UPDATE 335 - HIVE SKILL 3.0 Released!

October is always an exciting time of year for our Natural Selection Development Team, and this year is no exception. 18 years ago a totally unique and amazing new mod for half-life hit the interwebs and for many us, changed our lives. Fast forward to today, and its sequel Natural Selection 2 is celebrating eight years since release. Our Team and dedicated community continue to get games active and going 24hrs a day around the world and today is our next step in supporting all of you into the future. Update 335 is the official release of Hive Skill 3.0 (see our previous blog detailing the changes), our latest update to the backend skill tracking and sorting system for NS2. Hive Skill 3.0 for the first time introduces per team skill tracking including commander roles too. Our hope is to help better sort teams for more even rounds and enjoyable gameplay, but we want to make sure you know that this wont happen instantly. The update to the backend code is being merged with current data and will take many new rounds to begin to fully flesh out its adjustments, but in general our new algorithm seems to be doing better from the start. And just to be clear, no existing skill data/rank is lost in the update. An absolutely huge thank you to CDT Member Moultano for all his math wizardry.

Under the hood we have some bug fixes and enhancements to various maps and cinematics to entice you with some fun new gameplay. You can read all about those and other changes with this update in the changelog below.

Happy Natural Selection Anniversary Week!

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

Changelog

Gameplay

• Maturity and Gestation (Alien egg evolving) both now have a slight softcap in regards to their rate of completion being sped up by Nutrient Mist and/or Gorge Healspray.

• Mines will now only show on the map for enemies if they have been damaged recently or are currently Parasited.

• The Fade has had some movement changes with the goal of making it more visually consistent and predictable.

  • Air friction has been increased (feels heavier) when achieving high speeds and not currently in Blink.

  • Blink now has a minimum speed of 13.5

  • Blink now has an initial speed (first Blink) of 15

  • Additional Blink speed gained from each Celerity upgrade chamber is now 0.2 from 0.5. (Total of three chambers = 0.6 from 3)

  • Auto-crouch feature was removed until a better solution can be found. We recommend holding that crouch key at all times like in the old days.

Tweaks / Improvements

• Your Hive Skill will now account for which team you play on or command.

• Added new Research Notifications for field players, to help keep track of researching tech. You might notice that Research Notifications show on the left side of the HUD for both teams and as a result your in use upgrades are shown on the right side for both teams. This feature can be disabled in the NS2+ option “Research Notifications”.

• We’ve made multiple changes to the Marine flashlight to make it more useful in poor lighting conditions. Most notably a larger cone size, a greater range, and being brighter. It also has had its atmospherics setting brought down to almost nothing, so you won’t have to worry about your teammates blinding you anymore! Lastly it has specular graphics enabled for the first time and the color profile has been tweaked