Unofficial Honorverse Mod- Closed down due to IP requirements
 

Organizational Stuff

We have our own site now! http://www.honorverse.hwaccess.net/news.php

For discussion, visit sekrit channel on the community IRC server.

Okay, it looks like the community here likes the idea, so I'm going list those people who are down as mod contributors. (In no particular order)

Modeling: Unkn0wn, Sastrei, Enterprise-E, Shadowmouse

Scripting: Zatch, Locutus

Concept art: Kleiner Traum, DeepChrome, ThomasTheCat

Fluff Buffs: Locutus, Dahak, DeepChrome, Glacialis

If I've misinterpreted your post, and you either want to be here but aren't, or don't want to be but are, just send me a PM. This is a credits list at this point more than a list of duties.

Note: Since the scripting, FX, etc are going to be so similiar I propose we forget about the Peeps right now, and focus entirely on getting the Manty fleet ready for battle.

Current priorities:
Modelers: Right now we need to get the basic renders out, I reckon we can use Enterprise-E's render for Manticoran SD/DN, Unkn0wn's looks like an excellent destroyer (may need fewer weapons though, or none at all if we decide to use subsytems for weapons) and Sasteri has a nice lineup of missiles and Peep ships. Right now I'm thinking of having boxier rears for Peep ships to set them apart from Manties, and Manties being symmetrical with regards to fore and aft Hammerheads.

I'm also thinking that the semi-flat front of the forward hammerhead in Unkn0wn's render would be very good for ships of DD, CL and possibly CA classes. Very rounded and with an indent for chase armaments in the DN-SD bracket. Rounded bow with chase weapons around the nose for the CA, BC and BB classes.

An mini-model of <15 polys for a ultra-basic weapons blister subsystem would be good. Can then be textured in laser, missile tube etc. Missile tubes/lasers are actually pretty close in size IIRC, should only need one size of this. Provides us with a way to create weapon subsystems, simulating a combat environment where weapons can get knocked out until you get back to the shipyard.

Concept art: the following would be much appreciated.

• Space stations
• Shipyards
• Battle Fortresses
• Recon Drones
• Merchant ships
• Missile Pods
• Q-Ships
• Anything from the Honorverse I've forgotten here.

Scripting: When I get some time (hopefully this week-end) I'll try and work up an engine script that approximates Honorverse ships. Zatch, could you try to work on some of the FX and possibly laserhead missiles?

Thats all I can think of for now. Oh, I've contacted HomeBoy about getting our own mini-forum hopefully.

Good luck to all, I sincerely hope we can pull this thing off.

Honorverse buff here. Not sure how I could help though, as I'm only up to Flag in Exile.

However, my friend JRL3001 (who got me into Honorverse) has access to Honorverse stats and suchlike, and is a HW fan to boot. He might be able to get the needed information, and possibly some other contacts.

I would love to see this, but I've no idea how to help beyond moral support or creative ideas. :D

DeepChrome found this nice picture ad Ad Astra games to give you an idea as to what some of the ships are like:

Rather gray looking. Hopefully some texturer or modder will know how to put team colors and badges on those. >_>

And then someone's going to be doing Peep Navy and RMN badges, hmm? :D Come to think of it, that'd be a rather nice thing to put on my PDS fleet next time I battle stepdad...bwhahaha. (I'm still trying to get him to read Basilisk Station...he hasn't gotten to it yet.)

HH is one of my greatest inspirations to date, so I'd love to see a Harrington mod come to fruition... but yikes! That pic makes me remember why I absolutely abhor HH ship-design, this is prolly as classy as they get, makes me long for ships like the cover-art of Echoes of Honor. Ah well, some people love ST saucer-ships too so I suppose to each his own. good luck!

Onoz! That Klingon and Federation ships have perfect shots right up the rear throat of the Manticorean ship's impeller wedges! They're doomed!

I'd absolutely love to see the rules of battle from Weber's science of space battle applied to a mod, and a Homeworld one is probably the closest gaming universe aside from maybe Nexus, and that I'm familiar with, that makes sense in which to try. It'll be interesting how things like "roll ship" and "strafe" will be accomplished, as these would be an incredibly important part of the battle strategy if it were to truly take advantage of the way in which the ships' propulsion technique work.

The ships ARE butt-uglified, though. I'd wonder if some creative license would be allowed.

