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Natural Selection 2 [Steam] is now available in glorious 64bit, but that's not all. This is a pretty huge patch, so let's take a look.

First of all, 64bit support is here and it's live. 32bit will still work for now, but they will remove it so it's time to upgrade if you wish to continue playing.

Highlights

  • Natural Selection 2 will also now detect the correct keyboard layout for you, but non QWERTY keyboard users may need to rebind certain features.
  • They re-worked some job & thread scheduling, which means the game can now make use of all of your cores. This can result in improved performance and increased core spread load.
  • A new crash reporter, which will send issue logs directly to them so they can take look

Linux specific changes:

  • As for Linux issues, they removed a dependency on Intel’s TBB (Threading Building Blocks) library.
  • Fixed that the Shared.SortEntitiesByDistance method returned corrupted results at Linux causing all kind of issues and crashes. This also fixes that you couldn’t play the alien commander tutorial on Linux.

Sounds like they've done a lot of modernizing in their custom game engine, which is really pleasing to see.

However, as of right now the Linux version is completely broken. You can easily enough get it going again though, as the developer is aware and they're working on it. They show the commands to run in the "Known Issues" part of the changelog, but even though they get the game to start up for me, there's no mouse cursor and no input being registered rendering it still broken for me.

Hopefully the Linux issues will be solved within a day or two as it does sound like a rather nice update.

You can see the full changelog here.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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8 comments

rkfg Oct 6, 2017
Intel TBB has been a source of freezes on map load during the "Downloading mods" stage, I reported it with a backtrace from GDB. Now that it's gone the game must become much more stable. The main menu is broken so you can't do much. Even connecting via Steam servers doesn't work because it can't find some NS2+ mod files while they're in place. Probably it's also caused by the main menu script being interrupted prematurely.

Too bad, the 64-bit Linux build wasn't available in the beta period, it only appeared today so this kind of breakage is expected.


Last edited by rkfg on 6 October 2017 at 8:31 pm UTC
toor Oct 7, 2017
Do you need to be part of the x64bit beta, or is it merged in the main branch?
rkfg Oct 7, 2017
It's released for everyone, no need to apply for beta. Also, they said the fix is also released so the menu should work alright.
groundhog_day86 Oct 7, 2017
So like usual, since its in beta linux support is not listed on steam but will work if i download and play?
Liam Dawe Oct 7, 2017
Quoting: groundhog_day86So like usual, since its in beta linux support is not listed on steam but will work if i download and play?
64bit is beta, not the Linux version.
ngel Oct 7, 2017
They already released a linux client only update. I played a couple of rounds and didn't see any memory allocation issues any more.
cprn Oct 7, 2017
Are the next playoffs coming up? They used to organise some national tournaments, didn't they. I watched some on youtube, seemed quite nice how the teams worked together.
jesta Oct 7, 2017
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QuoteLinux 64bit client has issue on start-up. This can be fixed by recreating the symlinks for FMOD libraries (in the x64 sub-folder within the NS2 install directory):
ln -sf libfmodex64-4.44.58.so libfmodex64.so
ln -sf libfmodevent64-4.44.58.so libfmodevent64.so
ln -sf libfmodeventnet64-4.44.58.so libfmodeventnet64.so

Reinstalled this game and had to do the above, that was mentioned in the changelog. In addition I also had to install sndio from aur to get it working. Also before these steps you need to opt in the beta


Last edited by jesta on 7 October 2017 at 8:55 pm UTC
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