Change
• Shotgun uses now a symmetrical bullet spread pattern.
• reduced grenade launcher damage radius from 8 down to 6.
• reduced spit projectile speed by 12%
• arc menu will now always show both deploy and undeploy button.
• Removed celerity sound and screen effects.
• reduced Gorge spit damage from 40 to 30.
• It is no longer possible to damage anything during the pre-game.
Optimization
• Fixed bug where some objects would be unnecessarily rendered using material techniques that had no effect.
• Reduced the memory usage from keeping level data in memory.
• Reduced the memory usage pathing information.
• Improved Infestation performance on the client (thanks Matso!)
• Improved loading times when vsync is enabled by limiting the loading screen frame rate to 30 FPS.
Feature
• In-game audio device selection.
Fix
• Damage arrows are now more accurate when multiple players are attacked by a Whip at the same time (Thanks to Joop for pointing this out!)
• Fixed bug where request menu was not opening when your team has no Commander.
• Fixed bug where grenades were not dealing full damage on direct hits.
• fixed Whips being able to whack grenades through walls.
• Fixed issue were client side and server side selection status are sometimes out of sync.
• Drifters now uncloak when an enemy unit touch them.
• Fixed bug causing Celerity effects to remain on when the Skulk was walking or standing still in some cases.
• Fixed random number generator issue that caused inconsistencies in the bullet spread between the client and server.
• Fixed “Couldn’t open ”” error messages appearing in the log.
• Fixed Gorge build menu not getting immediately cleaned up upon death.
• Fixed bug which allowed more than 3 Sentries to be built next to a Sentry Battery in some cases.
• fixed melee attacks not triggering effects when hitting world geometry.
• Fixed bug where the main menu music would play over the tutorial videos.
• The server will now reload the map if 10 hours have passed and no game is currently being played (Thanks Mats!)
• Fixed bug preventing the MAC from attacking Hives.
• Fixed crash on exit if the rendering thread was still processing a frame during the shutdown process.
• Gorge Bile Bomb will no longer interrupt the Gorge’s Celerity speed boost after shooting the bomb.
• Fixed the “speed” console command not affecting player movement.
• Aliens may now evolve new traits if an existing trait is lost due to the upgrade structure being destroyed.
• Fixed bug where alt-tabbing out of the game would cause the Exosuit to become opaque.
• Chat will now display correctly in the dedicated server web interface (Thanks Sherman!)
Improvement
• cyst min range check will now pass when the vertical distance between cysts is too high, to prevent situations were Commanders could sometimes not infest resource nodes.
• selection and hotgroup creation works now without any delays.
• Commanders can now select enemy units.
• increased number of allowed hotgroup to 9.
• hot key icons blink up red if a unit in this group is under attack.
• added shift+click for manipulating selection (add/remove units)
• Cysts now “redeploy” instead of enforcing a minimum placement distance between existing Cysts.
• phase gates now show a connection line between each other on the minimap.
• phase gates show now the destination in their name.
Sdk
• Added support for distortion effects (like refraction) in surface shaders.
• Added Client.GetMusicVolume.
Veil
• Blocked small vents in Topographical
• Added cover to vents in Nanogrid

Feature
- Added the name of the player being followed while waiting to spawn to the screen.
- Added server browser filter option for passworded servers.

Optimization
- Improved the performance of lighting calculations.
- Changed fullscreen passes to be rendered using a single triangle rather than a two triangle quad to eliminate overshading pixels along the diagonal.

