Homeworld:@(0.2.4.0) P#840 - June Update

[Admiral Nelson]

It looks like one of the old Avatars went on a diet/exercise plan. Slimmer, with bigger guns. What bugs me, though, is the obelisk-like front with just those two little protuberances for the small guns. They almost feel like an afterthought, pasted onto the model once it was finished. Maybe it'll look better when textured, but I would recommend a bit more smoothing in horizontally.

The ions are spot on, though. Probably the most appropriate design I've seen yet. It mixes the delicacy of the technology and the raw power and armor of the heavy cruiser wonderfully.

[Siber]

I will note that the model is quite unfinished, and the placeholder texture does it very little justice. The point of the screenshot was the delightful new turrets.

[Danube]

Hey!
@Siber!

Were can i find that map displayed in post #740! ur post that has two giant pictures! that map looks kick ass!!!!!!

-regards danube

[Siber]

The ones in #740? That background is in use in most or all skirmish maps in the currently available versions. The specific map your seeing probably won't be available for a fair while yet.

[ericrajuin]

Hello everyone my first post in the forum
Just posting some updatet this is some pictures of the unh support firgate currently under work
It's based on concept made by avatar
This ship is like a carrier that transport finit amout of fighters into hyperspace.
Criticism welcomed.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/52532960@N04/5060691843/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/52532960@N04/5060691877/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/52532960@N04/5061301498/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/52532960@N04/5061301472

[Admiral Nelson]

The one suggestion I have is to beef up the connection to the bridge. It's kinda out on a limb there, where most others are either part of the main hull or have a more blended look to them. While you're at it, some of the detailing just looks a bit angular and out of place in the back. It's probably not noticeable in the game, but from the angles you have it just bugs me. I'm also not sure whether there's one turret or three, but the one on top is a cute little pop-gun. In case they're not, the other two sightings are on the front sides, just under the pea-shooter.

[Siber]

********************************************************************************
Beginning kill tally for game on 11/5/2010 11:05:54 AM
* 6 of ship HWAT_UNH_FFAssault killed
* 13 of ship HWAT_UNH_DDStandard killed
* 107 of ship HWAT_TRN_FTInterceptor killed
* 73 of ship HWAT_UNH_FTInterceptor killed
* 35 of ship HWAT_REP_FTScout killed
* 67 of ship HWAT_UNH_FTCBomber killed
* 15 of ship HWAT_UNH_CTIon killed
* 60 of ship HWAT_VAY_CTgun killed
* 20 of ship HWAT_UNH_FTCloaked killed
* 1 of ship HWAT_CZA_DDStandard killed
* 36 of ship HWAT_UNH_FTCDefender killed
* 9 of ship HWAT_UNH_FFIon killed
* 7 of ship HWAT_UNH_CTHeavy killed
* 25 of ship HWAT_UNH_FTScout killed
* 36 of ship HWAT_UNH_FTDefender killed
* 1 of ship HWAT_VAY_FFAssault killed
* 5 of ship HWAT_VAY_DDIon killed
* 94 of ship HWAT_VAY_FTLight killed
* 20 of ship HWAT_REP_FTInterceptor killed
* 1 of ship HWAT_UNH_CAStandard killed
* 34 of ship HWAT_UNH_FTBomber killed
* 39 of ship HWAT_UNH_CTStandard killed
End kill tally
********************************************************************************

[Siber]

It has been a while, and we have not been idle. Four new finished ships, new effects, gobs of new placeholders in varying states, and a new game mode that has been quite occupying us, both in development and in playing it. If you want to cut to the chase, the files are available on our moddb downloads page as soon as the files clear approval.

New Ships
The talented Dark Sentinel has been quite busy, offering his own ships, helping realize our designs, and spiffing up an old favorite. Full backstory for each ship is available in the readme.





The Taiidani presence has been felt before, in the republic scout and interceptor. These frigates represent the Taiidani confederacy, a nation risen in recent decades from the ashes of the empire that never bowed to the Republic. They proudly wear the red and yellow of old. In addition to their obvious armament both mount small antifighter cannons, giving strike craft pause.





