Natural Selection For Half-Life Overhauled

Entropius writes "Natural Selection, a free Half-Life mod that contains elements of both traditional first-person shooters and real-time strategy games, has just gotten a complete overhaul with the release of version 2.0. In a nutshell, it combines the best elements of StarCraft and Counter-Strike. NS 2.0 adds new alien abilities, commander interface changes, changes to the resource model, four new maps, and more flexibility in alien evolutions. It's a whole new game now, and a blast to play... one of the most innovative new mods in a long time. The mirrors are straining to keep up, but here's a list of download links via readyroom.org." Update: 08/01 14:43 GMT by S : Here's a very necessary BitTorrent link, thanks to commenters.

Comments

Ummmm where's the Torrent?

[aliens]

Heyo,

Let's get a .bit going so we can all enjoy. Righteo, let's move along here.

Re:Ummmm where's the Torrent?

[tankefugl]

You mean this one?

http://nonoobs.com/ns_install_v20.exe.torrent

Just can't wait to get home and play it after work ... *sigh*

Re:Ummmm where's the Torrent?

[aliens]

That'd be the one. Thanks for finding it, I'll have to keep closer eye on these thing so they don't wander off.

I have the entire weekend dedicated to gaming and beer drinking. Should be fun.

NS.

[magsymp]

I played Counter-Strike for a few years and then gave it up. I un-installed Half-Life and decided to give up the FPS genre at least for a while, after also having played alot of Unreal and Unreal Mods. Then I ran into Natural Selection and I have to say it's a great game. The only real problem I see with it is that the learning curve is really steep; in the sense that, at first you get killed repeatedly by more experience players, regardless if you are playing Marines or Aliens. Also people will rarely let you play the commander, unless you are skilled and, well, it's hard to become skilled without practice. I think both sides are fun to play, but I prefer the Marines. I've developed a fair amount of skill in the game now, all I can say is I can't wait to check out this new version.

Re:NS.

[BrookHarty]

The worst is when you get a commander that just builds and doesnt expand the weapons. And you cant get enough votes to kick them out. If the Aliens can morph into better soliders, you cant put up a defense. (Hoping they tried to make it a little more even this version.)

Seems the normal start strat is alien you rush the marine spawn, marine you put up defenses.

The mix of features makes this game fun to play, theres so much to do, and the maps are great looking. I'm wondering how many mods will be ported to HL2, CS and NS would look even better with highpoly skins and gfx effects.

BTW, why would anyone uninstall HL, CS is the most common lan party game. And Day of Defeat, NS is popular too.

Re:NS.

[magsymp]

BTW, why would anyone uninstall HL ?

My roomate is a CS whore, and only has an old voodoo 3. So unless I wanted him on my PC all the time.. I had to uninstall.

Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[Joel Carr]

A lot of 'great' mods have come out for Half-Life. Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and Natural Selection immediately come to mind. Meanwhile, not nearly as many great mods have come out for say a game like Quake 3 Arena, which is from the same sort of era. Although lots of mods have been made for Quake 3, the only great one I can think of off the top of my head is NS-CO, but that's not even finished yet.

My question is, why do people seem to prefer creating excellent mods for a game like Half-Life and not so much for a game like Quake 3. Is it because Half-Life is easier to write mods for, is it a better engine, or did it just happen to have the critical mass since it was such a popular game. Or am I just taking crazy pills and just as many great mods have been made for Quake 3 as for Half-Life.

The reason I'm so interested is because I would love to be playing these mods natively under Linux, and I was wondering what the Half-Life engine has that the Quake 3 engine doesn't. Also, does anyone know how the Doom 3 engine will compare with the Half-Life 2 engine with regards to the mods. I've heard Half-Life 2 will be a modders paradise.

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[arcadum]

why do people seem to prefer creating excellent mods for a game like Half-Life and not so much for a game like Quake 3?
tons of people have a copy, if they don't one can be had for $10. And, there is a huge community that mods so it's easier to find help.

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[saqq]

half life mods are pretty crappy man, i can think of good quake3 mods though: urban terror, rocket arena 3

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[Mage Powers]

You coulda reworded that slightly and been a karma whore :)
Urban Terror looks like Golden Eye + Counter Strike

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[MGrie]

I also noticed that (NS is incredible, but is limited by the ancient HL engine imho).

My Guess is it, that it's mostly the great number of HL installs out there and the much larger audience that stems from there.

Could also be the better support by valve and the bigger modding community overall.

Q3 ofcourse is a much more flexible engine than HL, but i cant really comment on the differences of modding in detail.
The methods of modding etc. should be pretty similar, since the HL engine was branched of somewhere between Quake1 and Quake2, but still uses most of the same basic concepts.