Wish I could commit to assisting, but a combination of Retrofamily and business travel have already made me break commitments to other mod projects around here.

FYI, I did this quick mock-up so those of you who are not familiar with the universe could see what's so special about it.






Would really make a tactician's day!

-- Retro

I don't understand this - why will the grav field protect you from a laser weapon, and how is interstellar travel realized with this?

Moe: It doesn't make for intersteller travel. The series uses hyperspace for that. What it does do is "suck the ship forward" as retro put it at accelerations of up to 6.0 kilometers per second squared.

As to sidewalls: think of it as a mini black hole stretched out into a geometric plane. You know that black holes can stop and/or bend light, that is what the sidewalls of this universe do.

Quoted an IRC conversation with Moe because I suspect others will probably have similiar if no the same questions.

black holes suck light into it's even horizon, but when it's stretched out like this...

where does the light go as it's warped off the gravitic field? wouldn't it present a danger to other ships as it refracts into their front and rear "unprotected" ends?

Progenitor: Generally in this series the lasers are so powerful that although they may be attenuated to a degree, they go through. And yes, the holes at the front and back can be an issue. Click on the link in the quoted IRC pic for another view of it.

&^%@#!$ I had about a page long reply but the forum servers stopped responding for about 5 minutes. :( Will type more later.

Highlights: plush treecats, HH bumper stickers, all books for free on the CDs that come with the hardcovers, a miniature-based HH wargame that's very very complicated, how Moe and anyone else interested in the technology should read On Basilisk Station for free because anyone explaining is bound to not do it in Weber's style -- which I think is important! 8) Fairly easy to understand the technologies by the time you finish the first book.

Edit: We're going to need to find out how to do laserheads in scripting. Also, since technology in wartime developes swiftly, we're going to need to pick one era to start with -- OBS is probably best, minus a little set of weapons a certain Admiral deems necessary to mount on the ship -- and incorporate the others later on.

I strongly, strongly recommend that anyone interested in the Honorverse or this mod to read the first book. I simply cannot stress this enough as otherwise the tone of the universe and the fundamentals of the technology won't be nearly as clear.

Glacialis, see my excerpt from On Basilisk Station, spoilered above. You don't HAVE to read the entire book, but you should at least read the last dozen or so chapters to truly see how combat works in the universe.

...and of course, that's a bit like reading the last twenty pages of a mystery novel first. :)

-- Retro

Guys, Homeworld maps are typically a few hundred km across. Since those wedges apparently extend hundreds of kilometers away from the ship that is generating them, I don't see how this could be realized. In HW2 terms you would have two battlecruisers at opposite ends of the map, and that would be the absolute minimum distance allowed. I think you will have to give up range realism in order to make the game actually enjoyable.

Oh, definitely. And careful attention to missile exchanges 'cause those are the primary means of warfare. But when they get into energy range, it's going to be pretty.

Time scale is also going to be an issue.

Retro, I skimmed it earlier :) and yes, it does explain a lot of things. But besides being a good book in its own right, OBS is a good introduction to a whole universe of technological intricacy -- though not delving into hard sci-fi -- and it truly does deserve to be read in context. MHO of course, but it's free! Everyone likes free! 8)

OOOOOOH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just ran across an old thread about someone wanting laser warheads the other day too. Old, as in several years ago.

I can model and texture, though I've done that with my Lego stuff, where I had prerendered textures. Same for the models, I got to rotoscope them. However, I'd be more than happy to give it a crack.

I'm on "Honor Among Enemies" now, so I've a fair idea of the tech and tactics up to that point. Now, as for what Moe was pointing out, he is right. However, why should we limit ourselves to the HW scale? The distance readout is easy enough to change, so that we could compress everything down. Now, this means ships might be specks when zoomed all the way out, but this is it's own advantage, as I've discovered with my mod, BrickSpace2; it means we could lod very aggressively, which would be necessary. Considering the size of fleet engagements and the number of missiles once the Manties develop their pods, it would be the only practical option. The less screen time those highly detailed meshes have, the better the fps, and the higher the ceiling is on unit counts.

I'll agree on the ship designs, they're not my favorite, but I think a certain amount of creative license would be allowed, as Mattingly himself put superstructures on the ships on one cover. Mind you, I disagree with the idea of having superstructures up there when we know the CIC and bridges to be deep inside the ship, but still, the point remains.

