Natural Selection 2: Release Thread!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Natural Selection 2: Release Thread!

Dred_furst: Nov 19, 2007; "Hey look, I'm flying a giant dong"

Pretty great, its a lot better than the early early versions.

Aliens won the first game,

# ¿ Oct 31, 2012 01:28

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 08:09

Dred_furst: Nov 19, 2007; "Hey look, I'm flying a giant dong"

I was playing on a US server with 200 ping and it was more than playable, had better performance than a lot of other games at 200 ping.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2012 01:30

Dred_furst: Nov 19, 2007; "Hey look, I'm flying a giant dong"

Lurking291230 posted:

I may be the odd one out here, but I have an i7 with an nvidia 460m, and I've been trying to play this on Windows 8, but it seems to die on me after 10-15 minutes when I'm trying to respawn. Strangely, I can successfully respawn 3-4 times before that, but it will eventually get to the point where it just crashes on me while I'm staring at my dude at the respawn point.

Any ideas, or could it just be windows 8?

I downloaded the most recent drivers from the NVidia website about 4 hours ago.

Well, I suppose there's always aimbotting. I have no idea how that would work in this game, though.

Are you on a laptop? If so have you messed about with your power settings and ensured you have your laptop plugged in whilst playing?

# ¿ Nov 1, 2012 00:43

Dred_furst: Nov 19, 2007; "Hey look, I'm flying a giant dong"

GateheaD posted:

This game crashes instantly (Black screen with Windows 8 error reported on boot)
Some things I have tried include:

Verify game integrity in steam
Delete items and redownload them (Shaders)
Remove logs etc from APPDATA (Logs aren't helpful as it just names my video card and crashes)
All manner of Compatibility and Administration elevation settings.

I have a ATI 6950 if that matters

I guess the next step is to download everything again but I'm not really in the mood to do that.

I'm a systems engineer so I have a fair idea how to troubleshoot, ideas for this game?

Try installing the dx9 runtime, I had the same issue.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2012 13:18

Dred_furst: Nov 19, 2007; "Hey look, I'm flying a giant dong"

Spengelbeiser posted:

What are you system specs/what problems are you having, specifically?

Some general guidelines for performance:
* Make sure the graphical bells and whistles are turned off. No Ambient Occlusion, don't texture stream unless you have an SSD.
* Lower your resolution. Most people with subpar hardware report a large performance increase from doing this.
* Laptop? Make sure NS2 is set up to run on your dedicated card, not integrated. Everyone forgets this.
* Update your video drivers.

If you're still running like poo poo after going through this checklist, then either you have some sort of edge-case driver support issue and need to report it on the official tech support forums, or your hardware is aging.

I have heard rumors of the game "just failing" Windows 8 when it worked fine on Windows 7 on the same system before upgrade, so it may be a case of that. I mean, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you're a systems engineer and you upgraded to Windows 8 in the first week of official release (aka unofficial paid beta) then you probably have a pretty good idea where to start your troubleshooting. But to state the obvious, make sure your drivers are up to date. Instant crash sounds like a flat-out driver fail, can't initialize the video device, which mostly likely means a Windows 8 driver fuckup of some kind.

Also posting your full system specs here would help.

This isn't quite what texture streaming is. It's to do with texture submission to the GPU from system memory. Traditionally textures were held in system memory, a texture was sent to the GPU and the system waited for the copy to happen. When the copy is completed, the system carries on.

Texture streaming is when the texture is in system memory and the GPU gets told to "stream" the texture. The GPU gets given a pointer to the texture and the system carries on issuing other directX commands. The GPU will then copy the texture to its graphics memory when it can.

It's experimental because it relies on some tricky memory management and resource handling as well as some difficult thread locking. Textures in texture streaming must already be in system memory before the GPU memory. This is because GPU ram is more expensive but a lot faster than system memory, so it is assumed to be a restriction on the graphics pipeline.

Direct x 11.1 on windows 8 takes this a step further by allowing the GPU to read the textures straight from memory without a copy.

Basically texture streaming should boost performance if you don't mind texture pop-in.

Furthermore windows 8 doesn't ship with direct x 9 at all, and bits of ns2 uses the dx9 runtime. Ns2 also doesn't ship with the direct x 9 redist. Just download and install it.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2012 17:57

Dred_furst: Nov 19, 2007; "Hey look, I'm flying a giant dong"

VarXX posted:

Is this really a thing

Yes, it ships with the dx10/11/11.1 binaries. Really ns2 should include the horrific direct x runtime every other game includes.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2012 18:01

Dred_furst: Nov 19, 2007; "Hey look, I'm flying a giant dong"

Kaal posted:

Of course it's Microsoft's fault. Basic OS services shouldn't have to run through an entire install just to indicate that they're functioning properly. And game distributors shouldn't be the ones to make sure that they're installed in the first place.

It's to do with dlls and linking. You need the precise dll that the software was built against, and game developers would be mad as hell at 1 directX update every 4 years.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2012 20:13

Dred_furst: Nov 19, 2007; "Hey look, I'm flying a giant dong"

Why do custom maps flag the server as modded even though we are playing stock NS2? that's my biggest gripe right now.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2012 20:26

Dred_furst: Nov 19, 2007; "Hey look, I'm flying a giant dong"

Not to forget Knifeback has a server up, I'd recommend joining mumble if people are actually on (the mumble server).

The server is on the default port at knifeback.co.uk.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2012 20:12

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 08:09

Dred_furst: Nov 19, 2007; "Hey look, I'm flying a giant dong"

Puistokemisti posted:

I know whips are designed to combat grenade launchers. I also do know that if they didn't have that ability, GLs would destroy all alien buildings with trivial effort. But the thing is, because whips are the main defense of aliens, it renders all defensive positions completely immune to the GL. So basically only role GLs have is "once defenses have been removed, you can use GL to destroy hive slightly faster than Flamer". Flamers on other hand are great for destroying buildings, really awesome for clearing out those skulks running around your Exos and not only do they do massive damage against Onos they also sap his and his support gorge's energy. Why would you ever buy GL instead of Flamer?

Why should marines have threatening solo hit and run setup?
I rarely see people play Lerks so that's not really a viable defense option. Fades work but what if they are on the other side of the map or just died? At that point a single marine can win the game just by farting around and setting hives on fire. It is bullshit because there's so little you can do to prevent it, is your Fade going sit sit around hives in case he decides to come back?
And if there's two marines, you can just kiss you hive good bye, it will be long dead before you can even think about reacting.

Have you tried telling your team to go to kill the guy in question? You are speaking as if he is immune to teamwork. Aliens are really quick, just flush him out into an ambush.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2012 00:35

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Natural Selection 2: Release Thread!