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[ThePyro]

Live player count stats taken from gamespy:

• Half Life : 86807
• Battlefield 1942 : 6872
• Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory : 6601
• Medal of Honor Allied Assault : 5338
• Unreal Tournament 2003 : 4085
• Americas Army: Operations : 3925

Half-Life is beating 2nd place by over a factor of 10 in terms of player count. More players = larger pool of potential modders = more high-quality mods. More low quality mods, too, of course - but you don't really hear about those much :)

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[BrookHarty]

My question is, why do people seem to prefer creating excellent mods for a game like Half-Life and not so much for a game like Quake 3.
Quake3 while yes a good engine, has a few problems, the texture maps make it look dark and cartoonish. HL textures look better compared to Q3.

I would love to be playing these mods natively under Linux
WineX from transgaming, works great for HL.

Also, does anyone know how the Doom 3 engine will compare with the Half-Life 2 engine with regards to the mods.
HL2 engine is going to be the hot game engine for the next 5 years. After seeing the 600meg mpeg of HL2, the demo they gave at E3, its an engine that you can do anything with.

What I havnt heard anyone talk about it, how HL2 engine will be compared to the CS2 engine, since they are not based on the same engine. So will people just port CS to HL2 and be done with it? Or will the CS be locked into a weaker engine? That would be quite disappointing.

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[Mike Hawk]

To be more exact, its not Half-life beating all the others, its just Counter-strike. Noone plays HL multiplayer.

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[ziggles]

Those stats are pretty meaningless in this discussion. Half-Life already has lots of great mods, and everyone already knows it's the most popular online game today. The question is, is it the most popular because it has lots of great mods, or does it have lots of great mods because it's the most popular? Those stats don't answer any questions.

Personally, I think it's a mix of both. HL is a great single player game, everyone who cared about PC gaming bought it. But it wouldn't have lasted without the mods.

CS was the saving grace, after that it was just everyone else wanting to copy it's success.

Anyway, in reply to the original post, there are some high quality mods for Quake 3. Urban Terror, Total Combat, Rocket Arena 3, Challenge Promode Arena(my personal favorite multiplayer FPS), and probably some others I'm not familiar with. Also, I'm kind of glad it's not as popular.. it's harder to find random people to play against, but it's also a lot less free of unexperienced idiots playing online games for the first time and treating it like an AOL chat room.

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[ziggles]

Er, sorry, I meant True Combat, not "Total Combat."

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[PainKilleR-CE]

Those stats are pretty meaningless in this discussion. Half-Life already has lots of great mods, and everyone already knows it's the most popular online game today. The question is, is it the most popular because it has lots of great mods, or does it have lots of great mods because it's the most popular? Those stats don't answer any questions.

There's not much of a question there, because those stats are multiplayer only, and everyone knows that the stats also show the default HL dm is played by very few players. It's most popular because it has the most popular mods, plain and simple (and actually, you could probably say most popular mod and still be right, but there might be one or two mods that are doing better than a few other games as a whole).

As to the question of how this came to be, it may be more simple than people think. For one, the single player game was extremely popular, as you stated later in your post, so pretty much everyone had the game for ~6 months before a single mod came out anyway. Secondly, the HL SDK came out close to 8 months before the Quake 3 retail release, although Q3 betas and tools were released close to the same time as the HL SDK. Q3 also changed some things in regards to how mods are built and how they interface with the game engine, whereas HL mods are not very different from Q2 mods in terms of coding (and a lot of the mod developers from Q2's community came over to HL, giving us CS and many other mods).

Personally, I think it's a mix of both. HL is a great single player game, everyone who cared about PC gaming bought it. But it wouldn't have lasted without the mods.

Something else to note is that Valve hyped their support of the mod community long before releasing a single tool, and even before the game came out. They did this by bringing in Team Fortress Software and stating that TF2 would be an expansion pack for Half-life, or possibly included in the retail box. Most of us know where it went from there, but a large number of TF players bought Half-Life because they believed they would need it for TF2 (yeah, it's not a great idea to do that if TF2 hasn't been released yet, but it's the sort of thing that happens and the sort of thing that companies like Valve know will happen). I'm not going to complain about purchasing HL, because it gave me more than enough hours of play (through TFC) to justify the money, but the single player experience, for some of us, did not live up to the hype that seemingly everyone puts on it.

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Those numbers are just plain wrong. They count both bots and 'fakefull' servers. Fakefull is a plugin used by desperate admins who cant get users to join their server, so they create fake clients to trick people into joining. Of course without these halflife would still win, but those numbers are still misleading.