So in short, I tentatively offer my services as texturer and modeler, though as I said, I've no experience with "traditional" textures.

Nother thought - multiplayer maps would be very interesting, since you could translate into n-space on the edge of the map and dive into the system to find a resourcing area. Alternately, you could just start the game with the player in place of course. Also, I've heard that the hyper effect is locked in hw2, is this true? Rather, would it be possible to create a new hyperspace translation effect for this. Seems like it'd be akin to that star-blur-flash effect from Star Trek (after and without rubber-band-ing).

I'm thinking before we start planning purdies, we'll need proof of concept on all key features. I do hope there's some scripting genius' lying about.

-Stefan-

Regarding range issues: we'll need to scale everything down by a fixed amount. Homeworld 2 can run maps that are thousands of km across, ships can have sensor ranges of 100s of km, but it causes some nasty lag. If, say, we scale all distances and speeds down by a factor of 10 (or more if necessary) then it should work out just fine. We might be able to play with the sensor manager to trick it into displaying properly scaled distances too...

Another thought occurs. Ships don't "stand still", they are constantly accelerating or losing velocity, as shown in the books. HW2 however works with more or less static ships with a fixed max speed that is reached after only a few seconds of acceleration...

Distances in Honorverse combat is so great that the odds of it hitting another ship are incredibly small. And by great I mean many thousands if not over a million kilometres (if i recall correctly).

Any mod would really have to play with the distances and speeds. Whether that would be acceptable is the question.

If you do decide to go ahead then I should be able to model some stuff, if I have some concept art to work from.

in the series, 30000k range is close combat(point blank actually...close combat is a bit farther) .10 mil(?) k is missile range.

Close combat - missile with nukes (or lasers..or gravlance i guess)

In the books, if a nuke explodes closer than 30000 km you are screwed

I may be wrong on the exact numbers but battles extend from a few million k to a few thousand.

Typical battle:
-both ships fire some missiles at extreme ranges hoping for a lucky hit (between the sidewalls)
-if they get closer they begin churning out missiles with laser/nuke warheads
-then they get into 'energy range'

It is very hard for two ships to get into energy range :)

Oh, and they always manouver so they can be protected by their impeller drive

Regarding nukes - but only if sidewalls are down, yes?

Definitely include the grav lance, if for nothing else than to watch people get toasted as they try to get close. :D

Aw just remembered, what about sensor invisibility until they light off their drives? It plays a key role in the books. Also the ftl grav pulses compared to the stl coms. Impeller signatures and hyper footprints at least will be easy enough. Oughta start assembling a list of defining aspects of the Honorverse, and how to tackle them, I should think. Obviously some stuff will have to be omitted, but there should be an effort to make this as close to the books as possible, I'd think.

-Stefan-

gravlance is made for sidewall kickin' ...the big thing about this, is that the attacking ship has to get very close to the other one.

Ships have 2 very weak points in their shields - front and back...no shields there. only armor.

Gravlance is mounted like an ion cannon, the firing port is in front of the ship. So the captain who has the gravlance has to expose his unprotected nose to fire....and that is deadly on that range. Defending ship can just fire down the other ship's "throat"


heh sorry..i thought you haven't read the books :)
[/teacher style] (for those who haven't read the books :p)

Let's make a "to do list":


-all ships Should be crazy-fast...naggarok style.
-Up, down invulnerable
-sidewalls..only with special weapons
-extreme ranges
-ECM
-PDS
-missiles {-nukes -lasers} -tweak the missile ai so it aims itself at nose/back
-subsystems
-hyperspace
-impeller drive interaction (if they come to close, they blow up)


ugh...lag. Also, low unit cap. Reducing the lagg

If you wanted it realistic, you couldn't have ships. Just icons. Not enough space for anything else.

Does anyone have a solution to my acceleration/speed problem?

Easy. Slow down acceleration time. Thus takes ages for the ships to ramp up to speed / decelerate.

Also theres a sperate thruster speed to main engine speed, relic just never used it.

For any game;

Fun != Realism, Fun > Realism

You can have fun without realism, realism without fun, and fun with realism, the two terms are seperate.

Remember this, never forget it.

