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Natural Selection Mod to get Sequel, Source port
kingphreak writes "The popular Half-Life mod, Natural-Selection is undergoing an update. Natural-Selection: Source (a port of the original to the new Half-Life 2 Source Engine) and Natural-Selection 2 have been announced. It is not known by Charlie "Flayra" Cleveland and the rest of the NS Team whether NS:S will be a direct port or whether NS2 will use the Source Engine, UT2004 Engine, etc." They're currently testing Beta 6 within the community.
If you don't know what Natural Selection is or haven't played it your missing out. I swear this is the best video game since StarControl2 Melee. Going to source will make it pretty I'm sure, but pretty doesn't make NS good, game play does. I also have to say that the fact that I can play the current version on my $400 used Laptop is a big plus. I go over to my buddy's house have a beer and kill aliens and its fucking great.
Source or Quake2 engine it doesn't matter to me, just give me some more NS goodness.
Natural Selection was one of the freshest and most original games I'd played in loooong time when I first gave it a shot c ouple of years ago. I haven't played it in a while, and this will probably be just the ticket to give it another go.
This was the first game I ever played that basically required voice communication among players - especially the Marine team. I got a usb headset specifically because of this game.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
Natural Selection is one of the best mods for any game out there. For those unfamiliar with it you play with two teams, aliens and marines (think Aliens the movie). One of the marines plays a commander just like any RTS out there. But instead of computer-controlled drones he commands real players. He can give them orders to build resource towers or group them to attack an alien hive. Of course players can choose to ignore such orders but NS shines in teamplay since the superior aliens will literally shred you to pieces if the marines don't play as a team.
I've played it since 0.9 days and it has gotten really good along the years. Game balancing has been difficult do to differences in marines and aliens but it's mostly settled now. The aging engine started to make the game look outdated but it's still great fun. I'm sure the developers will be able to port all the greatness of NS to the new engine since NS's allure is in its unique gameplay. I can't wait to get back to NS to kick some alien butt!
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
The problem with the mod is that HL2 itself barely runs on most people's PC nowadays. Who can develop except those with super 3Ghz processors with $500 video cards. I'd expect another year and a half before the mod community really picks up.
When the news post said this: " It is not known by Charlie "Flayra" Cleveland and the rest of the NS Team whether NS:S will be a direct port or whether NS2 will use the Source Engine, UT2004 Engine, etc."
To clarify that, NS:Source and NS2 are two different products. NS:Source would be a free Source mod, and NS2 will be a commercial product, who's engine hasn't yet been decided (though Source and Unreal Engine 3 are two engines that Flayra mentioned as possibilities).
According to Flayra (Charlie Cleveland), NS2 will be a ~$50 game (In other words mainstream), and will require a multimillion dollar budget to pull off, in addition to requiring several years of development.
Normally for a first time developer to get such a huge budget would be rare, but Charlie has proven with the original NS that he can put out a cutting-edge genre-defining game that pushes the rendering engine to the limit. That will count for something.
I love Natural selection, but they're given a chance here to completely rewrite this awesome mod.
Rewriting it for source will restrict me to using DirectX on Windows, which I don't want to do. Here's hopin' that they make it for Quake 3 (which should be GPL soon), or UT2k4 (which it would be awesome with, I love the Unreal 2 engine). Maybe even the Silverback engine that S2 Games has, for hybrid RTS/FPS games.
I hope they make the right decision, and I'll finally be able to play on my Mac.
Where exactly did the submitter get this info? I've heard nothing and I've been an NS player and follower since Day 1.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
I'm sorry, this comment is almost totally pointless, but... YES YES YES!!!! I'm so happy, the original was one of the best multiplayer games ever, though it needed some attention that it never got to really balance it and make it a great competitive game. I really hope they get it this time around, what awesome news!
There's so much confusion and misinformation floating around about all these projects that I think it's time to set the record straight.
First there was Natural Selection. Then I formed Unknown Worlds to make more ambitious retail games. I thought that the best bet for the company's first game was putting NS into retail, on the Half-life engine. This would be like Counter-strike or Day of Defeat in retail, and would've essentially been the same game, but polished up and packaged with the Half-life engine so people could play it without owning Half-life. I then decided that it would be too costly and a little boring too do this project, so it was skipped.