The Gunship may have given you a taste of our plans, but the assault frigate is a radical enough departure from the expected that it presents a good chance to talk about the Vaygr. Homeworld:@ is and always has been a rebuilding of HW2 from the ground up, and so it is with the Vaygr. The Vaygr are unknowns on the galactic scene, nomads from beyond the borders of any civilization that anyone considers important.




Their technology didn't get boosts from found starships, captured imperial warships, or bentusi charity, and their ships reflect that. The assault frigate's cannons are geared for anti-strikecraft warfare, and it mounts a heavy spinal projectile cannon. The Vaygr consider it a masterpiece of warfare, and shipyards throughout the reaches produce it with only moderate regional variations.



I don't think this one needs too much explanation.



In addition the placeholder UNH cruiser now has finished energy turrets courtesy of ericrajuin, and untextured turrets of my creation



Schwartz and MachinesInMotion, and myself all worked on the Vaygr destroyer model that you will probably be seeing quite a bit off.

Effects
Avatar has been going nuts with effects, and to be honest I have somewhat lost track of the cool things that have gone in. Here, have a picture of some beams.



Game Mode
I'd like to introduce you to my own pride and joy, Survival Mode. It can be found under Player vs CPU as its own gametype. You will find a number of maps you can choose from, but the basics are the same from each. You have an amount of starting RUs, and you can spend it on new ships as fast as you can click. As soon as you build a ship, the attacks begin, coming in successive waves. They will attack without mercy or heed for sensor range. Once you destroy the first wave, another will replace it, each bigger than the last. If you fail to kill a wave within two minutes, the next one will get impatient and come for you. When you run out of ships, the game ends.



Obviously you're going to need to build up your fleet and replace losses if you want to survive long, and to do that you'll need resources. There are two ways to get them! Firstly, there are bounties. For every ship you kill, you get 40% of its value added to your assets. Secondly, you get money for surviving every fifth wave. There is a catch, however. Every fifth wave is specially tailored to contain either ship mixes that are uniquely difficult to deal with, or ships that are themselves uniquely powerful. These boss waves must be defeated, subsequent waves will wait for them to be dealt with.



Be advised, the fighter swarms that you can see get quite large. The attackers are not constrained to unit caps. In part to limit the potential for computer crushing attacks, the boss waves from wave 15 onward are extremely unfair, and getting past them is a rare achievement.



Eventually, you'll die. When you do, a record of your achievements will be recorded. Inside Homeworld2\Bin\Release\ you'll find a HWAT_SURVIVAL_SCORES.TXT, and inside is information on how well you did. I've had a lot of fun playing this mode, and I hope you do too.


Maps



The thick dust clouds of the globule has prevented any long range reconnaissance, and makes the perfect mask for a potential enemy staging ground. Establish and defend a beachhead, but be advised. The enemy could surround your position without any warning.



Traffic through the kelym pass is crucial to local logistics, which means that eventually it will come under attack. You are in charge of its defense.



What the enemy is doing in the dunas expanse is unknown, but we can't allow them to occupy this region unopposed. Drive them out.



Access to and from the Higaara system is controlled by a network of massive hyperspace inhibitor stations, making attacks impractically slow without going through one of these bridges. In the old days each was protected by massive fleets, but in modern time no nation can afford such a standing navy. We have intelligence on an inbound attack, and you are in charge of the defense.

Beware, crews are not trained to deal with the kind of environmental threat posed by the gargantuan moving inhibitor stations. It falls to you to ensure that your ships don't stray into their path, even a mighty cruiser will be instantly crushed.

[MatthCoFreak]

Wooooooo this will be on top of my DL list as soon as it's out !

[Blaze]

OMG WOW SUCH PERFECT TEXTURES!!! Is there a release for this mod yet???

[23-down]

Awesome stuff... The quality you're showing here is amazing fantastic work to you and your team.

