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.

Comments

Re:HL2 mod problem

[Guspaz]

The performance hit might not be as big as you think.

The biggest problem with Natural-Selection is it's heavy use of entities. The Half-Life engine wasn't designed to handle maps with hundreds of entities, which caused enormous load on the server (And much more on the client than was normal).

Source, on the other hand, can efficiently handle a great number more entities than Half-Life could. There WILL be a performance hit going to source, but part of it will be offset by substantially better entity handling. Whereas NS is by far the most taxing Half-Life mod, it would very likely be on-par with existing Source mods/modes.

Also, keep in mind that if NS:Source were to enter development, the actual release would be something like 6 months or a year away. In that time average computer power will increase a fair bit, and while HL2's performance level today is acceptable (Enough people are playing it and it's mods to cast doubt on your "barely runs on most people's PC"), in 6 to 12 months one to two videocard refreshs (And possible one generation jump) will have occured, not to mention significant changes in the CPU business. In other words in 6 to 12 months the average PC will be a bit stronger.

Re:NS

[cronostitan]

Hi!

If you havent played it in a long time you might get disappointed. the NS community is very much split up about the changes the developers did to the origina gameplay. They optimized it more and more for fast clan games meaning that the play time was reduced to games under one hour. By these changes the original RTS- (Real Time Strategy - like Starkcraft as FPS) style of NS suffered alot and the game lost much of its complexety.

Ahhh.. those were nice times when NS games lasted up to 3 hours and the loss of the marines armory building was a big tragedy and could turn the game completely around. Now the loss of an armory builing is just a joke and you just build a new one.

Summa sumarum: IMHO it didn't get better and you can see that working by fewer and fewer people playing NS. I had stopped playing it for these reasons and playing it now from time to time to see if something changed to the better.