There are pros and cons to having a longer patch cycle. In this case, our reason for delay was out of our control. However this ended up allowing for a lot more of our work to be brought into the update. Update 323, as you will see in the changelog below, is probably one of the more impactful updates that we have done in some time. Beyond adding some new cosmetics and our new Shadow Onos model, there are some big changes to gameplay that have shown to not only adjust a lot of the existing strategy, but force you to think and apply all-new ones as well. We hope that these changes will inspire new gameplay and lifeform usage in the foreseeable future.

Summer is now afoot and as a special treat Rantology has added some new flair for your shoulder armor. It’s only available through July 16, 2018.

 

We teased at what was moving in the shadows just a couple weeks ago and now we are ready to unveil the Shadow Onos. An entirely new model created just for this skin, this completes the entire range of the shadow aliens. Since this is the final piece of the shadow skin collection, we have decided to give away the Onos skin to anyone that was a Reinforced Shadow Tier contributor, or purchased the Shadow Pack DLC. For those of you that don't receive the Shadow Onos from a prior purchase can buy it HERE . *please note that this item is not tradable

 

Our Forge skins have been very popular amongst the community, you could say they’ve been [u]red hot[/u]. They are one of our favorite skins in the game but we felt that the pack just wasn’t complete enough. So as a gift from us to you, please enjoy the addition of Shotgun and Flamethrower Forge skins. Anyone that already owns the Forge DLC will be granted the new items for free in the customize menu. If you don't already own this awesome DLC, you can buy it HERE .

 

We know everyone here likes to show off their bling, whether it be a badge, armor or some other in-game cosmetic. So we’ve added player skill tiers and fancy new icons to help differentiate between the tiers while in game. Of course, the main purpose of this feature is really more towards helping to balance teams based on skill and their relative groups.

 

There is much to digest in the changelog below. We hope you have fun playing around with the changes, new skins and Shadow Onos model. As always, there is more to come in the future! Good hunting.

Changelog

Gameplay

• Alien Upgrades rebalance [list]
• Auto-spawn with upgrades [list]
• Reapplies last used Skulk upgrades on spawn, even if you’ve since evolved into a higher life form, it will remember.[/*]
• If no upgrades were last used, they’re assigned randomly (save for focus)[/*]
• Has 4 second delay for each upgrade level, totaling a max of 12 seconds for all 9 potential upgrade chambers to take effect. Manually evolving is faster. But this mechanic keeps the QoL that is spawning with upgrades, without being overpowered or preventing Marines from locking down a hive room. (Thanks for the idea Handschuh!)[/*]

• Lerk [list]
• Increased personal resource cost to evolve into a Lerk to 21 (from 18) [list]
• This change was based on feedback from the community regarding a large amount of Lerk dominance early in a round often dictating the outcome. We believe the subtle lifeform timing difference coupled with the increased cost of re-Lerking will aid in marines being better prepared by the time they arrive on the field, as well as dealing with them less frequently, or giving more weight to their deaths.[/*]

• Added the new shadow Onos[/*]
• Added the new summer Gorge shoulder patch every player can unlock by playing 5 rounds during this summer until July 16th 2018[/*]
• Added the Forge Shotgun and Flamethrower skins[/*]
• Added player skill tiers (Thanks to IeptBarakat for helping out with this) [list]
• Your skill tier only changes after playing at ranked ns2 servers. All other servers do not update your Hive stats! Ranked servers show up with a blue gamemode field in the server browser. Otherwise quickplay tries to connect you to a ranked server whenever possible.[/*]
• Your skill tier is based on lower bound of your skill value. This is a combination of Hive’s estimate of your skill, and its confidence in that estimate. This makes the tiers more stable than a skill threshold alone would be, and causes them to tend to trend upward over time as Hive gets more confident.[/*]
• 1 tier for all rookies below level 20 (approx. 20 hours playtime) [list]
• Tier 0 - Rookie - green color[/*]

• General Sound Changes [list]
• Reviewed and changed over 1000+ sound events and their implementation to reduce global channel count. Optimizations to max playback behavior, steal behavior, max polyphony behavior, and several other properties for all events. Combined with a reduced global channel count, these optimizations should address sounds which stop playing or cut out which breaks immersion from the player and also prevents the player from hearing important gameplay information cues.[/*]
• Re-balanced all footstep sounds for Marines and all Alien lifeforms for all material types in the game. Walking on a particular surface won’t suddenly seem much louder than other surfaces now.[/*]
• Many additional minor optimizations to sound quality, volume attenuation over distance, reverb properties, and "under the hood" improvements.[/*]