I think only the Taiidan Ion Frigate could get a little bigger nose. I mean such a Ion beam is imense but with a nose like on that ship it would result in a tiny beam barely loaded with engery causing less damage or only massive damage on a microscopic scale on the target. :P

scale it up a bit and it will be perfect. (My opinion only.)

[hzjd]

Can't wait to try it; why does the approval process always take so long? D:

[Siber]

The downloads are now available. Link again if you need it

[hzjd]

Great job on this mod. Not sure how finished the multiplayer aspect is, but man is survival mode fun. Wave 16 on my second try! How far does it go? Anyways, greatly looking forward to an eventual finished version of this sometime far in the future, with, what, 3 factions? Hard to tell how many. Lovin' the new effects too. And I assume we can never expect multiplayer functionality on survival mode?

[Avatar II]

Congratulations on wave 16! That's pretty darn good after Siber's difficulty tweaks, heheh. The waves go on until you get bored or die; I once got to wave... 33? 34? then quit. Epic 90 minute game.

Multiplayer skirmish is extremely not done at the moment. We'll probably get to it soon.

Multiplayer survival mode is something we've discussed. I -believe- the verdict was that it wasn't impossible, but would require a pretty hefty amount of coding. Since winter is coming, that may be possible sooner rather than later, but at the very least it'd require changing the AI's RU injection curves pretty dramatically.

Or perhaps just spawning an AI enemy rolling on the random waves and earning cash for each friendly player... that could get pretty intense actually. Just imagining the defender wave mixing with the ion frigate wave gives me icy shivers of terror...

EDIT: CRAP! I forgot why I was editing. Those who perused the readme will note that there was a bugs section. One friend has recently discovered a possible fix to the "white square texture" issue for some hit effects. The effect in question is a very large animation in one file. This may be too big for some computers to load. Our friend got it working just fine by rescaling the effect to 1024x2048. The file in question is (data)\art\fx\detfilms\fireburst01.tga. We will be hosting a version of this that you can insert manually shortly while I investigate a more elegant fix. Thanks!

SON OF EDIT: Here's the file. IF AND ONLY IF you get random white squares on vaygr weapon impacts download this and put it in your (data)\art\fx\detfilms directory. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/896078/HW%40...ireburst01.tga

[Siber]

Alright. Good old MatthCoFreak has lent a hand by identifying and scaling back some things, and removing the shaders. Iff you have performance problems, he's packed up his altered version and put it up at http://www.mediafire.com/?pw2gfd55vc09duf

I encourage everyone to try it with all the shinies first though!

Other things: Skirmish is entirely playable, but it hasn't been tested much lately. We have had one or two internal multiplayer tests, and they worked, but they've not been extensive. If anyone wants to organize a multiplayer match and see how it works out, I'd definitely try to participate. Multiplayer survival mode is an objective, and I think it's possible, but it's likely a long way off and not a current priority. I think it'd be a lot of fun, though!

I'd love to hear people's stories of survival mode, and see screenshots and score logs, by the way! It makes me really happy to know some people are having fun with this thing, and I like getting feedback on whats working, whats fun, what isn't, and what could be added or improved.

[hzjd]

Anybody wants to get a big multiplayer match going over hamachi, a friend and I are definitely up for it.

EDIT: Any way to get the other faction ships in a skirmish? Cause it gets mad boring with just UNH.

[aquemnun]

holy crap man, those taiidani ships are freaking awesome!!!

I heartily anticipate the release of more taii goodness
(and the vaygr assault frigate has enough dakka to make an ork turn green with env-wait a minute.....)

[23-down]

Indeed awesome.. I've just played the survival mode... I really like it.. The new music is fantastic as well. Just wish there would be some more tracks available.

Anyway the new ships with purple engines what are they? (Vaygr?)
Love em especially the great spinning animation is cool.

Only negativ things I encountered so far are the explosion FX animation error (your fix doesn't work with the big file variant.)

The Defender unit (my own units can't hit it very good yet but it's ok 'cause it's still unfinished.)

