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First Person Shooters (Games) PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Natural Selection Half-Life Mod Reaches 3.0 Beta 46

Posted by simoniker from the only-the-strong-mods-survive dept.
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the official Natural Selection page, where V3.0 Beta of the Half-Life mod "hybrid first-person/real-time strategy game" is now available. According to the page, changes include 10 new maps, as well as the addition of Natural Selection: Combat, a "...new fast and furious gameplay mode focusing on intense action. Combat games generally last less than ten minutes, and require very little knowledge to play." The mod can now be played using the add-on's "official Steam support", and will be "...listed under the 'My Games' section (not as a 3rd-party mod)", a laudable achievement for the Natural Selection developers, who've also implemented vital "skulk prediction fixes" for this update.
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Natural Selection Half-Life Mod Reaches 3.0 Beta More

Natural Selection Half-Life Mod Reaches 3.0 Beta

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  • Quick problem / fix with NS 3.0 beta (Score:3, Informative)

    by sladelink ( 536962 ) on Monday January 26, 2004 @02:52AM (#8086052)
    Although they say on their site that NS 3.0 supports Steam (which most players hate) and WonID, they don't make any mention about how to play it without Steam. The official Natural Selection forums are down right now, so this should help anyone trying to play the game without Steam. After downloading it and letting it install to your steam account directory, make a copy of the nsp directory and place it in your Half-Life dir. Same arguments apply for 3.0 as in 2.1, but replace the -game ns with -game nsp. Still though, I'm only able to see two active 3.0 public servers. Could be because it has gotten such an ill reception from the NS crowd, or maybe the clan servers are playing private for a bit. I would sure be interested in finding out what's up.
    • Steam removed support for bots, killing single player version of CS. (steam has CS 1.6) I kept classic CS(1.5) installed for Bot support.

      I'm pretty happy with steam in general, but I think they are keeping bots out (single player) to make people buy Condition Zero.

      But I suspect that will change when HL2 comes out, and people port CS to it, with real bot internal Bot support.

      • Let's not forget that Valve didn't just pull the bots, oh no, they pulled them TWO DAYS after the changelog was posted, and snuck the info into it.

        They were pulled with no warning or explanation. In fact on several occasions Valve outright denied it.

        Essentially those who beta tested the bots, like me and many of my friends, got screwed over royally by Valve. If they've been up front and said "Look, were removing the bots" then fair play to them. Without prior warning it would have sucked, but I'd have no
      • I keep an offline copy of 1.6 beta with TurtleRockStudio(think ConditionZero)'s CSBot 1.0.

        Good for lanning/botting/testing stuff/working on jumps. Granted, it is an old copy so it has old vulns (throwing shield through walls and such), but its better than nothing.

        google: csbot

        The only reason to keep 1.5 now is watching your old 1.3/1.4/1.5 demos. I wish valve would release a 'Media Edtion' of cstrike that plays all demos 1.0 and up and better controls and record options for people making movies.

      • Re:Quick problem / fix with NS 3.0 beta (Score:5, Informative)

        by Sparr0 ( 451780 ) <sparr0@gmail.com> on Monday January 26, 2004 @11:21AM (#8087864) Homepage Journal
        Few CS players will move to CS2, because HL2 will be written well. No more "click on the head, get a head shot" bullshit like in HL/CS. CS players, as a general rule, are incapable of dealing with engines where you have to lead targets for motion and lag. This revelation only recently came to me. I play CS rarely, but after many years I never understood why I performed so poorly. About a month ago someone actually explained to me how aim works in CS (just click on your target). All this time I had been leading my targets. This rift is not easily crossed, and is why CS2, if it ever exists, will not draw a significant number of people from CS.
        • I'm a tribes player that moved to CS because Tribes1 finally started to die off. With disc shooting you had to lead, its part of the whole game.

          Moving to CS, the whole "instant shot" does make some sense, they add recoil and reload time, which other games dont.

          HL2 engine is made for modifications, even if they dont port CS, you cant copyright the Idea of CS. But if theres any legal action, expect mods to be named COPS, or SWAT, or Police Force, etc.. It will be interesting.
        • So you think lag is a positive thing? Don't you find it a little stupid that the game changes when you get to a competitive level? CS has better net code than other games. I played Q1 and I loved the netcode but HL is 10 years ahead of ID in terms of netcode.
          • No, lag isnt a positive thing. But to ignore lag you have to give the client power, which IS a bad thing. Allowing the client to tell the server "hey, i swear i hit that guy, no matter what his client says!" and get away with it is just WRONG. That is why there are so many hacks for HL (CS included). But, even ignoring lag, games should still require you to lead movement.
    • You can't play it without steam. The installer for 3.0 beta installs the game directly into steam automatically. That's it. Anyone who has a problem with steam can just shut their trap. It works perfectly on my machine, so if you have problems it is your fault. And the server finder and friends network make steam 1000 times more awesome than old half-life. Heck I can alt-tab out of a game and not lose sound. Steam rules.
    • The reason you only see two servers is that the copying thing you are doing does not work! 3.0 is STEAM ONLY as far as I know. Just download it and go to town, Steam really isn't that bad.
    • My gaming group was playing NS 2/2.1 over WON well after Steam came out (look up "unmitigated disaster" and I think Steam is in the dictionary) and we had a list of servers that we generally played on. It was also POSSIBLE to play 2.1 under Steam, but no one that I knew did. However, with this release, -every- server that we used to play on, has switched to the Steam version, essentially because despite the fact that the web page says it supports both WON and Steam, it seems to "default" to Steam. So whi
  • but, what still bugs me, is that they haven't yet implemented a 'html only' version of their page....

