After our technological experts worked feverishly to identify the newest assets revealed in the pre-alpha teaser, UWE have cast off all phallic suspicion with the Kharaa resource tower reveal; the harvester.

The Harvester serves the same role as the alien resource tower in Natural Selection; the alien team builds these structures on top of nozzles in the level to gather resources. When designing the look of the Haverster [sic], we wanted to retain the bulbous-ness of the original while incorporating the new visual style of the alien species. The bony growths, glowing sac and finger like tentacles are recurring themes in the alien designs. While we want the Harvester to feel like a living part of the alien ecosystem, it was important to make sure that the structure didn’t look too much like a playable character.

In addition, Max has been recently answering a few questions in regards to the Spark and Cinematic editors for NS2. So, if you are looking to read up on some of the more technical aspects for mapping, or just interested in reading more on NS2 then I recommend you check them both out. And in even more exciting news, Max has indicated that the regular Friday updates will now begin to feature more than simple Spark editor content. Those with a keen eye should notice what we are in store for next.

NS2 has been voted the Indie Game Of The Year by readers of ModDB.com.

The win is coupled with about a minute and a half of gameplay footage. Click this link. The footage starts around the half-way mark of the video.

On show is some marine vs skulk combat, marine and skulk 1st person footage, a brief cameo by the gorge and an array of marine structures including the builder-bot.

Stay tuned for some CSI analysis of the footage by our attractive forensic experts.

Watch the stand alone video featuring NS2 music, after the jump.

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A brief video of Flayra shooting some skulks wooden dudes has appeared on Flayra’s youtube channel. In the grim future of the NS universe woodism is pervasive. Flayra explains:

This video shows a simple mod we created for Natural Selection 2 to fine tune some features of the engine, like animation blending and physics. It also gave us a great opportunity to test out our content pipeline and modding infrastructure. This simple rifle range game was created from scratch (it’s only about 500 lines of Lua code) and took very little time using the Spark toolset. This mod doesn’t use any of the Natural Selection 2 game code, so the actual NS2 rifle behaves a bit differently. We thought you’d enjoy a peek!

The NS2 map editor, Spark, will be released to preorders today!

This is a pre-alpha release of the editor, which means we still have lots of features to add and bugs to fix. Releasing something that is in this stage of development is pretty daunting – especially when we know it will be compared to more mature tools that have had many man-years of development – but we expect that most of you would rather get an early build than wait for something perfect. So much for “when it’s done!”

The editor has a built-in updater which checks for patches when you start it up. Doing a pre-alpha on with this many people is a new experience for us, but our hope is to release new patches a few times a month, all the way up until we ship Natural Selection 2. In addition to bug fixes and features in the editor, patches will also include new artwork, other tools we’ve developed, and ultimately the alpha and betas for Natural Selection 2.

Download the Spark map editor here!

We’ve also thrown up a Spark forum for people to subject their creations to ridicule and ask for detailed instructions on how to read the manual.

Celebrating the 7th anniversary of the release of Natural Selection, Unknown Worlds has spooged two in-game NS2 screenshots all over our faces. Yes!

Pretty awesome if I do say so myself, and I just did. Also worth noting is the first look at the lerk in the first screenshot. Is that a beak?

Along with the screenshot release comes news that the NS2 level editor “Spark” will be released sometime in November to everyone who has pre-ordered. The editor will include a stripped down version of NS2 so you can explore your creations in-engine.

In AusNS2 related news, look for a new and improved version of the megalist sometime in the near future!