That said... please take creative license with the ships... Hard-science authors seem to think very little of artistic creativity when it comes to ships. I've seen more than enough flying cigars/cubes/triangles/saucers to last me a lifetime (damned SG1 + Trek!).

I could help with some tech info
 

I own 'The Short Victorious War', 'Ashes of Victory', 'War of Honor', 'The Shadow of Saganami', 'Crown of Slaves', and the fourth anthology 'The Service of the Sword', and have the rest of the books on a CD that came with 'War of Honor'. The only book I don't have right now is 'At All Costs', which is coming out this month. I know a lot of things from the series, and what I don't know I can look up in the books.

I do recommend starting on OBS if this gets off the ground because, a lot of changes occur between the OBS and 'Shadow of Saganami', one of the more important of which is how battles are fought. New ship classes and weapon are two of the main reasons for the change, along with advances in electronic warfare and new tactics.

Hmmm, would a new campaign be part of the mod if it goes ahead? Or just the multiplayer component? Assuming of course the POCs bear out the ideas so far put forward.

Where'd Locutus run off to?

-Stefan-

Given that we have the storyline already cut out for us, a campaign seems like a plausible addition to the mod.

The priority right now, though, is getting the models, FX, and weird scripting features into the game. Assuming Locutus doesn't object, that is...

I'd say at this point, getting this to work in skirmish would highlight most of the bugs and such. Get it working against the computer, then you can go on to put it against a live opponent on the other computer.

Anyways, what's really getting me interested is the logistical problem solving of bringing Honorverse situations into a game that doesn't really emphasize them. Off I go. :D

It occurs to me that you might have to fiddle the HW2 interface a bit. The two biggest issues I see that we're going to have to work out are: weapons control and movement.

In Honorverse, they tend to pick their weapons: missiles/pods for long range, smaller ships for mid-range, and then energy weapons for close range, as stated. Either you're going to have to find a way to easily pick out your weapons subsystems, and program them like fire control officers have to, or someone's going to have to pre-script it so they do this automatically.

The other thing that came up to me is movement. In HW, you have the time to pop off move orders with a cursor, because most of the subsystems and weapons are automatic. You're not having to pick and choose, or telling your ships to turn an undamaged side to the enemy unless you really want to pop your cursor all over the place.

But in Honorverse, you're having to move a lot more often, and more quickly. First to get your formations there (that's something HW already has), second to turn to deliver broadsides (that's either going to have to be scripted at X range or whatever?) , and third to turn to wedge when your enemies fire at you. There's a couple more movement options there, particularly when you get into the fighting aspect of things. If all the weapons are scripted to act at certain ranges, then you could get away with doing the standard HW-style move orders without as much trouble. And of course, some people are going to say "where is the fun in that?" and be right.

But if you're having to manually operate which weapons systems to fire, the fire control modes (that's a whole 'nother thing), and monitor your whole fleet...that doesn't leave much time to give the move orders in the middle of a fight. In that case, having a few buttons with pre-set maneuvers that execute on the selected ship might be useful--especially the all important "turn to wedge" move. Maybe buttons like Turn to Wedge, Drives On/Off (lighting the drives), and Broadside Turn? (Or if need be, keyboard shortcuts.)

As for sensors, I like the idea of keeping ships hidden until they turn their drives on. It fits Honorverse, and gives a real fog of war effect that doesn't come into HW unless you're looking for enemy fleets in dust clouds. (On PDS, stepdad and I have a tendency to use this one map that has a very thick dust cloud in the middle--unless I send a probe in real close, and zoom up the Sensors to squint a bit, I won't find his ships that he's gotten hidden there.)

Also having the Manager play out as your Honoverse Tac Display might be a useful tweak--convert everything to icons, light codes, and so on? HW already uses a sort of icon system in "framing" their ships, and if you go far enough out, probes and the like become mere dots. At the scale you're all saying to switch to, everything would turn into dots anyways, right? ;)

The last thing I want to bring up--Honorverse ships don't manufacture much besides recon drones (aka probes), and the like. Are we going to need a shipyard class in this somewhere, building ships, or are we going to end up with fixed fleet numbers at the start where you cannot rebuild your ships? I'd suggest the latter for realism's sake, unless you want to include the Hephaestus next to a planet as a starting point for your side/team/whatever. That would give you the ablity to add ships to your fleet, but you also have to guard the station like "Short Victorious War" saw Honor's task force guard Hancock Station. I figure whatever we do in that area will define what we decide to do with resourcing.

