Natural Selection II to cost money

[o_groovyf]

Hello there folks!

This marks a special transition time for the NS team and I wanted to make sure you guys knew what was going on.

First of all, NS v3.1 is progressing nicely. This release will contain some balance improvements, some usability tweaks and our long-awaited Big Unannounced System. We are on the verge of announcing the details of this "B.U.S." and expect to post details on naturalselection.com within shortly. We're really excited about this release and hope you guys will be too.

Secondly, is NS for Source (Half-life II). We're getting tons of e-mail about if we're planning on updating NS for this great new engine. The short answer is yes, we're planning on doing this and excited to see how we can take advantage of the improved graphics and physics. However, this is a huge amount of work, and will probably mean we have to redo all of our artwork and level textures. We are planning on doing this, but it's going to take some time and we haven't decided if we're going to save it all up for one big release or if we're going to do it a piece at a time and release it in smaller patches.

Finally, there's Natural Selection II. NSII will be a full AAA retail game, it won't be a mod. On one hand it's too bad it will cost money, but on the other, it means we can make a MUCH better game then Natural Selection. We're now actively looking for a private investor or two to help us build a demo we can shop around to publishers. If any of you have any rich uncles or friends that love games and want to be involved with something very cool in the San Francisco area, please point them here and have them contact us for a business plan. We are looking for serious investors only ($50,000 U.S. minimum). We could really use your help here!

If you'd like to give feedback or ask any questions about anything in this mail, please do so here.

That's all for now. We hope you're as excited about the future of NS as we are...we're just getting started.

-Charlie "Flayra" Cleveland and the whole NS team

From a post on another forum.
I wonder if NSII will actually get anywhere. Not that I care as I don't play NS

[o_qbaler]

ya who knows if it will ever get off the ground.

NS is a great mod and team. I havent played in a while but it was fun when i did.

In addition to making NSII they are also working on plans for a port over to source, which should be prety damn sweet. NS had to hack a lot of code in order to get there stuff working, this is the cause of the huge amount of bugs theyve had. The source engine will offer them possibilities they only dreamed of.

gl ns!

[o_binarylife]

I skimmed over before reading, and for some reason thought that it said the game will cost 50,000 dollars.

I promptly read the entire thing.
I'm sure they can make a mod worth the money they'd charge.... but all this mod charging thing is slowly becoming aggrivating. Originaly, you could download any game you wanted and just add it on, or just download it. now you've got to throw out 50$ for every new idea someone comes up with?

[Lost]

With the complexity and the quality of the original, I can only imagine how well their second try would be, especially if they got enough funding to make it as good as they possible can.

If they make a stand alone game, then they can develop their own bots for single player games, perhaps add Starcraft style IRC channel and game selection. I don't think it would be prudent to create more than 2 teams, i.e. additional marines attacking a Kharaa base, but that would be another option. Of course, you can imagine the horse of a server a 32 man game would require. I think that Soldat had a 128 player limit, the largest I've ever seen. That would be a massive game of NS, no doubt about it.

[o_spud]

Originally Posted by qbaler

NS had to hack a lot of code in order to get there stuff working, this is the cause of the huge amount of bugs theyve had. The source engine will offer them possibilities they only dreamed of.

gl ns!

Are you refering to hacking the actual dll's that made up the hl1 engine? If so, is this even possible/legal?

Reason i'm asking is that for my own mod I wish to alter the phys_timescale commands that are embedded in hl2 differently for each player on a server. I.e. to allow some form of multiplayer bullettime with everyone moving slowly and some people not in the sphere queries influence, still moving normally.

I've been trying to pitch my problem to VALVe but still await a decent answer. The problem is that the code for all the timescale commands is embedded in the dll's that make up the hl2 source engine and thus I have no access to modifying these parameters and variables to my dismay... But you say the NS team managed to hack the code which intruiges me..

Anyway soz that went a bit off topic there lol.

[o_travis dane]

I'm a bit pessimistic about this one (surprise surprise!). Mostly the fact they still haven't decided wether or not they'll port NS to Source: "We will look into it" "We're investigating" "We're planning to", is very annoying to NS players. Nothing like having a lil certainty your community is going to exist for another couple of years.

I have to admit they did a good job creating NS, but unfortunatly, it went downhill from there. The unreasonably long waits between patches, and the complete turn-around each patch just hurt the game so badly. Not to mention the addition of Combat at 3.0, which in my opinion was just the latest of bad decision making on the developer's end. And seeing as how very long it takes for the developer team to make but the smallest changes, I really doubt we'll see an NS:S within 1 year at least.

