Update 295 Released! - Natural Selection 2
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Update 295 Released! - Natural Selection 2
Keeping in tune with our weekly releases is key to our continued work on NS2. What’s great about this schedule is that we can make tweaks and improvements across all...
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Other than that minor oddity this looks like a great patch. I especially like the nickname change as now the ™ at the end of my name shows.
Does "shaking up ns2 gameplay" mean you'll also finally, finally, finally take a look at webs and their unlock requirements?
Also do you intend to look at gore damage at all? (curious)
I'll start my argument with a quite from an older post of mine that kinda predicted this issue:
Performance has been getting worse patch after patch and lowering move rate to compensate is just a lazy way out. I think the bigger question is why has server performance fallen so much that this change was required?
With < 5 weeks left of our Phase 2, we do not have time to work on deep network changes or fixes. It's not lazy. It's being efficient. This change is simply the best choice with the time we have left, and should not significantly change pub-play, but improve server performance (and in turn, client performance).
And in mid game/late game it was down to 40%.. Is that normal? NOPE!
So yeah.. right now it's the easy workaround, and i hope they are actually looking into the actual problem. And dont overlook and forget about this whole moverate. Is the HoTs of medpack hitting the server this hard? Investigate it!
The similar issue is happening on every map ... but in it's origin (position vector 0x0x0)..
The video shows very old bug never fixed, but floating pistols and pistol's shells are very common these days .. looks like they are not shifted to origin of map just left where freeze.
I feel like it's important to note that the way the move timing is calculated has been changed with build 279.
You can see the impact of that change in this google sheet (make a copy to edit it). With that change in mind you will clearly understand that a move rate of 30 is not the same pre-279 and post-279.
And that actually a value of 26 now still is better overall than the pre-279 30.
Toggle in options please?
I love kicking corpses of gorges and oni.
Greatly appreciated. However, there has been some error when generation those translation files. Czech is 99% translated according to translate.naturalselection2.com, but csCS.txt file is half untranslated (to be exact, 977 strings out of 1726 are original English version instead of Czech). Even worse, the content seems to be very old, those translations look like something predating the time 2-3 weeks ago when I started working on it. But at translate.naturalselection2.com I see my recent translations. Even weirder is that csCS.txt has 1726 lines, but enUS.txt has 1541 lines. How on earth is that possible? Something is messed up. Can you please have a look at it? (I forced game files verification in Steam to make sure I have the latest unmodified files, no change).
I was planning to email some Czech gaming news sites saying that NS2 has now full czech support (translations and character rendering), but with the current state I can't. Thanks.
@navazka You should really join our discord server, we have an private channel just for the ppl actively translating where informations like the following one have been shared in the past. To make it short the download buttons do not work anymore. A up to date zip with all translation txt files can be fetched via http://translate.naturalselection2.com/api/buildLangFiles/1/ .
Also, not sure if intended, but the new item popup is still giving me a steam notification. Is the change for the NS2 main menu only?
That's a steam thing - steam gives you a notification every time something gets added to your inventory.
What are you talking about?
Am I insane? I can't see the difference...
No clue about other resolutions but at 1080p, it just looks horrible, the menu and options looks huge and just so akward
Honestly it's such a small difference that i wasn't even really sure if anything had changed at all. (besides the font of course)
It wasn't until someone else started complaining about the graphics looking weird since the update, that's when I knew it wasn't just me.
I only mentioned it out of curiosity in the off chance someone from the PDT has an explanation.. It's no biggie
To expand on this... The way moverate was calculated changed in build 279. You can see this in the spreadsheet ghoul linked. To keep the original moverate, it should have been lowered to 26 at that time. Since it wasn't, it was equivalent to raising the moverate (pre-279) from 30 to 40. This is why a lot of servers had a lot more performance issues after that patch.
Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. Mats thought he could get away with "raising" the MR like that due to the other performance improvements that he had done leading up to and including 279. But now, since there have been ongoing complaints about server performance issues (especially in these last two patches where nothing at all changed in that regard), we've decided to try this.
The problem, as you pointed out, is that it sounds like we are making servers worse, even though we are actually just restoring the old status quo.
Hope this explanation clears this up a bit for you, @Grissi
Thanks for your feedback. Sorry to say, but we aren't going to be introducing toggles for every change we make. I would suggest playing with it a bit more and see if your opinion changes or if you get used to it. I'd be interested to hear what you think after having given it a shot.
The intent of the ragdoll change is to make it so players can more easily tell when an enemy has been killed and is no longer a threat. The ragdolls often looked very buggy/wrong (onos rolling around a hallway, command chairs being pushed around), and blocked players from seeing the other immediate threats. By making it dissolve immediately it should help keep your attention on the action and help new players waste less bullets. It is the same effect that was used before, just triggered sooner.
If feedback shows it's disappearing too quickly, we can adjust the equation further. The equation we're using is shown here: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/xdugiqqvb8
The blue line is the new equation, the orange line is the old equation. The black line is showing how we could adjust it to make it dissolve far slower, if that is the consensus of the feedback we receive.
(The orange line actually should start at x=6 rather than x=0 to be a more accurate representation of the old dissolve.)
Correct, only for the main menu. We don't have any control over the steam popups.
Still not mentioned are the many Interpolations warnings and fails that came with build 279 and can be monitored with perfmon. They occur every now and then even the server has idle value of 50% or more. ( I have not checked them since b294, maybe they got fixed, correct me when I am wrong).
Another example is that no server now can hold 1500 entities or more with a default tickrate. Before b279 came out, my servers had tickdrops when reaching 2500 entities, now this happens with 1000 entities less.
A good way to see the performance actually is when all players will be moved after a game to the readyroom. With 42 players the idle drops to 10-20%, before b279 it was at about 40-50%.
Ragdolls are a great part of NS2, why the hell would you get rid of them? In every single game, ragdolls are present. They are there to show realism and act as a sort of trophy for the marine who kills five skulks in the room. Removing this feature is doing a major disservice to the NS2 community as a whole, veterans and greenies alike. The way lifeforms and structures just dissolve in thin air looks unnatural and makes absolutely no sense. Ragdolls need to come back in the next patch, no if's, and's, or but's.
My favorite thing to do as a marine comm is to redrop a res node when the ragdoll pieces are still in place, flinging the pieces across the room. This is no longer possible.
Onos deaths are not as fun. When you kill an onos you WANT to see it's dead body roll around on the floor. The way a skulk's lifeless body continues to fly is absolutely rewarding. Watching a fade's arms fold and body crumple fills me determination to kill the next one.
We already know when a lifeform dies, it's when I see the green +# in the middle of my god damn screen. It's not hard to understand what that means.
Seriously, get your shit together UWE. If you don't revert this, at least add a toggle for ragdolls.
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oh and one more thing, CHANGE THE FONT BACK.
Hi, you don't represent everyone. Thanks.
I feel the same as him. What about IMMERSION mentioned few build earlier?
If anything, I always wanted for ragdolls to stay for a little longer. They are pretty cool in NS. In most games, ragdolls inherit too much velocity from bullets and fall unrealistically, but in NS skulks/lerks/fades just continued to move in the same direction, just in a 'relaxed' state. Looked so cool and NATURAL.