Natural Selection 2 Released

[Duke Nukem]

totally love this game

[Shr3d]

Absolutely craps all over the current games available.

[Epifire]

Absolutely craps all over the current games available.

Ranks in my top favorites of this year, (that now resting at NS2 and Dishonored). I hear this game barely made it out the door due to low funding... what a loss that would have been had the devs not came through on it. Truly a masterpiece, and it also ships with a very clean and orderly modkit.

[source-maps]

anyone having any problems connecting to servers from time to time.. it's really annoying

[Sathor]

I am quite impressed by the game. I am always looking for games which are not charged the full 45 to 50 Euros most big companies will charge, so with ~ 23 Euros, NS 2 was a welcome addition to my games library.

With a good commander, the teams can do work very well together. In BF3 you CAN have great teamwork moments, but in NS2 those moments seem to be more consistent. Many people are really willing to work together, on both sides. In my very short experience so far, I have run around with Marines, with one guy in an Exo-Suit and 3 guys running along with him, trying their best to cover each other. On the alien side, I have played with random people and started some cool ambushs on the marines.

I think the learning curve with the aliens is a bit more steep. It is harder to figure out how to play with the aliens, since they are not so obvious to learn like the Marines - nothing complicated about grabbing a gun and pointing your crosshair at something.

The good thing is, a Marine is more likely to panic a bit. I always feel a bit scared as a Marine, especially when I know that the aliens already have those really big things ... (Onos?).

The game performance well on my PC, and so far, I didn't encounter any connection problems.

I heard there is a Level Editor, too. I am quite interested, but I could not find any way to download it? Is it still exclusive for pre-order people?

[Epifire]

I think the learning curve with the aliens is a bit more steep. It is harder to figure out how to play with the aliens, since they are not so obvious to learn like the Marines - nothing complicated about grabbing a gun and pointing your crosshair at something.

I thought the opposite since Marines are so dependent on the foot soldiers to do the building when a commander places something. Also Aliens get the Onos and Fades, so those are two pretty over powered units over the Frontiersman units.

The good thing is, a Marine is more likely to panic a bit. I always feel a bit scared as a Marine, especially when I know that the aliens already have those really big things ... (Onos?).

Well running over railings and hopping into vents is a great way to avoid the Onos. Also one really funny thing is chasing a skulk into a vent, because skulks have no way to hide from you then and they get owned in tight spaces. Also placing mines in vent shafts successfully cuts them off as valid Alien routes.

I heard there is a Level Editor, too. I am quite interested, but I could not find any way to download it? Is it still exclusive for pre-order people?

Yeah the full developer kit that they use is in the NS2 directory. Just go to steam/steamapps/common/Natural Selection 2/LaunchPad. Thar be it all and it is ready to use, and quite neat it is. I already briefly skimmed over it but the launcher acts as a quick launch root for all the other development programs in NS2.

Would be fun to play some time, so feel free to add me in Steam if you like. I am often playing it a lot since NS2 is one of my top favorite games of this year, so I am always looking for more good players.

[nub]

Why does this game run like shit? No matter what settings I put it at, it just hitches constantly and makes it literally unplayable. I know for a fact my rig isn't that shitty.

[Epifire]

Why does this game run like shit? No matter what settings I put it at, it just hitches constantly and makes it literally unplayable. I know for a fact my rig isn't that shitty.

Dunno, it might have something to do with it's dynamic loading system vs your hardware. Everything runs in that game like real time. Literally. As I hear maps in it are not pre-compiled so it is resource heavy. What is your hardware though?

[Shr3d]

Runs fine on my system, but my system is what I'd still consider pretty high end in general.
GTX 570, i7 2600k, 8gb ram, Win 7 on SSD and steam on HDD.

[nub]

I jumped the gun and bought the game before looking at the official minimum specs; like an idiot. My system is very outdated, but it still manages to run a lot of modern games decently. I can run Crysis 2 better than this game. Granted it's an entirely different engine (with an entirely different budget), but good lord this game is unoptimized. Most high end systems will probably just brute force through it, but older systems like mine struggle a lot.

it turns out I lack the VRAM and the CPU ghz for this game. I have enough RAM, but it's DDR2 so I don't know how much that's going to affect things. I need to get a new PC pretty badly.

But it seriously shouldn't be this hard to run, given the visuals. It's a good looking game no doubt, but I still think they need to do some serious optimizing. I managed to get it to run ok, but I have to put everything on the lowest possible setting, including my resolution. Even then I can get some FPS drops. But the hitching has mostly gone away at least. I just wish it ran smoother...

The other issue I was having was insane network lag, but it was probably because of my internet. I think either the modem, router, or an ethernet cable is going bad. I have to frequently reset it to keep my internet going at full speed. Otherwise it starts crapping out and slowing down.


Anyway, specs:

Nvidia Geforce GTS 250 512mb

Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13ghz

3gb DDR3 RAM

Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit

[Epifire]

Yeah dude like I said NS2 runs everything in real time. I mean it's beautiful and accurate rendering but the performance cost can be insane. It is definitely a PC game, as consoles would choke trying to run it.

I am running off of...

-8GBs DDR3
-GTX 580
-Quad Core 3.40GHz i7

It generally runs fine for me, I do have a few things turned down though just so I could get some more manageable frames. I am sure getting your card updated would help for the ingame lag, while I am pretty sure the latter DDR series will just make things load faster.

[source-maps]

everything on max, runs ffing smooth for me
got an AMD oct core 3.6 GHz, and an ATI from the 6900 series

also, the server problem I was asking about a few post back.. if anyone has it.. try connecting via this website
http://hypernovadesign.co.uk/nanogrid/

[Blink]

Found this article explaining the performance with LUA - http://www.ns2hd.com/2012/04/performanc ... where.html

I've had to knock off a couple of settings (mainly AA) but I would certainly expect better performance than I already get. I remember all through the Alpha and Beta it was average in frame rate, but it is a bit better now for the released version but not perfect.

Doesn't stop me enjoying how awesome this game is though.

[nub]

Thanks for the article, Blink.

So it seems this game is rather CPU heavy due to LUA. That's probably the main reason why I'm having so much trouble running it smoothly.