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Natural Selection 2 [Steam] is the FPS/RTS hybrid released for Linux way back in 2013, many years later it's still getting updates!

This latest release adds in a new tutorial named "Skulk Challenge", which will help you learn the various abilities it has like wall jumping. It also serves as a challenge mode, since you can download ghosts of other players and compete against them and earn badges and get a global rank.

They finally updated the confusing spectator system too. Spectators now have dedicated slots, meaning server owners can have full 24 player servers with 24 spectator slots too. A much nicer system, as I was often confused when trying to join a game and seeing "25/24" or something.

It took a long time, but 64bit is officially going into beta and will be released as a small update. Their 32bit version will officially retire, so if you're playing and you're on 32bit, you should seriously upgrade already.

On top of that, they also polished the game as a whole with balance fixes, bug fixes and so on. You can read the full changelog post here.

Anyone here still playing it? There's still a few hundred people playing it every day. It's also rather cheap now, at £6.99 it's not a bad price. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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Zengun Aug 24, 2017
Unplayable on AMD Vega with Open Source drivers :'(
Wendigo Aug 25, 2017
I haven't played it for over two years.
Last time I tried, it took over 10 minutes to even load a game and crashed so often that it took me three attempts to even complete the tutorial of one fraction.
Are those problems fixed by now?
I really liked the game even though I couldn't really play it. I'm still a huge fan of Aliens vs Predator 2 which is very similar but unfortunately not on Linux (but it runs perfectly via wine).
Ardje Aug 25, 2017
I have it, but then I realized I need friends to play it with.
And the first 2 or 3 years it would not even start on my pc.
So I've taken a plunge and walked through it. And that's it.
The time has come that I can choose not to buy multiplayer-only games.
Mezron Aug 25, 2017
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Quoting: ArdjeI have it, but then I realized I need friends to play it with.
And the first 2 or 3 years it would not even start on my pc.
So I've taken a plunge and walked through it. And that's it.
The time has come that I can choose not to buy multiplayer-only games.

Yeah, I made that choice a few years back. Now, it's only local MP only. On occasion, I give a MP only game a shot and it's usually a disappointment.
s8as8a Aug 25, 2017
Quoting: shotgun14Unplayable on AMD Vega with Open Source drivers :'(
Do you know why, by any chance? I'm curious; also, I hope that when I upgrade my GPU in the future that I will still be able to play this game with a free-as-in-freedom driver. :)

For what it's worth, it works with my AMD Radeon HD 6970, using the free-as-in-freedom radeon driver, in Debian stable/stretch, but it didn't in the previous Debian release (which is now jessie/oldstable).
ripper Aug 26, 2017
Quoting: s8as8a
Quoting: shotgun14Unplayable on AMD Vega with Open Source drivers :'(
Do you know why, by any chance? I'm curious; also, I hope that when I upgrade my GPU in the future that I will still be able to play this game with a free-as-in-freedom driver. :)

For what it's worth, it works with my AMD Radeon HD 6970, using the free-as-in-freedom radeon driver, in Debian stable/stretch, but it didn't in the previous Debian release (which is now jessie/oldstable).

It works fine for me with radeonsi userspace driver (Mesa 17.1) and radeon kernel driver on R9 270. So just a default distro install (Fedora in my case), nothing changed, works great. There has to be some problem with Vega, it's very new and the opensource drivers are not even upstreamed yet.
rkfg Aug 26, 2017
Quoting: WendigoI haven't played it for over two years.
Last time I tried, it took over 10 minutes to even load a game and crashed so often that it took me three attempts to even complete the tutorial of one fraction.
Are those problems fixed by now?
According to your PC specs, you only have 2 Gb of VRAM, try to set Texture Handling to 1-1.5 Gb. Most of the crashes I experienced are because of that.
ripper Aug 26, 2017
Quoting: rkfg
Quoting: WendigoI haven't played it for over two years.
Last time I tried, it took over 10 minutes to even load a game and crashed so often that it took me three attempts to even complete the tutorial of one fraction.
Are those problems fixed by now?
According to your PC specs, you only have 2 Gb of VRAM, try to set Texture Handling to 1-1.5 Gb. Most of the crashes I experienced are because of that.

That depends. If he uses opensource AMD drivers, the problems were caused by NS2 running out of 32-bit memory space. That is resolved with Mesa 17.1 with shader caching. The first load after new NS2 update or new Mesa drivers might take a long time (several minutes), and might have 32bit memory problems (that's why NS2 devs push to convert it to 64bit). But all future load times are much faster (e.g. 30 seconds) and the memory issues no longer occur, at least in my case.
s8as8a Aug 27, 2017
Quoting: ripper
Quoting: s8as8a
Quoting: shotgun14Unplayable on AMD Vega with Open Source drivers :'(
Do you know why, by any chance? I'm curious; also, I hope that when I upgrade my GPU in the future that I will still be able to play this game with a free-as-in-freedom driver. :)

For what it's worth, it works with my AMD Radeon HD 6970, using the free-as-in-freedom radeon driver, in Debian stable/stretch, but it didn't in the previous Debian release (which is now jessie/oldstable).

It works fine for me with radeonsi userspace driver (Mesa 17.1) and radeon kernel driver on R9 270. So just a default distro install (Fedora in my case), nothing changed, works great. There has to be some problem with Vega, it's very new and the opensource drivers are not even upstreamed yet.
Oh, I see; that makes sense.
rkfg Aug 31, 2017
Quoting: ripperThat depends. If he uses opensource AMD drivers, the problems were caused by NS2 running out of 32-bit memory space.
As I said, according to his PC specs. Luckily, we have it right here, one click away:

GPU Vendor: Nvidia
GPU Model: GeForce GTX 760
GPU Driver: Proprietary


So AMD could not be involved here. However, it's true that because of memory fragmentation NS2 used to run out of address space sometimes even though it doesn't utilize 4 Gb in total. It's not an issue now, except that maybe on Mesa as you pointed out, but for NVIDIA it's been resolved for a couple of years already.

I noticed that Windows players experience crashes much more often than me, could be the same problem with texture handling.
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