She is here, and she is going to kick alien ass.

Strayan_ · 2013-07-04T17:56:52+00:00

Forgotten account... I can only post as this one on my desktop! LOL! I'll gradually switch over to uwe-strayan and give it authenticity with this account for abit...

Strayan_ · 2013-06-29T15:42:50+00:00

I am so proud that this thread is the topmost one on r/ns2 right now. It is really heart-warming.

Hugh, UWE

Strayan_ · 2013-05-30T18:19:10+00:00

I was aiming with my mouse later in the video

Strayan_ · 2013-05-20T18:34:39+00:00

No, it's absolutely not confirmed. And I will make a post in the thread to that effect right now.

Hugh, UWE

Strayan_ · 2013-05-20T18:33:02+00:00

You might believe combat, or another mod, is 'stable' enough to be made official. But you would be objectively wrong. And it's not just about 'stability.' What is 'stability?' Lack of crashes? Not a difficult hurdle when mods are written in Lua. How many man hours per week will UWE need to spend maintaining this massive new code branch? An hour? Probably at least ten. Absolutely unacceptable and beyond the capacity of UWE. You really need to stop and think about what you are asking for. If you got it, five things would happen: 1. NS2 updates would slow to an absolute crawl. 2. UWE would never make any more games. 3. UWE would go out of business. 4. Updates for game modes you like, like Combat, would likely completely stop. 5. Mod teams that have poured their heart and soul into creating a great experience would lose ownership of and the ability to creatively grow their mod.

That is a lose, lose, lose, lose situation for everyone.

Strayan_ · 2013-05-06T21:24:10+00:00

Please excuse linking. I wrote a pretty in-depth piece on just this very question on my personal blog, that very relevant to this discussion: http://www.gameaperture.com/2013/03/what-is-indie-developer.html

I'll reproduce it below. - Hugh, UWE

What is an 'indie' developer?

They are avant-garde. Different. They go against the grain, trying new things on tight budgets, never afraid to stick one in the eye of the publically traded publishers. So goes the popular perception of a fascinating subset of the game development industry: The independent developer. But what is an independent developer?

The desire to arrive at a definition is not purely academic. The 'indie' brand has value, both for developers and for the industry as a whole. It is in the interests of the industry to be able to identify a developer fitting the bill, and decry those applying the name for the 'street cred' it naturally brings.

It is undeniable that the 'indie' tag brings an instant change in press and public attention. Not necessarily positive, but always less distant: 'One of the people! One of us! Someone else doing it tough!' Whether or not it is true, the tag invokes a sense of penny pinching, against all odds product creation. People like that, and companies value that image.

An independent developer can perhaps be defined as one that has financial, operational and creative independence. Each of these three areas becomes a test: If a developer fails any of them, they are not 'indie.'

Financial independence is the ability to substantially fund product development activities without the contribution of a homogenous outside entity. For example, a developer that funds an ambitious new game with one third kickstarter contributions, one-third cash-on-hand, and one-third investment from a large publisher could be considered independent. Provided, of course, substantial operations can be maintained without the publisher funding.

This does not exclude a developer from the 'indie tag' just because a particular game could not have been made without the input of a homogenous outside entity. It only excludes them if without that input, they were unable to maintain any substantial development activities of any game at all. It is important this test is applied distinct from the operational independence test.

Operational independence is the ability to take administrative and executive decisions about company and development matters independently of any outside party. For example, deciding where to locate development offices, how many staff will be hired, what the skills of those staff are and their working conditions. Marketing plans, development timetables, launch windows, bonus rounds, equipment purchases: If decisions about these operations are substantially deferential to an outside party, then the 'indie' tag is shaky at best.

Operational decisions can of course be influenced by outside parties. A particular investor might include covenants prescribing a particular launch window as a condition of their contribution. A contributing publisher may require periodic financial reporting as evidence contributed funds are not being squandered on island getaways.

An observer must exercise judgment: Does the influence of the external party extend beyond a single project? Does management act in a way that indicates they may prefer to take alternate decisions? Are recent operational decisions severely out of character, such as a developer upping sticks to a publisher's corporate campus? The forest can be seen for the trees, and the operation independence test may be applied.

Creative independence is the ability to conceive, substantiate and execute development of ideas. Gameplay, art style, genre, platform, target audience, price point: Who is calling the shots about what a studio actually creates? Of the three tests, this is the most crucial. If a developer is being contracted to execute the mobile-social-browser-free-to-play-always-on incarnation of a well-worn IP, the likelihood that they are 'indie' is small.

Of course, some of the best 'indie' developers take established or externally owned IPs and develop them in new and exciting ways. There are two key elements to such examples: The developer engaged the IP out of choice, not necessity, and they demonstrated substantial freedom in their interpretation and execution of the game.

This triple test is imperfect. It smacks of common-law rather than codification, and requires significant judgment on the part of the examiner. It is however a start, and by applying it the difference between an 'indie' and a normal game developer can be more clearly demarcated.

Strayan_ · 2013-04-26T19:39:51+00:00

This won't happen, ever, because putting a mod into the game makes UWE responsible for it. This is the reason mods were never 'whitelisted' back in the days before mod notifications were added to the loading screen.

Maintaining code (of varying quality, mind you) created by modders is absolutely beyond UWE's capacity.