Fix
- Fixed bug causing text in a message box on the main menu to overflow outside the box.
- Fixed bug in the sv_ban command when banning a player not currently on the server.
- Fixed bug causing the Fade to "teleport" to the ground while Blinking into walls and the ceiling.
- Leading and trailing whitespace characters are ignored in the server list filters.
- Filtered out duplicates when mounting mods.
- Eliminated duplicate log messages when mounting mods for consistency checking.
- Fixed bug where returning nil from GetAttachPointCoords would result in uninitialized data being used.
- Fixed issue where having non-ASCII characters in the Windows user name would cause the game to not save mods, settings or cache files properly.
- The Command Structure health will no longer be displayed for enemy structures when they spawn in a nearby room.
- Fixed crash after alt-tabbing.
- Removed the "Attack" button from the ARC as it is not needed and was causing some problems.
- Fixed crash during precaching when a cinematic couldn't be loaded.
- Signaled Steam to stop refreshing the server pings when connecting to a server to avoid cases where the routers NAT table overflowed.
- Fixed issue where LaunchPad didn't properly specify the -game command line parameter when running NS2.
- Crash when acquiring physics models from different threads.
- Fixed bug where collision detection would fail on bodies which had extreme off-axis scaling applied to them (affected Harvester flinch animation)
- Fixed bug allowing the Alien Commander to cancel research on a lifeform egg at the end of research, gaining back the resource cost but not canceling the research.
- Fixed bug where ARCs didn't fire at targets when they had an attack order. They still need some work for actually listening to attack orders though. #3921.

Improvement
- The "Update" button in the server browser now changes text when finished updating servers.
- Steam overlay based web views moved over to in-game web view.
- The load progress is now displayed as a percent instead of a count.

Editor
- Removing the shift-hover-select thing that just spams undo items. Some other polish/fixes.
- Fixed crash/bugs with copy/paste then undo.
- Hardcoded hotkeys 0-9 for viewport settings (perspective, lit/unlit, etc.)
- Made Tool Settings dialog taller to not hide stuff..heh.
- Added an origin cycle mode to put the gizmo at the first selected object, so you can move a group of props without bad grid-snap.
- Fixed editor bug where you could create empty props.
- Fixed bug when undo-ing face merges.
- Welding vertices will now auto-cleanup things like degenerate edges, duplicate edges (that were formerly different), etc.
- Made camera acceleration an option (tools|settings|general|display settings). off by default now.
- Fixing some issues with deleting faces, undoing, etc. Details: FaceIds are NOT reliable when faces are deleted, so each vertex now stores Face pointers rather than IDs.
- Work in progress checkin for fixes to welding. Just adding some un-used stuff for now.
- Fixed some bugs introduced by adjacent faces optimization.
- Move operations, with/out texture lock, should now be a lot faster and smoother. Using a adjacent-faces-set per vertex instead of doing global face search.
- On second thought, completely removing scale tool restrictions. Mappers use negative values.
- Changed some scale tool parameters so it's less restrictive when sizing small-ish objects.
- Added weld-selected-vertices command. Activate Select Tool, select a group of vertices, then Edit|Weld Selected Vertices (at the bottom of the menu)
- New "knobs" for texture mapping (and other) spinners. purely mouse-movement-based. Up/down arrow keys still work if cursor is in text box. CTRL and ALT modifiers work on both.
- Fixed lost-focus for hotkeys.
- Feedback about how many faces were affected by texture replace.
- Added ALT shortcut for texture replace; added F, C keys to move up/down when in first person camera.
- Fixed annoying scrollbar reset with prop/texture browser windows.
- Added Texture Replace tool (red paint bucket, all the way to the right of the toolbar)
- Removed (-1000,1000) range limit on texture shift spinners. This fixes some of the texture lock-move blank-field issues..
- Grid snapping for texture gizmo. There is some weirdness with snapping, but it works.
- Ctrl + doubleclick on face now adds a whole body to selection.
- Paint(Texture) Tool now has moving handles, in addition to rotate and scale.
- Switching to hash_set instead for faster "used asset" lookups.
- Texture browser now has "show used only" filter as well.
- Props browser now has "show used props only" checkbox. Same thing for textures browser coming soon.
- Custom colors now saved to *.level files.
- Custom colors now saved between selections. Next todo: save per-level custom colors to disk.
- Autobackup filenames now include level name, e.g. ns2_refinery.autobackup2.level.
- Tooltips for tool bar buttons now display bound hot key. Bug: If you change them, the tooltips won't update until restart. Ah well.

SDK
- Added the ability to specify default values for settings in a render_setup file.
- Added Clear Level menu option in the Cinematic Editor to clear out the currently set level file.
- Fixed issues with COLLADA files that contained instance_material nodes.
- Fixed issue where COLLADA files that referenced textures with spaces in the file name would not be properly loaded if the file name used a relative path.
- Fixed loading of COLLADA models in the Viewer.
- Enhanced the sound picker with a hierarchical folder display.
- Added support for hearing sounds effects placed in the level in the Editor.
- Added support for displaying cinematics in the Editor.
- Added support for displaying web pages in game.