OK...that's enough out of me for now. I've probably sent everyone's heads spinning...

Well you could start off with the new flight behavior, pick a small craft and start toying with the acceleration values...

I'm here! I started this thread less than 24 hours ago and I've already got people signing. up :)

I just had to go to the little insane asylum know as high school. ;)

Okay, I've given a good deal of thought to some of the problems that have come up, so I'll address them in no particular order.

1. Wedges: What I was thinking of shouldn't be too hard for the modeling people to do, if I'm right it will be darn easy. Simply make a plane-shaped subsystem as part of the model, either seperated from the ship or connected by a unltra-thin wire, whichever is easier. I got the idea from looking at EJ's shield tutorial once, where he made the shields for warlords out of a transparant mesh of the the ship that had been scaled up slightly so shots would first hit the invisible subsystem. I reckon if we give the wedges the 'PlanetKiller' armor familiy, they should be invincible against all weapons, save Sajuuk :) I don't know if it is possible, but if there is a way to make a translucent texture that might be best.

2. Acceleration: As Mr. Pete already mentioned, the engine allows for various thruseter accel times different from the max speed of the ship. This is why Battlecruisers in HW2 can't turn on a dime. I reckon we set a nice high MaxSpeed, then have an acceleration value scaled down for the HW2 game engine from the original 6 kps squared for light units.

3. Anyone and everyone is welcom to help witht this mod, whether they be a fluff buff, texturer or scripter.

4. Laserheads: I think the most workable idea is to take a cluster torpedo, give it about 25 missiles, give them .75 accuracy or so, turn speed of 0.0 and get someone to whip up an engine trail that looks like a laser beam. Then give the missiles a maximum range appropriate to the scale we settle on.

5. Thanks to everyone for their interest.

6. Impeller drive Interaction: set a maxtix of weapons (30+? Have to see if their is a copy+paste for that sort of thing in Maya) on certain points of the subsystem we've hijacked as a wedge that has massive damage and can hurt other wedges. Bigger wedges have more health than small ones, so an SD's wedge will survive an impact with that of a DD. However, a ship that meets a wedge... Give wedges a half-decent regeneration rate two. In short: wedges shoot at wedges, the one with the most health wins and we set the armor family so nothing but another wedge can damage them.

7. If possible, each member of the mod team gets a ship command slot. i.e. a line in ship description saying: CO: RADM Zatch, etc. (PS: I call the Superdreadnought :) ) Ship names will be drawn from the most distinguished ships in the Honorverse series of couse.

8. Main focus will be MP/AI skirmish initially. And Zatch is right about priorities. Lets get ships, FX, etc first, then we can figure out how best to play with all the new toys we've made.

Lastly, could Glacialis or someone contact the folks over at the PDS mod forums? From what I understand they don't have a lot of time to read Relic forums, but I know there or some talented modders/Honorverse fans over there.

I had an idea when reading Moe's post.

Why not do the LAC's (tin cans) first, where you have ships small enough with few enough weapons that they'd be a good testing ground? Figure out the wedges, weapons, movement, and so on, and mod them into the HW fleets first. Then once you get the kinks out of them, you can scale the whole thing up to battlecruisers and so on.

It's just a thought because I was thinking we're going to need a testing ground--modelers on up--before we go all-out with the rest of the ships. This would give us a basic script for an Honorverse ship, but on a small scale.

Edit: More miscellaneous ideas came out. At the rate I'm going, I must sound like Hemphill on too much coffee, lol.

Ready Made Pods: PLATFORMS. All you have to do is script them into something other than the one-shot-stay movement they do now.

Recon drones: Souped-up Probes or tweaked Scouts. I figure if someone wants to try the Manticoran grav-pulse or PN laser-com networks, all they need is to code lines going between them on Sensors like way points.

Lasting Damage/Damage Animations: I recall PDS got some headway into this to the point where they now have ships' death playing out as a few final subsystems firing away while you can do nothing with them, before they finally blow up. It occurs to me that we're going to need a way to give "maintained" damage to a ship on its hull that doesn't regenerate like with a HW ship. They don't have resourcers with erpair beams in that universe, and damage more or less stays for the length of a fight. That means models may have to be built with "damage" areas in mind, as if you're swapping a perfectly healthy one for one with a gaping hole in say, its forward impeller node. (Of course, affected subsystems would simply be gone...in a way the HW engine having subsystems should work for you here.) This would make the fighting more true to the books.