And the Recon unit while still unfinished I dislike the entire shape of that ship. Looks like 3 matches attached to each other and don't fit with the remaining ship designs. (my opinion only.)

I'm looking forward to your next release.

[Avatar II]

Now that we've got the white squares issue figured out I have split up the animation into a series of easily loaded 512x512 frames instead of one monolithic 2048x4096 sheet. This fix will be standard from here on in and should give you the full quality of the effect. We are also going to be adding a few more action-y tracks to the survival mode jukebox really quite soon indeed.

We'd totally neglected skirmish testing. The next release will include vastly improved build and research speeds, 250 and 150% respectively. We will eventually do our colossal build interface rewrite with the aim of enabling parallel build like in HW1, which will make the currently-rather-painful build times a bit more natural feeling. We hope to get this quick fix out in the next few days. Thanks for your patience and your enthusiasm.

[Siber]

NOTICE: 
This readme only covers the patch and how to install it, please refer to the full Homeworld:@ readme for credits 

and similar information. This is a patch, and you need Homeworld:@ 0.2.0.0 to use it.

CHANGES:
 - Vaygr assault frigate firepower reduced from erroneously high levels
 - Build and research speeds increased in skirmish games
 - Skirmish unit caps reexamined
 - non-UNH units added to skirmish mode.
 - explosion effects fixed to work with more graphics cards
 - added map thumbnails

HOW TO INSTALL:
  FOR .BIG 0.2.0.0
If you downloaded the .big version of Homeworld:@, extract the contents of this archive to your /homeworld2/data/ 

directory, so for example you should have a /homeworld2/data/ship/HWAT_VAY_DDIon directory. Then add "-

overrideBigFile" to the end of your shortcut.

  FOR FILES 0.2.0.0
If you downloaded the loose files version of Homeworld:@, simply extract the contents of this archive over your 

existing data directory, overwriting when prompted. 

  FOR LOW-FIDELITY.BIG 0.2.0.0
If you downloaded the .big file for lower end systems and wish to use the lower resolution effects within it, 

extract the contents of this archive to your /homeworld2/data/ directory, so for example you should have a 

/homeworld2/data/ship/HWAT_VAY_DDIon directory. Then add "-overrideBigFile" to the end of your shortcut. Then 

delete your /homeworld2/data/art directory to revert back to the low res effects. I do encourage you to try it 

first to evaluate the performance with the patch's effects first.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/896078/HW%40...%200.2.0.1.rar

[Zephyr]

Mmmm... It's very awesome! I'm looking forward to having completed drone frigates... And the campaign... and many things. Great work so far

[Siber]

Okay, important note. Don't save and load survival games. It currently breaks in some ways I understand, and some ways I don't, and would be wildly cheating if it only broke in the ways I understand, but due to the ones I don't, slows immediately down to a crawl and you have to restart the process. So if you have to end a survival game, just scuttle your fleet and get your score report, don't try to save the game.

I'll do my best to track this bug down, but right now I've really no idea where to start.

[23-down]

I've just spotted your Support Frigate post some msgs above.

IDEA:

My suggestion for the Support frigate would be like that:

Since it is most unlikely that you get a working repair script for it I would recommend to write a script that creates 1 small sqaudron of fighters leaving through the support frigate after it has left the mothership or carrier.

This squadron will be free and fully controlable and be replaced should the other one get destroyed. Should be possible to write a little spawn script with condition given if the squad is alive and active or not.
Even better it could be also used as special attack only which works if the squad is dead + a time delay for the special attack feature. So if you lose the fighters after 10 seconds it's basically shit happens because you have to wait like 180 seconds before you can spawn another squad with the limitation that you can get just 1 squad at a time with the specific support frigate. The fighters or corvettes could be also randomised like sometimes you get 5 bombers the next time 5 cannon corvettes etc.

That would give the support frigate a much more useful value.

That would also make it interesting some people are going with the support frigate thing to gain more fighters while another 1 uses more ion cannon frigs who will win? With rocket launchers this should be easilly dealt with.