[o_otiz]

I agree that combat completely sucks bollocks, but it's great for pubs (kind of like dustbowl sucks for serious clans but rocks for noobs/pubs).

[o_lithium]

NS is getting CS'd

[o_mooga]

How are they going to design their own gaming engine for NS2!?
I personaly play NS every now and then. It's a great mad, but they were working with a pre-made engine. Making your own engine is NOT easy work, you need tons of experiance!

If this is real, I have douts about if NS2 will ever come out...

[o_hypnotoad]

Originally Posted by otiz

I agree that combat completely sucks bollocks, but it's great for pubs (kind of like dustbowl sucks for serious clans but rocks for noobs/pubs).

huh? Ive had one of my best clan games on dustbowl ;o

[o_mooga]

Dust bowl is a fun map but it doesn't has too much stratagy to it. I mean, sure a well played Spy on off can cause pure caose and a Demo on de can pipe the flag but it doesn't require as much teamwork as a map like 2fort does (even though tons of people tend to hate 2fort for it being over played).

[o_hypnotoad]

Strategy on pub servers? I never see such thing unless its clanstyle pub server. Pub servers are just for casual fragging, of course you dont see any well though strategies in there. As for dustbowl dont need strategy (talking bout clan games here)...it needs TONS of more strategy than freaking 2fort where you just got those 3 sollies and engy on def and rest offies (such a STRATEGY++!), where in dustbowl you need to think def places for every 8 guy and it changes everytime flag moves etc and there is MUCH more strategy involved on offy too. AvD maps are far so much more strategy involved maps than ctf maps.

[o_qbaler]

Originally Posted by spud

Are you refering to hacking the actual dll's that made up the hl1 engine? If so, is this even possible/legal?

Reason i'm asking is that for my own mod I wish to alter the phys_timescale commands that are embedded in hl2 differently for each player on a server. I.e. to allow some form of multiplayer bullettime with everyone moving slowly and some people not in the sphere queries influence, still moving normally.

I've been trying to pitch my problem to VALVe but still await a decent answer. The problem is that the code for all the timescale commands is embedded in the dll's that make up the hl2 source engine and thus I have no access to modifying these parameters and variables to my dismay... But you say the NS team managed to hack the code which intruiges me..

Anyway soz that went a bit off topic there lol.

sry for misleading you i meant more on the lines of hacking as in creating a new way about doing something. I dont know specific examples off hand for NS. But like the hl1 engine wasnt meant to do something so they had to come with an innovated way to get around the engine and get the desired result.. which in turn gave many bugs and was hard to do. (hacking... im prety sure its a valid word for what they did).

[o_jefferino]

The first time i played NS I found it very confusing. I didn't know what I was doing and the evolutions thingy just made me more confused so i deleted it.

[o_mooga]

Originally Posted by qbaler

sry for misleading you i meant more on the lines of hacking as in creating a new way about doing something. I dont know specific examples off hand for NS. But like the hl1 engine wasnt meant to do something so they had to come with an innovated way to get around the engine and get the desired result.. which in turn gave many bugs and was hard to do. (hacking... im prety sure its a valid word for what they did).

The word Hacking is often used to discribe breaking into computers although many geeks/nerds believe that the corect term should be cracking not hacking. Hacking would doing stuff like this and can be used as you used it. Hacking it simply changing something. I could hack my lamp to use a different type of lightbulb. Or you could hack your car's CD player to play MP3 CDs.

I personaly use hack/er/ing in both ways.

[o_spud]

Ta for clearing up that.. except i'm still stuck on my question

[o_travis dane]

Originally Posted by spud

Are you refering to hacking the actual dll's that made up the hl1 engine? If so, is this even possible/legal?

Reason i'm asking is that for my own mod I wish to alter the phys_timescale commands that are embedded in hl2 differently for each player on a server. I.e. to allow some form of multiplayer bullettime with everyone moving slowly and some people not in the sphere queries influence, still moving normally.

I've been trying to pitch my problem to VALVe but still await a decent answer. The problem is that the code for all the timescale commands is embedded in the dll's that make up the hl2 source engine and thus I have no access to modifying these parameters and variables to my dismay... But you say the NS team managed to hack the code which intruiges me..

Anyway soz that went a bit off topic there lol.

I think he ment the NS dev team went about doing some really ugly stuff to get things working on the HL engine. What you're talking about is reverse-engineering, or at least changing the binaries of HL2, which I believe is illegal.



But I don't think there's much they can do if you live in a foreign country...

[o_mooga]

Reverse-engineering is legal, the problem is that companies tend to sue people with the DMCA even though they technicly can't. I can post some links on the DMCA and reverse-engineering if you want, I wrote a paper a few years back on the DMCA...