Communication delays: In HW, everything's instant. I'm not sure how we could figure in Honorverse's issue of news of a fight in one area taking its time getting to commanders in another idea, but it would make for an interesting quirk in battle scenes if you discover you have to frequently monitor your ships or they don't tell you they've gone up in fireballs... >_> I had this problem in Cata with Recons. If I don't watch them, they can die without my noticing. Is there a way we can put this into the game to add to the Honorverse element, or would it be too much to put in?

Broadsides: In HW, I've yet to see any ship short of a battlecruiser in all-out mode, fire all of them, all at once. I would think this might be a bit of a challenge, as broadsides are a big part of an Honorverse fight. A ship turns its side to the enemy, then cuts loose with every missile it's got. Unless I've missed the screencaps of some utterly awe-inspiring battle in HW2, I've yet to see anything broadside-ish, short of a battlecruiser going all out with every ion cannon and gun on some hapless enemy ship. Anyways, I don't know how much extra work this will need, but I would think it'd become important.

That's all I can think of for now. X_X Maybe later I'll post more, but hopefully this is the last edit for a while?

You're still in High School? o.O I woulda picked you for older. Ya never can tell, neh?

Hand me a white beret and a Battlecruiser! :p

If my laptop didn't suck I'd have started on ships today, I'll start fiddling with model-making and textures. Question - as a general reference for all potential modelers for this, should we use 8 pointed, 10 pointed or what for "circles"? 8 vertices set to 50 degree smoothing (or 46) seems to work nice, IMO.

As for your wedge idea, I like that, might I suggest trying to create some crazy effects with the "fx" shader applied to the wedge mesh. I did that earlier today and got a transparent ship...it was freaky-weird, like the normals were reversed...except they weren't. Anyways, my 2 cents.

-Stefan--"High School...oh yeah, the one that sucked."--G.

Sasteri: The rounder the circles the better. I'll leave the exact nature of that up to people who actually know 3D modeling, since I will be the first to admit that I don't. 10 is a nice round number though.

Hmm. Have to ask Zatch to play with his FX editor tools (he knows more about them than anyone) and see if we can get some interesting FX effects for the gravitic-based shielding.

Oh, and some links to good Honorverse info:
Ship Charts
Weapons Tech Reference

I think that pic I posted a while back is a good reference if the modelers need one.

You can make custom armor families, no need to stick with the stock ones. i do that for RW to raise HW1 ships' life expectancy to a similar level like in HW1.

Can HW2 ships be scripted to have ammo?

As for "battle damage", that's easy, if not the best visually - just eliminate or lengthen repair times. I'd go for a massive lengthening, as ships do have onboard vac-suited crewman, and I've seen references to "repair (damage control?) remotes."

-Stefan-

Okay, I've got some concept art pics from the web for Sastrei and Unkn0wn since they have volunteered to do some ship models. Anyone else who wants to model for us is of course welcome. Concept art for pinannces, shuttles, space stations, shipyards, etc would be great too.

@Zatch: You've done a lot more scripting than I have, is there a way to turn hit effects on/off depending on what it is you hit? It would look kinda silly to have hit effecys spawn when the wedge got hit.

@Everyone: More help is always welcome, please sign on if you have modding skills to contribute, artistic skills, or are just a HH buff! :)

Artistic license is of course welcome and encouraged, feel free to tweak to your heart's content. These are some nice looking ships, should provide you modelers with a nice starting point. As an FYI, there are anywhere from 3 to 8 boatbays IIRC on the bottom of the ship, depending on its size.


And here's some concept art by Thomas the Cat:

My lil BuShips'd like to announce some of the first base meshes!



As I say, these are >base< meshes, no greebs or anything yet.

-Stefan-

Mod edit: You flunked BBCode 101 :p

Edit: Apparently. :D

Is it possible to make the wedge have some kind of light-skewing effect so it would be invisible, but anything on the other side is invisible also. just wondering because wedges are supposed to be that way.