So the next project is likely going to be NS on the Source engine. We don't know for sure if we're doing this, as we haven't had time to evaluate how much work it will be, but everyone on the team is excited to do it, so I think it will happen. We don't know yet if it is going to be a straight port over to Source, or if we're going to redo a lot of the artwork/animations, or if we're going to change a lot of the fundamental gameplay (flamethrowers, physics, etc.). We need to look into it more, see how many months it's going to take (the bad part) and then make a decision. As soon as we know, we'll let you guys know. NS on Source will be done primarily by the current NS team. I'll be doing the game design and overall direction, but the NS team will be doing all the actual work.
The OTHER project, is Natural Selection 2. The game design has been started (hoo-boy, fun stuff), but this will be a full-fledged $50 (or so) retail game, not a mod. It will use a next-generation engine (like Source, Unreal Engine 3, etc.) and will take years and millions of dollars to create. This is what I'm now spending the majority of my time on.
Please trust that as soon as ANY information is available on any of these projects, we will post here on the front-page news of this web-site. You won't have to dig through the forums or IRC chat logs, we're going to broadcast loud and clear. We're also planning on making particularly big announcements to the Unknown Worlds mailing list, so make sure you've registered an account and subscribed there if you're interested.
I hope this clears things up. I can't wait!
-Flayra
The NS site is really unstable at the momment(to be fixed soon) Anyway, NS:S IS NOT CONFIRMED. "We don't know for sure if we're doing this, as we haven't had time to evaluate how much work it will be, but everyone on the team is excited to do it, so I think it will happen." I'm preaty sure its going to happen, but it isn't confirmed yet
Currently, the best platform to play "games" is irrelevant. If you're a gamer, you get a PC, but you also get an Xbox, and a PS2, and so on, and if you actually care about framerate (and not just how big that video card looks), you get Linux and run some (not all) games there.
News flash: Source is not that fucking innovative. Just about everything Source had, Halo 2 had also, including the Havok engine -- and there are free physics engines out there, too. And let's not forget -- Halo 2 came out when it was supposed to, did what it was supposed to, didn't have weird stuttering bugs, and allowed everyone who bought it to use it as soon as they got the disk home.
And maybe the best engine is a lgpl or similarly-licensed one anyway. I certainly wouldn't make a source mod. Steam embeds Internet Explorer, Source crashes, there is no dynamic level loading, and even the static loading is far slower and more frequent than in Doom 3, which was more technically impressive if artistically depressing -- and let's not forget, they could have embedded BitTorrent instead of IE, and Source, to my knowledge, still actually uses BSP trees, which were obsolete when we got hardware 3D acceleration.
Halo 2 can be played straight through without ever waiting for a loading sequence except when first turning the console on, and when it does load, you get a cool-looking loading progress bar, not just the word "loading".
And Valve treats their community like shit. How fucking long does it take to make a "friends" system? There's a long list, but I'll mention three -- during the CS:Source beta test, all you had to do to cheat was have "sv_cheats 1" in a config file on your local machine, which would get replicated to the server. Despite repeated begging from mappers, guns still fall through the floor on fy maps, and new versions of the editor don't even allow maps with guns-lying-on-the-floor to be created.
I know you liked Half-Life 2. We all did. But that was content, which NS can do just fine on its own. The engine sucks.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I agree, but I'd want it on the Doom 3 engine. I'm biased, though -- Doom 3 runs fine, but UT2k4 is bitching at me.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I run on a 1.7 ghz Athlon XP with a $225 video card, most settings on medium detail. I don't think it ever ducked below 20-some fps, and I could always turn the detail down if it started to.
CS:Source lags when I find servers I can cheat on. I bind a key to "give weapon_flashbang" and piss everyone off. Or I use the same trick to make a giant pile of AWPs to hide in.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
hmm. What about using webbing to launch barrels and junk? What about having to melt the webbing with welder, and having it actually resist you, instead of just slow down your walk speed?
Seriously, though, Source isn't the only game engine with Havok physics, and Havok isn't the only physics engine. I want my Linux support!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I guess this is not new to any of you. But FYI, there is a game Savage: http://www.s2games.com/savage/index.html which have the same concept of RTS + FPS. It has been out 1 to 2 years I guess. And it can natively run on Linux and PC.