Xenoswarm released!
We're proud to announce the release of Xenoswarm, the latest mod from the team that brought you NS2 Combat!
Ten years after the events of Natural Selection 2, the Kharaa infestation has spread to the inner reaches of TSF space and many outposts have been lost entirely to the alien swarm. You're part of an elite squad of TSF marines who have been sent to single-handedly capture these outposts and create a 'beachhead' in the infested colonies. Fight through hordes of aliens and destroy the Hive to win!
In development since January, here are the features you can expect from the new game:
- Co-operative gameplay for 1-6 players (or more if you're really good!)
- Difficulty scaling with number of players
- New XP/Upgrade system
- 3 Player classes: Assault, Support and Scout:
- Wield heavy weapons as an Assault
- Build turrets and support your teammates as the Support
- Run like a bullet through hordes of enemies and fight with enhanced melee strikes as the Scout.
- New weapons: SMG, Laser Mines, Knife
- New Magno Boots ability lets you walk on walls!
- Choose your own colour!
- Instead of dying straight away, players become injured and can be revived by teammates.
- Maps available at launch: Descent by Mr.P, Mineshaft by Seraph, Minegate by TwoStroker
- Some maps have Narrative points as you progress
- Alien tunnels that spawn waves of enemies until they are destroyed
To run a server for this mod, see the Server guide here.
To join a server, just look for servers running the 'Xenoswarm' mod and join one. The game plays quite well in single-player but it's more fun with friends!
If you want to play it on your own, subscribe to this Collection and enable 'ExtraEntitiesMod', 'Xenoswarm', 'Xenoswarm Assets' and the map of your choice, then launch a single-player server as you would normally.
Mapping guides to follow soon!
We hope you enjoy the mod and if any mappers or coders would like to help us take it further please let us know!
Ten years after the events of Natural Selection 2, the Kharaa infestation has spread to the inner reaches of TSF space and many outposts have been lost entirely to the alien swarm. You're part of an elite squad of TSF marines who have been sent to single-handedly capture these outposts and create a 'beachhead' in the infested colonies. Fight through hordes of aliens and destroy the Hive to win!
In development since January, here are the features you can expect from the new game:
- Co-operative gameplay for 1-6 players (or more if you're really good!)
- Difficulty scaling with number of players
- New XP/Upgrade system
- 3 Player classes: Assault, Support and Scout:
- Wield heavy weapons as an Assault
- Build turrets and support your teammates as the Support
- Run like a bullet through hordes of enemies and fight with enhanced melee strikes as the Scout.
- New weapons: SMG, Laser Mines, Knife
- New Magno Boots ability lets you walk on walls!
- Choose your own colour!
- Instead of dying straight away, players become injured and can be revived by teammates.
- Maps available at launch: Descent by Mr.P, Mineshaft by Seraph, Minegate by TwoStroker
- Some maps have Narrative points as you progress
- Alien tunnels that spawn waves of enemies until they are destroyed
To run a server for this mod, see the Server guide here.
To join a server, just look for servers running the 'Xenoswarm' mod and join one. The game plays quite well in single-player but it's more fun with friends!
If you want to play it on your own, subscribe to this Collection and enable 'ExtraEntitiesMod', 'Xenoswarm', 'Xenoswarm Assets' and the map of your choice, then launch a single-player server as you would normally.
Mapping guides to follow soon!
We hope you enjoy the mod and if any mappers or coders would like to help us take it further please let us know!
Comments
- WorthyRival has been working on a 'Maze' map with random spawns and multiple avenues. Hopefully this will be available soon post-launch.
- 'Defense mode' maps, where you defend a specific point (in theory these work, we just need a mapper to try making one).
- 'Escape' mode maps, where you have a time limit to reach a safe point
- Laser sight upgrade
- Different types of Sentry guns
- Sword for the Scout class
- Railgun for the Scout class
- Play a form of Combat 2.0 on regular Combat maps
server ip: 62.65.106.53:27040
- Jetpacks are OP. I'm sure the infinite fuel is a bug but the speed and agility of it is insane for this mod.
- Onos is a resource pinata. Normally it's the last thing I'd want to see but i get money signs in my eyes when i see them.
- Too much sustain from the AI commander. Need more reason to build armories.
- The cost of everything is too cheap or the resource gain is too high. Or both. The gameplay feels cheapened having a jetpack, new weapon and upgrades 2 minutes into the game.
- Lerks don't fly far from the ground
- Marines run too fast imo. Let scouts run at this rate but nerfing the speed for the other two classes perhaps?
- Overall i feel the pace is too fast/games end too quickly
Server favorited and i look forward to the updates.
There's an AI commander now dropping health?
You should get UW to do a blog post about this on Friday so you get lots of people trying it over the weekend,
Sorry you're experiencing crashes. It's possible you've stumbled on something we missed in our playtests. I'll take a look and if we can, I'll try and fix it in the next build.