As for your hyperspace idea I would limit that feature for like 2 or 3 squadrons only like 15 single fighters or corvetes. I mean it's not a carrier which would make it pretty much useless with the support in your hands.

I think the support frigate looks good as it is.

[Avatar II]

Today it's time for the Saturday Update Day Update
-table of contents-

i. New patch in the works
ii. What's coming soon: Mothership
iii. What else we've been up to and thinking about

So, to start things off auspiciously, we are a day late. Well, there's been several nice but firm requests for more periodic updates and releases, so we'll see if we can't sort that out and have actual next saturday be Saturday Update Day Update II. Besides, having the need to post something every week should motivate us to be a little more productive, one might hope.

I. First off: We're hoping to release another patch this week. This should have a few balance fixes, a few more FX, and if our luck holds, a few more songs for wave combat's music rotation. Right now there's many more minutes of ambient music than there is of combat music, so we're hoping to even that out some.

The Czalkir Destroyer has effects by Doci, but basically every other effect in HW@ is made by me. I've always been unhappy with the UNH assault frigate's death animation, and so following a delightful discovery I rebuilt it. Not only is it more efficient by FAR (something like 15 times less particles, for real), its a heck of a lot prettier to my eyes. Here's a bit of a preview:

massive screenshot

There's an entire sequence you can view, too.
http://i244.photobucket.com/albums/g...as/ss00627.jpg note the forward compartment losing atmosphere
http://i244.photobucket.com/albums/g...as/ss00628.jpg kerboom
http://i244.photobucket.com/albums/g...as/ss00629.jpg
http://i244.photobucket.com/albums/g...as/ss00638.jpg
http://i244.photobucket.com/albums/g...as/ss00635.jpg and the aftermath

The effect itself is heavily inspired by World in Conflict, which you should look the heck up because it's awesome and amazing. It in particular features very realistic artillery impacts that shoot out both particle-spawning slow moving jets of smoke and fast moving, billboard beams of smoke. So I've finally lived a personal dream and got something quite like that working in HW@.

II. Secondly, I'd like to talk a bit about the future of HW@. Right now we've just rounded off a healthy chunk of gameplay expansion and so we're going to be diving back into expanding the highly skeletal rosters for all factions. Specifically, our next milestone is the completion of a major capital ship: the UNH Mothership.

I've been agonizing over the design for ages, but this latest round has really started shaping up into a ship I can really like. I'm going to be banging out as many concepts as I can possibly manage in the coming weeks, hoping to finalize the shape to as high a detail resolution as possible and from as many POVs as possible to avoid snags in the modeling. Then Siber's going to model it, and we're not going to stop with a placeholder like last time. With the addition of Dark_Sentinel's manic energy to the team, we're going to try and make the next big release include a fully armed and operational battle mothership.

So what's the bloody thing look like? I've had a lot of trouble with the UNH mothership; it's hard to replace the iconic banana simply because of its baroque and unique shape among starships of our beloved science fiction stories. But the UNH is a decidedly military organization, and the form should follow function. We needed something that looked sleek, fast, deadly, enormous, and yet elegant and willowy. Dead sexy is also on the design list, and so I splashed in a few elements from an old favorite of mine. I'm pretty sure nobody will be able to ID it, simply because the series is so reviled, but who knows.

But it's been a tough road. The original concept for the UNH mothership was a pair of the old bananas, back to back, with some greebling and in a horizontal configuration. There were many steps on that road, and each time I've gone forward we've made the ship a little sleeker. Right now, though, the entire team is pretty stoked about it and the ship is coming together in hopefully its final incarnation.

Bear with me for some pretty crappy tablet sketches.

massive image, first round top and bottom

massive image, first round side and glide views

massive image, first round rear view

massive image, rear-side construction bay. Blue marks landing/construction areas. Featuring carrier!