    kinda makes it hard to browse for info...

  • Is it just me or is Valve trying to ruin their product with this crap so people will upgrade to whatever comes next? I haven't dusted off my HL cd since a long and painful encounter with steam which ended with what amounted to me deleting the directory because the uninstaller wouldn't work anymore.
  • Me and my roomate downloaded and started playing this yesterday after we sat around wondering why nobody was playing WON NS we found out the beta came out.

    Let me tell you. It is freakin' awesome. The game is nearing perfection. And the combat maps, which I was very skeptical ofl, are actually a ton of fun and very awesome. Great job NS guys.

    On thing though. We were supposed to do a bunch of homework yesterday, but since NS came out our day was shot. I guess its all work and no play today.
  • Natural selection is the best teamplay game in the world. The co-ordination that the marines need to win a round is second to none. The biggest problem with the game is noobs can fook it up for everyone. I think lowering the learning curve and adding more straight violence will simply bring the counter-strikers. What a shame :(
    • They did that. It's called NS Combat--basically Natural Selection with the RTS elements removed, and just lots of things to shoot/chew on.

      Natural Selection--even the full version--really isn't that complex.
      • Of course not but neither is chess by nature. However the level of balance achieved offered divergent strategies for victory. The base switch the research tree, the hive grab the HMG rush and these are just a few of the more obvious strategies, not to mention the difficulties involved in getting 12 year olds to guard an important point for more than 5 seconds. PLLEASSSEE I'll give you a lolly.
        • Lolly?

          "If you stay at that node for 10 seconds I'll drop you a shotty..."
          • I played back when there was no voice comm muting (or vote kicking, Imagine the trolling)and there were problems with 12 year olds spamming. The other team couldn't see it so you had to deal with it and it was the responsibility of the Commander to babysit. Maybe others had diffrent techniques to social engineer the little bastards into not wrecking the game but mine involved cajoling, rewards, and keeping in mind that they just want to kill kill kill. Which is fine if one of your soldiers wants to do it, e
  • The answer is none: None more black.
  • Sad I know, but I only just finished Half-life a couple of days ago (i'm a slow player and I started late).

    Now thats finished, what other mods are there out there for Half-life that I can give a go? What do you recommend?

    FWIW, I don't have access to the internet on my home PC so multi-player/internet games are completely out.

    Thanks!

  • Quoth the write-up:

    "Combat games generally last less than ten minutes, and require very little knowledge to play."

    Because that's just what the First Person Shooter genre needed: dumbing down.

    • Re:Great. Just great. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by magic ( 19621 )
      I think that means relative to regular Natural Selection, which has a steep learning curve.

      NS:Combat is easy because at the heart, it is a point-and-shoot game. What makes it fun is the RPG aspect. You get experience for kills (and for kills scored by nearby teammates!) and can spend those to level up through your own personal tech tree. The decisions you make there are important: will you go for heavy armor to be invulnerable to Lerk Spores, or buy a Jet Pack and take to the skies? Do you want to play

  • The Best Game Out There (Score:4, Interesting)

    by magic ( 19621 ) on Monday January 26, 2004 @05:05PM (#8092393) Homepage
    Even in Beta, I think NS 3.0 is the best PC game out right now. It looks and plays better than the rest (yes, even though it is on the Half-Life engine) and NS:Combat is incredibly fun even if you don't feel like a full-fledged NS game.

    The players agree-- within hours of release it rocketed above all but Counter Strike and Day of Defeat in the number of players.

    And you can't beat the price-- free for anyone who has Half-Life (which is only $14 itself!).

    -m

  • Ensuring Good Gameplay (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Play on regular servers if you want to play with ppl who do teamwork. myself, i play on Lunixmonster and the 3 Old Fogey servers [OldF] oldf.net. My handle is Niteowl. would be nice to see some slashdotters playing along side me :)

    Personally, i'm really happy that NS has combat is in. since there are quite a few NS servers out there that run COMBAT ONLY, you can basically use those as n00b magnets. Ppl who want furious gameplay/want to learn the game/can't guard an RT to save their life will go play combat

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