@DJPenguin thanks for the feedback! There's a minimum level option we can add to the jetpack/Magno boots, and we also can make them more expensive to help with the imbalance. Generally we have leaned towards fun over difficulty but we'll get some chances to tweak the balance once we have more data. Mappers can also tweak the difficulty of individual spawn points, to make e.g. A double-health phantom Onos
EDIT: Infinite jetpack fuel is a confirmed bug... It's tricky to fix because the Magno boots share the same fuel gauge. We'll try and do it though!
Anyways, cheers for now, lookin forward to the fine-tuning.
Enjoy.
Seems much more stable
Many NPC spawners changed to NPC tunnels
new shipping location added
@MCMLXXXIV Still getting that NPC tunnel spawn issues that after a number of NPCs are spawned the tunnels stop spawning NPC's even though the tunnels have 99 waves
@WorthyRival thanks for letting me know. I'll try and investigate and fix this week. It's possible that you're hitting the hard cap for active NPCs? We limit it to 30 active NPCs to stop servers from crashing, with the rest being added to a queue. I'll update the code so you get some console output when this happens. On our testbed map, we found that triggering tunnel spawns based on a large trigger box entity is a good way to trigger based on proximity to the players (maybe we need a new spawn mode that keeps a cooldown for each individual player to allow scaling by number of players).
@Jekt: thanks for the log file! Looking into it, there are some errors affecting high-level players in there that we missed in our final run of testing and it's likely that they are the cause of the instability you're seeing. I've made some bug and balance fixes which we'll playtest and hopefully release next week.
Gorge spit is still bugged.
When you kill a tunnel it says that someone killed 'skulk' - make it 'tunnel' or just not show up like the rest
Gorge tunnel does not work with lerk spawn.
In mineshaft, most of my onos spawns are not working either and I have no idea why. I made a couple other minor fixes in mineshaft today.
@JimWest I'm also having an issue with the logic_event_listener, I'm trying to use a pair to give a dialogue at the end saying 'you won' or 'you lost'. But when marines just won it gave the lose dialogue - I double checked and mineshaft has them set up properly in MS.
Edit: also - you adding the timer?
This mod seems so good, that I might start playing NS2 again just for this mod!
if there are more its a bug.
Will test the entities seems like some are broken.
will upload it later ^^
Will you be focusing a bit more on combat again?
I know a lot would love to be able to spend some of their points on buildings like we see in xenoswarm, until then combat will feel a bit unfinished i think, buildmenu and xmenu were quite popular in ns1, so it would be a shame if we never see them again!
I tried to play last night, but was having trouble joining into a server. I picked a server and tried to join, waited and then failed to join. A message appeared saying the version was out of date. Not sure what this means as I can play regular NS2 without any trouble. Is there any way I can help to get you a copy of this error code?
I did not change anything in my settings or in the mid section. I just clicked on a server and tried to join. Hopefully this might help...
Sorry, not the best when it comes down to doing tech work with computers.
if I spawn 30 onos you wouldnt say that (onos do now stun ^^).
Also skulks will use leap + xeno in the next version.
Yes, this will make it more interesting.
I've done a difficulty pass on Mineshaft, should be just a tad harder now. The only issue I've found is last run the last 2 triggers didn't work, and I have no idea why, map is fine.
- The gorge balls (e.g. >10 gorges) can be especially devastating with their near accurate spit. I'd suggest an additional limit of specific classes as one time in addition to the overall NPC limit (e.g. no more than say 10 gorges/lerks, 5 fades/onos at one time)
- I'd also love to see more diversity in the classes that spawn, such that you get a mix each time (e.g. something like first spawn = 100% skulk, 2nd = 75% skulk, 25% gorge, 3rd = 50% skulk, 30% gorge, 20% skulk, etc)
- The aliens are pretty easy to fight because they largely don't use the aliens movement advantages. Its not difficult to clear out a wave of ground skulks, lerks that fly in a straight line, or walking fades. I'd love to see the difficulty increased by making the alien NPCs more clever in their use of movement rather than just increasing their numbers.
- Made the npc base difficulty harder
- Made the players' resupply rate slower
- Made the jetpack and magnoboots tied to the player's level (it's not obvious from the GUI yet, but magno boots are now available at level 8, jetpack at level 12).
- EEM timer countdown gui (for maps that use it) now visible in the GUI.
- Lots of bug fixes for weird situations that we missed in testing
- Fixed a bug with sentries when their owner disconnected from the server
- Finally uploaded the knife model!
We've tried to fix as many of the stability issues as possible. If your server still crashes please can you send the zipped up logs to xenoswarm2013@gmail.com and we'll go over them with a fine-tooth comb to fix the cause of the bugs :]
Thanks to all the server operators sending logs, we've also been able to plug away at some strange edge cases that were taking down servers (Fades deciding that their 'best target' was a flamethrower flame, for example!). I also made a few performance improvements today.
Changelog:
- Fixed some instability issues with Xenoswarm itself.
- Fixed client-side updating of the upgrades that you've bought.
- Added more diagnostics to the server log to allow us to debug map-specific problems.
- Also fixed some obscure errors in the ExtraEntitiesMod npc code that were causing instability (hopefully these will be published by JimWest over the weekend).
- Improved general performance when lots of NPCs are active.
We had Fun with waves and waves of lerks lol