Homeworld2 (2.0) [Update: SVN Public]

[Supernova]

...Industrious is a good word They've already been added to the SVN so hiigaran side is catching up with the vaygr side (considering about half their ships already have some form of normal map up)

[Turambar]

going on being industrious

[CnlPepper]

Wow, great work.

Just to let you know I've fixed the bug with HodEd that occasionally produces off lighting on some ships. See the hoded thread for the new version and for instructions for fixing the models. I recommend you run *all* your models through the new version.

[Supernova]

7 Minutes of mindless explosions, enjoy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz8BYwDnMDk

[Homdax]

Super! Super...

[Ammon Ra]

Nothing but beautiful...

[Silver_Wolf#]

Super: Add in engine glow, its just odd that weapons light up a hull and the hot gas/plasma that goes out an exhaust port doesn't cause any light up effect.

[Sastrei]

Supernova, you may want to update your drivers if they aren't the latest release, that checkerboard explosion issue has been fixed afaik.

The video rocks.

-Stefan-

[Ammon Ra]

same thing supernova posted but with some youtube-fu thrown in. You can watch it fullscreen reasonably well. Add sound next time though, watching it in silence is already impressive. add some hw2 music in and it'll be epic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz8BYwDnMDk&fmt=18

[Riess]

It's... dark.

[Sky_walker]

Yea... cause that's test map... vid could be better if made on other map IHMO.
Yet... guys... video don't show even 25% of that beauty... on the other hand however it hides 99% of ugly things ^_^


And for now...

Hiigaran BC

What was changed

As you see (or not) besides shaders themselves there is completely new texture for Arbiter cannons... resolution now is 4 times default! ^_^
Hm... ok... it's cool, but now texture on hull looks ugly... low-res. :/ Hm... eee... forget it, you won't get uber-high-res Hiig BC.

what other High-res textures has been added

Stuff with high-res textures currently in mod:
Hiigaran Ion-Cannon Frigate
Hiigaran Torpedo Frigate
Hiigaran Ion Cannon platform cannon (not the platform)
Hiigaran Arbiter-class Kinetic Gun
Hiigaran Long Range torpedo (destroyer one)
~all made by me

What wasn't changed

Well... Ion cannon turret is in need of shaders... but will do this tomorrow.

[Turambar]

Super: Add in engine glow, its just odd that weapons light up a hull and the hot gas/plasma that goes out an exhaust port doesn't cause any light up effect.

that might actually be possible.

it will probably cripple performance, but i think i might give it a shot

[Eric072691]

Someone with a good PC could do it to show off the upgrades.

[Turambar]

Someone with a good PC could do it to show off the upgrades.

actually, just realized that was a bad idea.

1: lights added to ships in the .hod seem to cause crashes

2: you pick your trail color, so unless we could magically make it not crash and script it so your player color changes the light color, it's a bad idea.



hmm, this might be a good time to call dibs on the Hiigaran Destroyer.
consider them called.

[Supernova]

@Tur, its actually not lights, but NavLights added. As long as 'Only Cast Light on High End Systems" is unchecked and its not visible then you can create a point light wherever you want. Sadly, this can degrade performance quickly. All the trails do have a bright white in common that could be used for the NavLight color.

As for the checkered texture thingy, I have the latest drivers unfortunately they don't fix the problem. EvilJedi has had to roll back to a much earlier set of drivers iirc. Eventually I'll get the right version installed.

@Riess, its dark because I wanted to test the new per-pixel lighting. Its quite cool watching a shipyard pull up next to a mothership and cast light on to the side of the hull. Or park ships outside the mothership's hangar and watch them light up.

[Turambar]

that's my first question.

my second question: i've got a decompiler for decompiling the .ship scripts, how do i recompile them?

[TON_Viper]

No need. They run fine decompiled.

[Avathar]

i say do it it looks ugly. but if its a lot of coding dont bother

[Elukka]

This is awesome.
Someone please do it for PDS!