• Aliens [list]
• Increased the volume and distance for many structures. Hydras, Whips, Shades, Shifts, and others are much more audible to allow Marines entering a room to scout idle and active sounds.[/*]
• All lifeform footsteps balanced for volume and consistency. For example Onos footsteps now travel as far as a Skulk and Skulk footsteps aren’t at the loudest volume at maximum distance on rock materials.[/*]
• Onos charging into a Marine and an Exosuit sounds added.[/*]
• Impact sound for Parasite added regardless of a successful hit.[/*]
• Optimized gorge channel count.[/*]
• Optimized fade channel count and increased the sound of blink so fades can be scouted more easily at longer distances.[/*]
• Improved and tuned Hive pain sounds.[/*]
• Volume roll-off added for Hive death scream so it doesn’t cut off abruptly at range.[/*]
• Fixed Tunnel exit/enter sounds when inside a tunnel. Escaping aliens in a Gorge Tunnel will now hear an enemy chasing after them.[/*]
• Tunnel exiting sound now emits from the Tunnel itself instead of following the player. (Thanks Steelcap!)[/*]
• Balanced UI voice over volumes such as team notifications or “Base Under Attack” notifications.[b]
  [/b][/*]

• Cached pathing map data no longer takes the build number into account (which was causing pathing meshes to be rebuilt for every new patch, even though the level probably hadn't changed).[/*]
• Fixed that some of the new player progressions menu entries did not work correctly and used outdated descriptions.[/*]
• Fixed an issue with the team bot controller that caused it to start a never ending loop of adding commander bots at rookie only servers.[/*]
• Fixed that Warmup structures, such as Armory or Prototype Lab, didn't respawn after the first Warm Up phase.[/*]
• Fixed issue where the material of the sound of footsteps was sometimes wrong (eg walking on a "metal" surface would sometimes result in "thin_metal" surface footstep sounds.[/*]
• Fixed that dropped Marine Weapons would not make any sound on most surfaces.[/*]
• Fixed that using a non 16:9 screen resolution or disabling hints in the options menu would hide the harmless loading screen tips. We are working on updated tips but those didn’t make it for this build.[/*]
• Fixed issue preventing the game from using exclusive Fullscreen mode[/*]
• Fixed an issue preventing changing from a low resolution to your monitor’s native resolution.[/*]
• Fixed that Sentry Batteries were not visible in Alien commander view or on the Alien map[/*]
• Fixed that Stomped Marines could occasionally use the Armory or other interactions, causing a race condition.[/*]
• Fixed that by default the "Texture handling" option defaults to "nil" instead of "1 GB".[/*]
• Fixed that whenever a Powernode without armor takes damage from Infestation (even 0 damage) the lights in a Location slightly flicker. [/*]
• Fixed that Babbler-mines hatched if an enemy is nearby but already dead[/*]
• Fixed that Babblers are not 'poofing' blueprints, making them an easy target when they are stuck trying to kill it, and not targeting a built one.[/*]
• Fixed an issue with Servers and Clients creating too many HTTP requests when calling external APIs. Both Servers and Clients now use managed and throttle request queue. [list]
• Server ops can change the default value in ServerConfig.json[/*]

• Summit (Contributed by Psyk) [list]
• Updated with cosmetic improvements to Atrium, Crevice, and Crossroads[/*]
• Updated vent connecting Reactor Core and Glass Hallway. It’s now more accessible to both teams.[/*]
• Added support for reflections to the entire level[/*]

• Editor [list]
• Added extra placement options from the Static Prop tool into the Entity tool (Contributed by Steelcap)[/*]
• Fixed that using select-all would select types of objects that were filtered out.[/*]

• HLSLParser now supports tex2DGrad() and texCUBElod().[/*]
• Added some utility scripts to the ‘utils’ folder used to help migrate physics joints data from old 3dsmax 2009 reactor physics format to new fbx-friendly format that spark uses now.[/*]
• Fixed a help-screen related script error that prevented modders from easily customizing the help screen. (Thanks Nin!)[/*]
• Removed all code related to the old sabot organized play system and heavy rifles.[/*]
• Added a new Client API call to get the address of the server the client is currently connected to.[/*]

• Repair tool close button will not close, but instead run the tool just the same as clicking OK would.[/*]
• There is a minor script error in the end of the Alien tutorial if you return through the gorge tunnel, inappropriately[/*]