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[junkgrep]

HL is NOT from the same era as Q3: it is two years older. The reasons it's so popular include it's low system requirements (no matter what computer you have, you can find HL very cheap, and it will play on your computer), the great support from Valve, a very moddable engine, and also just plain momentum. Not to mention the unprecdented success of CS. Doom3 should be as moddable as Q3, and it's hard to compare to HL2 because we're heard so much from Valve about how they'll be supporting mods, and very little from id as of yet (D3 comes out several months later, so they have more time to announce stuff). HL2 is supposed to be way easier to mod than even HL, and the SDK should come out fairly soon: a month or two before the game even comes out.

Re:Why do modders seem to prefer Half-Life?

[junkgrep]

Which is too bad, because I always found HL MP to be far more interesting than Q3,UT or other MP games. It had great maps (including gimicky ones like the airstrike maps and rustmill) and a really good mix of weapons that lent themselves to all sorts of different strategies both rambo and tactical.

Open-source bot for Natural Selection

[clamatius]

A little project I've been working on in my spare time is a bot for this game. It's called WhichBot.

Features include a bunch of fancy AI stuff (dynamic navigation, wall-climbing support, pack-based strategies, etc), Linux support and open-source code on Sourceforge.

You can find it at whichbot.com.
</plug>

Important note: we didn't have access to the NS 2.0 server before release, so the current bot version DOES NOT support NS 2.0. We hope to have a compatible bot version up ASAP.

Urban Terror mod for Q3A?

[antdude]

How about [link=http://urbanterror.net/]Urban Terror[/link] mod for Q3A?

Re:Urban Terror mod for Q3A?

[antdude]

DOH! Wrong tags (ezboard).

try again.

NS 2.0

[Foggy1]

I've been playing NS since 1.0 came out last October, and it's been my favorite HL mod besides The Specialists. I've been waiting for 2.0 (then called 1.1) for quite a few months, but I'm a bit disappointed with it. I thought it would be the huge upgrade that would turn NS into the mod to end all mods, but it's basically just a set of tweaks with some new features and 4 new maps. I'm not complaining, but I was expecting something.. bigger.

Re:NS 2.0

[ctr2sprt]

It really is a huge upgrade. It changes the fundamental strategy for marines from "Don't let the aliens get 2 hives" to "Capture as many resource nodes as possible." One consequence of this is that it eliminates two of the most successful - and most hated - NS 1.04 strats, the jp/hmg rush and the 2-hive lockdown. Both strats may be effective at times, but as complete strats they are gone.

I guess the big changes don't really leap out at you as much as new guns would, but trust me, they are there. I think the moment when it really hit me was when I realized the aliens had 3 hives and I wasn't worried. We went on to win that game.

Re:NS 2.0

[clamatius]

In competitive play in NS 1.04, a solid (but un-fun) strategy was to spawn-camp the aliens.

That doesn't work in NS 2.0, thankfully.

The biggest change of all is actually the different resource model:

* resources nodes take a while to activate
* alien gorges get an equal share of resources compared with other aliens
* both sides get resources for kills (even the commander, he gets resources for turret kills)

Re:NS 2.0

[clamatius]

On the minus side, I was wrong on one point: built resource towers no longer take time to activate, it was taken out in the last couple of days of testing.

On the plus side, here's the complete changelog for NS 2.0.

Re:NS 2.0

[wearedan]

i agree,also the irritating siege canon behing the back wall of a hive now needs skill to achieve
the biggest improvment is how much cpu power it needs,playing on some older machines(lan),me and my friends didnt a dedicated,the previous version did on the same machines.
also being able to eat people for health is a VERY good touch

OMG

[PeteyG]

NS 2.0 adds new alien abilities, commander interface changes, changes to the resource model, four new maps, and more flexibility in alien evolutions.

I haven't played Half-Life mods for over a year now, and I only focused on DoD and CS. I know nothing of Natural Selection... save from what I've quoted up there.

When I read that... My heart nearly exploded with joy. I cannot wait to go home tonight, dig out my old HL CD and cd key, and install that. I anticipate many squidjims of joy in my computer room tonight.

Now we've had a week to play it

[Private Baldrick]

I downloaded the V2.0 version a week ago and have played it quite a bit. I was an avid fan of the V1.03 & V1.04 version.

The game has definately improved a lot. It is no longer a case of the Marines winning 80%+ of the time, if anything the balance is favouring the Aliens.

The weak point (and strong point) of the game is the Marine Commander, if you have a bad commander or one that simply is not on the ball the Marines will almost certainly lose the game. However if the Marine Comm is good then the Aliens will have an uphill struggle.

Gameplay changes have improved things the new stealth abilities of the aliens are a little scarey (aliens disappearing from plain view...)

A great V2.0

Balders