UPDATE 332 Released!

While it’s been a while since the B.M.A.C. production came online through the Trans-Gov Federation, we’ve been in the background quietly tinkering away on deep system improvements within the mainframe while aboard this station. We recognize the Kharaa threat is an ever present and increasing one, and because of that the Federation wants you to know that your well being is important to them.

As such we’ve made things go faster. We’ve oiled up some rusty parts. And we’ve reprogrammed the nanites to not be so painful upon injection. We think we’ve made good progress and are excited to show you some of our work by getting it into your hands for assessment double time. Just be sure you don’t forget to fill out the p3.1415 forms in the Discord server to let us know how satisfactory your experience was.

Contained within TSF-Software-Patch.332 is a host of improvements to both performance and stability, as well as some new customization options for the Elite B.M.A.C. package, and entirely rewritten AI behavior. There’s also balance changes and visual changes. The list is long but fear not, if you do not read the entirety of the log the fine is only 500,000 credits per section 10.2009 of the Articles of Citizenship.

We still have some exciting and very large features to add in the next software update that will arrive soon, such as matchmaking and a new city to defend, Metro. But these tasks are so large that the Federation has brought another member aboard our team to help: Salads. Please welcome him with the traditional and formal greeting per regulations. He’ll be in the back of the station, behind the terminals that say High Voltage.

Remember all sales of NS2 and DLC directly affect our development budget and allow our team to continue work on NS2.

This is Command Station Alpha, over and out.

Changelog

Gameplay

The long list of balance and gameplay changes can be found here in a separate blog

Optimizations

• Removed one frame of mouse input delay that was always present in the game! You felt it, we felt it, it was only a matter of finding and destroying it after all these years of looking. Here is an example in 30 fps of the degree of impact this had on aiming before it was fixed, where the green ball represents the amount of the delay that was present compared to the pink crosshair.

• Optimized worker thread load to prevent blocking other threads from running (which could cause a timeout during connection and other issues)

• New and faster file hash algorithm for consistency checking. This provides faster consistency checking and therefore slightly reduced loading times.

• Reduced frame time maximums by preventing the steam friends list from updating every 15 seconds regardless of whether it was visible or not.

• Resolved performance issues and conflicts from build 331 in relation to SDL changes that affected some clients (Thanks Terence!)

• Optimized frame times by preventing weapon displays from rendering every frame, even for weapons you are not carrying.

• Drastically improved the average frame time of Spectator health bar update routine

• Greatly optimized the Mini-map update routine. The run time was rather long at 50+% of the total world update time and thrashed the Garbage Collector. It has been entirely refactored to be more efficient and JIT’d.

• Refactored scoreboard to use the new map container which makes things more efficient

• Optimized the Garbage Collection. Made sure the Lua GC doesn’t run during world update routine,