The Goddess-class mothership has three superheavy ion cannon turrets with phenomenal arc. It can fire six beams forward, six beams down, four beams up, and four beams straight back. Depending on how complex I decide to make the underbelly superstructure it may be able to direct all of its beam cannon firepower to the rear as well. Bolstering that are six quad-barrel heavy energy cannon turrets. Completing it is eight turrets on the long nose of the ship; we're still not sure if they're double energy or double frigate-class railgun. The railgun would make better sense; the mothership is meant to be a balanced attacker and should have the ability to fend off corvettes that might be preying on its vulnerable fighters or resource collectors.

I decided against having a banana-ship style construction bay that has the capital ship's belly laid flat out on it; it would require too much hull real estate in the cramped rear area. Instead I opted for the main construction bay exiting straight out the back, leaving the only potentially vulnerable arc of the ship dead aft. The main bay door will extend straight out backwards, allowing the completed capital ship to "drop" into action. Each of the blade/fin structures serves both as a long range sensors array as well as a physical shield for strike craft launch or recovery.

With the bottom of the vessel no longer taken up by a massive construction bay door, we can place the main resource docks between the two lower thruster assemblies. These areas have much better cover from the bulk of the mothership than earlier concepts; from three arcs they're quite protected by the engines and the belly super ion cannon turret.

Getting the angles to flow together nicely and wrapping my mind around the exact proportions is the remaining detail. There's a few more details I need to cover yet (obviously). We've been thinking a bit about putting on details for gimballed point defense cannon or maybe light turrets but honestly I'm not too thrilled about it. It's my opinion that since most of the game is played zoomed out at low LoDs and low texture resolution, important weaponry had better be very easy to discern in action. Hence the utterly massive weaponry and the built up housings that jut out of the ship. Some also expressed concern about the frailty of the cruiser's forward beam mounts and the oddness of the cruiser's PD emplacements - the same philosophy holds there; the guns need to stand the heck out so what's going on is obvious.

I've got some pipedreams about reusing the bulkier, clunkier designs as older model motherships or something, but that's far in the distant future. For now, we hope to get the Goddess class out the door. As the epitome of modern Higaaran strategy, it's extremely fast, hits very hard, has respectable toughness, and is quite reliable and dependable. And yes, we will be texturing the beast. It's been far too long since I had ninety million layers in a 100+ MB psd to mongle.

III. What else we're working on and thinking about and stuff. We've also been talking about long-range planning. I've been thinking about doing a big expansion of Higaaran drones to be more interesting. In particular, it's our opinion that the upgrade from a drone frigate to a drone destroyer should entail more species of drones and more flexibility. Here's the rough breakdown of stuff we've been discussing:
* Attack Drones: Your bog standard annoying fly. As-is ingame, it travels from the mothership, shoots fighters, and doesn't afraid of anything. We might force it to periodically dock ala the Kadeshi swarmers. Possibly a shorter range, more efficient weapon than the Defense drones.
* Defense Drones: We've seen somewhere somebody got a sphere formation working for squadrons. We don't intend to use squadrons for regular fighters in HW@, but we might in this case: a sphere of dedicated drones firing from a defensive position would make drone ships more resilient and more useful escorts. Besides, since drones regenerate anyway and are nonselectable, it's OK for them to use the otherwise odious squadron layout.
* Heavy Drones: Your bog standard annoying fly with an energy cannon. More or less as-is ingame; even with 16 heavy drones, drone destroyers have a real hard time doing more than mildly inconveniencing enemy capital ships. Obviously this won't do.
* Sensor Drones: I got to thinking about ships in sphere formation. These would essentially be proximity sensors from HW1, except tied to the drone mothership just like defense drones. However, they'd be in a much looser formation; perhaps several KM in radius. They'd be few in number too, perhaps six, and unarmed. They would add a critical early warning aspect to the drone destroyer; though I'm most interested in the aesthetic of a nested double-sphere of drones. I miss sphere formation .
* Escort Drones: We'd long ago decided that Republic defense fighters would go unmanned due to their high-priority target status; we figured the higaarans might apply the same approach with their coopted antimissile lasers. First we'd have to get antimissile weapons working ingame to our satisfaction. Then, these buggers would get launched intermittently with the drone script providing them with guard orders on friendly fighters nearby to give some cover from ravening missile swarms. This same functionality is intended for the pulse guns on assault frigates and support frigates.
* Repair Drones: Since repair rate is based on number of latched repair units, this is tricky to work out. But it'd be a neat way to have ranged healing from second line support frigate type units, and yet another way along with prox drones and escort drones to make drone destroyers into force multipliers.