An idea for pods (when used during combat, not pre- launched) : make a missile that can't acclerate but after a few seconds, splits into the appropriate number of missiles (different for RMN and PN)

Will you give missiles impellers like the ones in the post by Locutus that damage things? Asking because with the reduced range scale imposed by HW2, I can see ships getting in the way of an impeller missile on its way and getting annihilated by the missile's wedge. This would be nearly impossibe in the books, but with the way everything will be crowded together...

Anyway, I hope this mod can survive because I've always liked Weber's space battles (from all his books, like the Empire From the Ashes trilogy, not just the Honorverse) and have wanted to see their like in games for a LOOOOOONG time. Of course I don't plan on seeing a planetoid in anything. Ever.

heeey i want a dreadnaught too!! 'the void'

@Locutus: Hit effects may be toggled through the use of "penetration" values. If the weapon doesn't penetrate a particular armor class (e.g. the new 'Wedge' armor class we'll make) it spawns a different effect than when it hits something and penetrates. We can just make the NoPenetrateFX a null effect (this is speculation, of course, have yet to test it.)

@Dahak: I'm not sure about making things behind the wedge invisible, one thing we _can_ do, though, is make the wedge a matte black color with no specular highlights, since we'll probably be using mostly black backgrounds if the goal is realism. This should mimic the effect of "cloaking" everything occluded by the wedge.

Edit --
Time to decide how we'll scale things so I can start working on the weaponry. I'm thinking we should cut everything by a factor of 10,000. That means the multi-stage missiles will have an effective range of 3,000km instead of 30 million km, lasers will have an effective range of 100km, etc... These things need to be scaled down because the sensor manager doesn't like big numbers (there's a clipping plane that cuts everything off past a certain distance.)

Edit 2 --
Might need to scale things down even more. I'm having a lot of trouble tweaking the sensor manager's clipping ranges and they're very restrictive...

The biggest problem you'll face is getting those giant dildos...err...ships with a reasonable polycount into the game. You'll have to spend 10-12k on the body alone if you want a relatively round surface.

wouldn't having the wedges cloak ships make the ships...unseen by anyone?

i mean, given the size of those wedges, no one would be able to see abything much less attack anything unless they see the ship's fore and aft ends.

"seeing" doesn't matter too much in the Honorverse universe due to sheer range. At that sort of range its sensor scans which matter the most.

I've not got time to model anything now (grrrrrr, lectures) but I will see what I can do later on today.

Uni, it shouldn't be as bad as you think, although rounded the ships have very straight midsections without many kinks in them, which should mean that we can offset the poly damage by doing the midsections all in one piece. I'll have a go later on and see what I can do.

And what about customisable loadouts depending on which sort of combat doctrine you prefer? I would quite like the option to equip at least some ships with grav lances and energy torps. Or perhaps it could just be a different build option.

For lasting damage, we could build and texture the models predamaged but then cover up the damaged spots with subsystems. During combat these subsystems would get blown off and expose the damage.

I think that Nexus: The Jupiter Incident would be a better base game to mod in this case, guys. It emphasizes tactical decisions rather than strategic ones, and you have much greater control over your individual ships.

not to mention it has larger maps and FAR better graphics.

although the moddability might be in question.

yes..nexus is the better choice.
You already control weapons,shields,power etc

However, we already know how to mod and love modding HW2, so going to Nexus would be very difficult. That, and Nexus has a feature I very much dislike: you can't move your ships to an absolute position in 3D space, only relative to other ships.

A thought about sensors: Make secondary sensor ranges very long to reflect gravitic sensors, and primary ranges significantly shorter.

that would work, although the entire map would turn blue when seen from the sensor manager.

it seems when this mod comes into works, the modding community might unite.

Progenitor: I thought that the secondary sensor only showed up little dots beyond the blue sphere. Within the blue sphere you can see full details of everything which is not cloaked. Range for primary (and thus targeting) about 1,000 kilometers?

Zatch: How about increasing the scale factor by half so that MDMs have a max range of 150 km? I think this mod will have to be played on some of the HW1 maps from the community map pack to get big enough maps.

With regards to Nexus: Could Alex or somebody who is involved with modding that game provide some insight into its moddability? Did anyone ever make a succesful skirmish mod for Nexus? Frankly I think that might be a biggest strike against it: the lack of a skirmish.