KungFuSquirrel aka Andrew Weldon aka ‘the guy who made ns_eclipse and ns_veil and is now on the NS2 dev team’ has been interviewed over at ModDB. The NS2 related questions start at about question 6 and there’s some good info in there:
9. Are you expecting NS2 maps to look and play like NS1? Or should we brace for something totally different?
NS2 is going to be different than NS1, but I think it’ll still be familiar to anyone who played the first. Cory is still the art director, so you’ll see a lot of visual and thematic similarities both in the levels and in the characters and structures. I’m assuming everyone has seen the hive by now. It’s very different from the original, but still instantly recognizable as the iconic shape from Natural Selection. I think that comparison applies to the entire game.
Much of the core gameplay is still there, but with some new elements. You guys have now seen the power grid by way of Charlie’s blog update; map layouts will be different enough that you can’t port over NS1 designs in most cases, but many of the same concepts still apply. The layouts are a bit smaller and more focused and maps will be a lot more cohesive. Elements like weldable doors, turrets, and sieges are all going to be a lot more interesting this time around.
People should be excited for the change in visual fidelity We were limited to 800ish wpolys in the NS1 days… Today, triangles are all but irrelevant as a benchmark for performance. There are single props
with more triangles than entire chunks of level in NS1, and single materials that take up more texture memory than entire NS1 maps. Where NS1 levels were textured mostly 1:1 (1 pixel to 1 unit) or less, NS2 is currently 8:1. Our sexy next-gen vent2 equivalent is 32 units and 256 pixels tall – the same height as a wall texture from NS1.
Check out the full interview for the rest.