[Turambar]

Hiigaran Destroyer is now a WIP
only the main texture has been worked on, and i'd put it at about halfway done at the moment.

[sinhosie]

Great work guys... Nice videos some music would have helped :P... I hope the guy that does the complex mod applies these new changes to his mod that would be awsome...

Do you guys still need help with anything? Let me know and I will see if I can help...

By the Way what tool are you using to create the maps?

[Turambar]

i'm using photoshop to draw a heightmap based on the textures, and then the xnormal plugin for photoshop to generate a normal map from the heightmap.

[Homdax]

Tel'Quessir needs to see this...badly...

/me digs around pockets for emails and numbers..

[SmileyToaster]

This is so effing cool

Especially love the Hig BC and the Destroyer.

Sweet stuff guys

[Blah]

This might just be due to my personal tastes, but does anyone think that the saturation of the explosion's reflections is a bit high? Kinda looks like an 80's disco...

[CnlPepper]

One of the artifacts of enhancing the shaders was that the specular intensity is significantly increased (due to being added and not multiplied now). As such the lights look a lot brighter.

There are two ways to fix this, decrease the light intensity ranges or reduced the specular channel for the ships. The latter is the most desirable and easier to do.

Out of interest has anyone been adding the gloss map information to the red channel of the glow texture? People seem to have forgotten I've added this to the shaders! The gloss levels of the ships look very low, ie at unaltered/zero. The standard HW2 gloss would be ~110 in the red channel. Making a proper gloss map that differentiates the different parts of the ship would ideal. Low values for things like the thrusters, matte sections of the ships (with low specular also for the matte) and very glossy sections for the windows/less rough sections of the ships. If done properly the gloss map would add a lot to the specular detail.

Regarding the megaliths, you'll need to switch many of them from the megalith shader to the matte/ship shader. The megalith shader is now used for planet atmospheres.

I'll have the alpha channel shader completed soonish (needed for the bentus ruins), I just need to reorganise the shaders a bit internally first.

[Mantaray]

many good works happening here. i love the destroyer, it looks great!

[Sky_walker]

CnlPepper - I add gloss maps to all ships I make
About the megaliths... yea, there is quite lot of work with them. I already tried balcora... looks neat far more realistic than in default HW2

Turambar! It was me who wanted to make destroyer!!!!


sinhosie - we use Photoshop with Nvidia DDS plugins and CnlPepper's modded CFHodEd (aka Cold Fusion Hod Editor 3.19). You can get all of this from Assam Kiith'sid Storehouse (link in my sig).

Blah - well, in some cases it looks better than with lowered explosion's reflections, but I guess that if we gonna lower brightness of them/make spec maps darker, then we will do this at the very far end of mod development. There are dozens of more important things to do

[Turambar]

aside from some touch up work (and badges n turrets), destroyer is done

[Sky_walker]

Erm... done? And what about the badge? Turrets? It's far from done I would say
Also I would make those black lines between hull plates less black... some normal map issue?
But besides that - great work! Looks very neat!

[Turambar]

like i said, badges and turrets.

as for the lines being dark, that's just the lighting. i take pictures like that to show off the normal map, looks normal from normal angles.

[CnlPepper]

Sky_Walker, any chance of a picture of Balcora gate?

btw are you removing the dark lines from the diffuse and specular maps which were originally used to mark panel edges? With the bump mapping present these should really be removed or at least greatly reduced.

[Supernova]

For the time-being guys, ignore the mirroring problem. Its not terribly hard to fix but we'll save that for a later revision, lets concentrate on just getting the normal maps assembled and on the objects right now.

[-=[F@LC0]=-]

Ehm - I don't know if it was suggested before but I would like to see the benefits of bumpmapping on damaged ships too. So maybe editing the "battleScar"(?-more or less called like that in the ship-file) will make th 2d holes and so on look more like 3d holes and scratches on the hull ..

Maybe cool .. or not ?

[Supernova]

Thought about that too, I'm not sure what rendering path the scars take though, so it may not be possible.