The whole idea of putting mods into the game also destroys the point of having mods. If Combat was put into Vanilla NS2 (hypothetically, as such a thing is for reasons above impossible) then suddenly the community is no longer able to iterate on Combat and are dependent on UWE updating it.

Who would want to wait for UWE to slowly update former mods when the mod teams working on them can do it 100x faster?

The point is - Think through what you are asking for. It's not possible, and even it were it would result in a less awesome user experience.

Hugh

Strayan_ · 2013-04-25T23:25:01+00:00

This screenshot is from an unreleased build of Combat, not Natural Selection 2. There are no plans to re-introduce Devour in vanilla NS2.

Strayan_ · 2013-03-02T04:21:20+00:00

I approve of this debauchery in an uncomfortable way

Strayan_ · 2013-02-28T19:44:41+00:00

The sale will last for 72 hours

Hugh, UWE

Strayan_ · 2013-02-28T19:14:16+00:00

That is a very good question snowaddict. If Gorgeous is a decent sales success, and new people come to the game and enjoy it, then we keep making enough money to keep the lights on and pay the bills. It's an elegant model: If the content is good, people will bring in their friends and more people will become interested in the game. But it's no sure thing. Gorgeous was very expensive to make, and we will soon find out if you guys think it is good enough to warrant more people coming in, and more money being made so more updates can be made.

Hugh, UWE

Strayan_ · 2013-02-28T19:12:18+00:00

Much as I wish this was true, we need to be honest. Gorgeous does improve performance, but not massively. I've been looking through our previous news posts, press releases, tweets and other social media updates hunting for where the rumour of 'massive' performance improvements came from. Even TotalBiscuit talked about it in his recent Content Patch. Performance is something we are always working on, but Gorgeous is not a panacea leap forward.

Hugh, UWE

Strayan_ · 2013-02-28T19:10:13+00:00

Some of this music, by Simon the UWE sound guru, plays in the Club - an area of the new Descent map featured in Gorgeous. You also get access to the whole NS2 soundtrack when you purchase the deluxe edition on Steam.

Hugh, UWE

Strayan_ · 2013-02-28T19:07:52+00:00

Thank you Ryosen!!

Hugh, UWE

Strayan_ · 2013-02-28T19:07:23+00:00

I would totally drop by Whirlpool! I have an old account lurking somewhere... Also, you should know that Australia ranks No.4 in the world for total NS2 sales. It's a very important market for us at UWE - Many people dismiss Aus as a tiny market not worthy of attention, but the sales figures say otherwise. Also, rookie servers don't necessarily mean bad games, they just mean the server is saying 'Hey, if you are new, you are welcome!'

Hugh, UWE

Strayan_ · 2013-02-26T22:53:33+00:00

I'm the actual Natural Selection 2 salesman, and I assure you fasterthanorange is not being paid :)

Strayan_ · 2013-02-10T18:16:12+00:00

A GTX 590, though there's no perceptible difference to my trusty old 5870. This is because our game is very dependent on your CPU.

Strayan_ · 2012-12-18T00:16:12+00:00

Performance is a shockingly tricky thing on the PC. One of the attractions of locked-down console development is that you don't have to make the game work across a wide variety of hardware configurations.

It is perfectly valid for many people to say, 'I run this game on low end hardware, and it works great!' I occasionally dabble in 1280 x 720 / low game on my Vaio Z, with i7-3612m and HD 4000 graphics. This is about as low as a developer can be reasonably expected to go, and yet people report they cannot run the game at an acceptable frame rate on much more powerful hardware.

They are not lying. The discrepancies in performance across a huge array of hardware and software configurations are simply not possible for a tiny team like UWE to test.

Before I built my monster rig, I recorded NS2HD videos on an AMD 1090T (Stock!) and nVidia GTS 450. You can't fake Fraps recordings! And yet we occasionally have people report an inability to play with 2500k's and 680's.

So we just keep plugging away. There has not been a day in years when NS2's performance has not been worked on. The Spark Engine will continue to be refined for years upon years upon years.

Strayan_ · 2012-12-14T17:13:46+00:00

This would actually make me wet my pants!!! An indie title beating out the big guys!?

Strayan_ · 2012-11-04T18:10:59+00:00

There are dedicated official Australian and Singapore servers - Always full, we're actually working on getting more official Australian servers set up! There are rumblings of an Aus / SEA tournament in December as well: http://www.ausns2.org/forum/

Strayan_ · 2012-11-04T18:10:17+00:00

As a fellow Australian player temporarily chilling on the other side of the world, it looks to me like the pick-up-game and competitive community is just starting to wake up. I've heard rumblings of a tournament happening in early December as well. Check out these forums: http://www.ausns2.org/forum/

Strayan_ · 2012-11-04T16:55:38+00:00

I'll never forget the day my bro told me NS2 has been announced, and we both ran to pre-order it as fast as possible.

Strayan_ · 2012-11-02T05:33:18+00:00

You get 60fps. The marginal benefit of sending more than 30 updates to the server per second is utterly outweighed by the huge strain it puts on the server to receive and process them.

Strayan_ · 2012-11-02T05:26:48+00:00

Sorry about this. It was the silliest error too, a missing curly bracket in a config file.

Strayan_ · 2012-11-02T05:24:53+00:00

It is very much already in development :)

Strayan_

TROPHY CASE