Return to Eclipse in Natural Selection 2

Posted by 7 years ago

Something must be in the air at Unknown Worlds. Not only are we announcing new games, we’ve also started hitting deadlines! We promised you Eclipse at the end of 2013, and with 11 days to spare we are proud to announce that is has been released!

Eleven years ago, Eclipse was one of the original Natural Selection battlefields. Tight corridors, multiple Hive spawns, iconic rooms, Eclipse was one of the greatest maps ever made for the original Half-Life mod.

Now, we can all return to Eclipse. Painstakingly recreated, the map is faithful to the original while allowing for the evolution of Natural Selection 2 gameplay. By taking advantage of Spark’s modern rendering techniques and UWE’s art resources, the mapping team has been able to remake every corner of Eclipse in exquisite detail.

The team that built Eclipse was led by Jake ‘Jonacrab’ Smith. Under the artistic direction of Cory, Jake drew together work from mappers Oliver ‘Dux’ Hobbs, Michael ‘Olmy’ Schouten, Andrew ‘Insane’ Jones, Marc ‘Sgt Barlow’ Newton, and art from Sergey, Dmitry, Yuri and others from Fox3D.

Eclipse is included as part of Build 262, which was just released on Steam. Build 262 is free for all existing players of Natural Selection 2, and includes a bunch of other improvements to the game. Here is the full changelog:

Fixes

Fixed players sometimes being stuck in command station at round start

Fixed Infestation blobs blocking commander view

Server Browser now highlights player count yellow if the server is semi-full due to reserved slots.

Removed texture streaming option from main menu since it wasn’t doing anything

Fixed all structures being outlined blue when on overhead mode as spectator

Fixed projectiles colliding with invisible movement collision group

Fixed ECHO_HARVESTER tooltip missing when echoing an Harvester

Fixed accidental use of voice order keys while ESC menu is open

Fixed bug where marine buy menu did not close when player was Stomped

Fixed Stab not having a custom icon

Fixed round start music not playing due to incorrect path

Fixed WhipBomb showing killed with BileBomb in console

Fixed loading screens using the wrong art sometimes

Fixed commander bindings reverting to default if a player joins a server before opening the options menu

Features

Added new map: Eclipse

Added new main menu background

Added egg counter for Alien Commander in the top of the commander interface

Added Hive skill and level stats under name in main menu

Added support for new structures in ScenarioHandler. Added one other check path that works.

Added link to forums by clicking logo

Added remixed NS1/NS2 main menu theme

Balance

Ammo packs now refill all weapons instead of only the active one

Optimizations

Limit hit effect messages to 100 per second

Correctly limit max resources network field to 100 per player

Reduced network traffic generated by static structures

Implemented extra precaching to reduce incidence of hitching at the start of rounds

Optimized network traffic produced by Insight spectator system

Minor optimizations for skulk movement (optimized wall traces and removed predict wall walking)

Improvements

Insight spectator system now outlines players in overhead view by default

Replaced “request enzyme” with “request drifter” in the Alien ‘commo-rose’

Servers with cheats enabled no longer send data to the Hive stat tracking system

SDK

Revert auto-generation of overviews by Builder due to Overview.exe crashes

Fixed crash in editor related to file type properties

Allow mappers to define custom round start music in ns2_gamerules entity

Added console command playmusic. Usage: sound/NS2.fev/pathtosound

Refinery (Thanks SamusDroid)

Fixed pathing in Lava Falls

Fixed some textures and gaps

Fixed some stuck spots

Adjusted some death trigger scales

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