Btw, I call Tanis...
...And chimera...
...And...screw it, everything in the first level == mine....

...minus the core Turambar called that one...

[Turambar]

called and completed

[adamstrange]

Will this Shader Modification be some sort of update that I can put into my mod folder and all my custom hodded ships will take on the new look?

[L@pt0p Guy]

well yes and no

the goal for this mod is to improve graphics for the existing models in the game.

you can copy over the files to your mod and use them if u add credit where required but you will need to improve your ships aswel. but the ship shader does get per pixel shading you will just need to add normals and a height map

but with the using the files from this mod.
i dont think it has been directly said but from the nature of this mod and a few of the posts it would seem that it will be ok to.

also for my question when will we be seeing a download link or SVN?

[CnlPepper]

Turambar could I suggest to increase the specular and marginally increase the glossiness of the central dome section of the core. Its very smooth and appears, at least to my eyes, to be painted. As such I think it would looked more real if it had a more defined specular. Feel free to ignore me of course.

[Silver_Wolf#]

@adam: This is a shader that can be applied to any HW2 ship, they are current applying it to stock HW2 ships. It isn't their business to mess with the IP of other mods (cause modifying ships made by other modders can be considered an IP violation if done without their express consent). So to sum up: It will affect only the stock ships but if you want you can try and apply them to the ships in the mods you have just make sure that the modified ships stay with you(sort of like a personal modification of a mod).

[Sky_walker]

btw are you removing the dark lines from the diffuse and specular maps which were originally used to mark panel edges? With the bump mapping present these should really be removed or at least greatly reduced.

I tried that - it doesn't make models look better but rather more... flat (aka uglier). It seems to be odd, but, well... that's the way it is (or I just came to wrong model )

Balcora will come later on.

Supernova - so, now we reserve ships? Ok, so I take all of the Progenitor stuff (sajuuk, keeper, movers, drones, balcora and so on) ^_^

[Thunderbolt]

Once this is done... and if i can get someone to help convert all the pirates mod ships. i will apply this to the pirates mod.

keep up the good work guys

[Aemilius]

I must say, this mod looks very awesome.
Will it have much higher system requirements than the original Homeworld 2?

[Sky_walker]

Well... till now all goes smooth on my poor PC (1,5 GHz, 1GB RAM, Radeon1300), so I guess that if you don't want to make ave huge battles on multiplayer then new requirements wouldn't be much higher than original one (yet: DX9.0 GPU is thing you must have)

ok, now time for promised balcora... and few other progenitor ships
(In spoiler tag, as it's very very very tall image)

Progenitors stuff

not shiny?

If someone would like to know why eg. Balcora isn't shiny enough (?) - well, sorry, but in HW it wasn't intended to be very shiny It was using matte shader, so here you have also quite matte balcora (yet, it shines as normal metal ).

[Elukka]

It definitely doesn't need to be shinier. Most games go way overboard with this and make everything OMGSHINY. They aren't painted with chrome paint.

[Turambar]

hm, you might want to increase intensity on your normal maps, or we might not even be able to tell they are there. they are there, right?

[Solarmech]

Like the look the work. sm

[Kapyrna]

Next, we need to code permanent damage effects. An ion cannon raking across the hull of a Battlecruiser should leave a mark. Then, code Resource Collectors to repair and 'paint over' the marks.

[crazykushan]

will this patch be an auto patch
(as in i can check for updates and it will be there)
or will i have to download it
if so PLEZ MAKE AN AUTO INSTALLER
thanks
i want this so badley
keep up the good work

[adamstrange]

@adam: This is a shader that can be applied to any HW2 ship, they are current applying it to stock HW2 ships.

And thats the point that I was trying to figure out Silver_Wolf.
For example this new ship.
VGR EMPRESS NABUNTA DESTROYER


Since I built it out of stock HW2 ship parts,and not a modeling program,would the Shaders be applied to my ship once the Shader update was put into my mod ?