Balance
- Changed combat time-out to 3 seconds (was 1.5) seconds (makes Regeneration and Cloaking less powerful and easy to use).
- Reduced Shade cloaking radius from 20 to 14.
- Re-balanced Crags so they now self-heal, but only give 3% health every 2 seconds (min 10, max 40). (was 5%, min 10, max 50).

Fix
- Fixed error when starting Explore mode.
- Fixed bug where Crags were getting too much health.
- Fixed crash when a render_setup file could not be parsed due to improper formatting.
- Fixed bug where text with multiple lines was not properly printed to the console.
- Fixed bug where the spinner on the loading screen did not display if texture quality was set to medium.

SDK
- Added a second parameter to the callback called from Shared.SendHTTPRequest in the case of an error, which specifies the error message.
- Changed models to use a default material if one wasn't specified in the imported file.

Balance
- Evolving Onos eggs now requires three Hives instead of two. Onos eggs are a complex matter, and are a work in progress!
- Reduced Onos armor by 100 (-8%, effectiveness vs. Exos and heavy weapons impacted less because armor).
- Welder research time increased from 10 to 15.
- Exo armor changed from to 300/390/480/570 to 400/460/520/580.
- Welder rate reduced from 125/sec to 90/sec.
- Reduced shadow step cost from 15 to 10.
- Increased blink momentum to be close to build 220.
- Increase start blink energy cost from 8 to 12.
- Shift Hatch now creates 2 eggs, but costs 5 resources and has a 5 second cool down (was 1 tres per egg, no cooldown).
- Increased trait structure (Shell, Spur, Veil) mature health by ~20%. Also increased their base health to be closer to their previous mature health.
- Reduced spore research time from 90 to 60.
- Hive build time increased from 150 seconds to 180 seconds.
- Reduced Onos Gore range by 0.5 meters.
- Added cooldown to shift hatch ability.
- Lowered max healing on Crag.
- Added minimum healing from Hives.
- Changed combat timeout to 4 seconds.
- Reduced mega regeneration (max regeneration is now 10 per second instead of 120).
- Doubled ARC rate of fire (halved damage)

Fix
- Fixed bug where the server would leak memory under some circumstances.
- The ghost Power Node no longer takes damage, fixes a problem where the Power Node could not be rebuilt after being destroyed in some cases.
- Fixed rare bug where a Hive could become invulnerable if it was killed in the same frame as it finishes building.
- Fixed sound bug causing ambient sounds in the world to not play correctly.
- Fixed unbuilt shifts being able to generate eggs.
- Fixed Exo and Mine tooltips.
- Fixed regeneration effect showing up in combat.
- Fixed the "filter modded servers" option not always working correctly in the server browser.
- Fixed ARC targeting issues.
- Fixed already recycled units still taking damage.
- Added protection against speed hacking.

Improvement
- Added more loading screen tooltips.
- Added a display to the server browser to show the number of servers in the list.

Sdk
- Added the ability to specify "passes" for build rules in the Builder to setup simple dependency relationships.
- Added SoundEffectInstance:SetCoords() function.

Natural Selection 2 Build 228 is now live on Steam. This patch fixes crash issues some players are experiencing, especially those during the "pre-caching" phase of connecting to a server. If you do experience a crash in NS2, please submit the crash report via the displayed dialog; this information is very useful for us to fix any problems quickly.

Fix
- Fixed issue where the game would run out of memory on 32-bit Windows.
- Fixed bug where unicode characters could not be deleted in text inputs.
- The server browser scroll bar now resets when the menu is displayed and when the "Refresh" button is pressed.
- Fixed server crash caused by getting a new ability in the same frame an Alien was destroyed.
- Reduced bloom flicker (thanks slime!)
- Reduced visual noise when ambient occlusion was enabled.

Improvement
- Added server list filter option to display favorites only.
- Added option to disable camera animations.
- Disabled automatic sorting of server list during refreshing.

Optimization
- Reduced client and server memory usage by 200-400 MB