fix

 

Fixed bug that prevented an Alien from evolving if they had Babblers attached to themselves.

Eliminated uninitialized data when sending packets with strings less than the maximum length (may cause problems with some firewall rules)

Fixed exploit which allowed Gorge tunnels to be build outside of the map.

Fixed bug which caused Skulks to lose all their momentum instantly when touching the ground.

Fixed bug where mines were ignoring damage falloff.

Fixed bug where Alien attacks got blocked by attached Babblers.

Fixed bug where fullscreen windowed mode forced vsync on.

Changed the maxfps console command to only allow values above 30 FPS to prevent exploitation

 

Optimization

 

Reduced overhead of isa method.

Improved server performance.

Reduced the cost of updating entities in the query manager.

 

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