Tacking that much functionality inherent into all these drone types on one drone control ship may never happen, but I'd like to at least implement some of these ingame and see how they play out. We'd probably assign a squadron of twelve defense drones and eight attack drones to the drone frigate, and perhaps twenty defense drones, ten attack drones, ten heavy drones, and six sensor drones to the drone destroyer.

UNH Tech Tree, revisited: Check it out! Siber's been working on it here; with working dependencies and currently planned units outlined there. It's not too heavily modified from the last release or from HW1 for that matter, but we've decoupled some of the heavy strike craft from capital ship research. It should be a little bit more natural to play around in the middle tiers, with assault and ion frigates, corvettes and interceptors before reaching the big boy toys like bombers, ion corvettes, and cruisers. Our patch slated for next week probably won't include this, though who knows.

Confederate Ion Frigate: Another thing I was working on a while back is a modern Confederate ion frigate. Those who read the manual we put out might have noticed that the ingame unit is decidedly last generation in design. A more complete concept; the confederate modernized heavy ion cannon frigate is much better equipped to counter Higaaran ion frigates.

large image, ion frigate wireframe modeling guide

This baby is a bullpup; one of the engine nozzles has been removed to make room for the base of the heavy ion cannon that extends throughout the hull of the ship. Sluggish and inflexible, it nevertheless is a testament to the skill of confederate engineers that second hand, outdated, and stolen technology can be mated to their chasses to make a competitive modern heavy beam artillery piece.

Dark_Sentinel's pursuing some other projects; he's made some incremental improvements to the working texture of the Vaygr destroyer. Given the utterly glacial pace I work at, we expect that by the time the Goddess is nearing ready to go, he'll have that texture ready too. We'll post regular updates. He's also working on some of his own things that we'll probably include based around a possible Frerrn faction. A minor faction, the Frerrn would have fewer units to choose from than the Taiidani, Higaarans, or Vaygr but would serve important single player campaign roles.

Lastly, if you've read this massive post from start to finish; thanks a lot. Was it too much information, or too little? How can it be restructured to be more readable or interesting?
Thanks in advance,
HW@ team

[23-down]

Interesting post...

Normally I would say something like the ideas you guys have are impossible to realize in HW2. But after seeing your working drones ingame I'm sure you can archive your goals here. I wish you guys good luck.

The mothership scetches are looking great but I miss any references to a mothership styled class. Still I will wait for a fully textured model then I will judge.

In my opinion you wrote down to much informations. While it is interesting you should keep your posts as short as possible to receive more critism. Pictures & little videos say more than 1000 words. None the less it was ok and if you don't have any pictures nor vids I guess there wont be any way around larger text blocks.

Looking forward for your next update.
Greetings 23-down

[Siber]

23-down: What you describe is essentially identical to our drone frigate's mechanics. So there'd be some redundancy there. Squadrons are also something we don't do as such, and don't plan on doing. But assuming that instead of a squadron, you spawn five ships, they'd be pretty fearsomely powerful. Drone ships are limited by keeping the drones tethered to the frigate, you can't command them directly. Maxing out the frigate cap with your hypothetical support frigate would give you a constantly replenishing force of one hundred fighters, which would seem to be a bit over the top.

The support frigates are meant to do just that, support a fighter swarm. The goal is to have support frigates increase the fighter unit cap, so for a truly huge fighter fleet you will need you to sacrifice frigate slots to expand your fighter cap. In addition they will mount pulsars, effective anti-drone and hopefully anti-missile weapons, and frigate kinetic turrets, effective anti-corvette weapons, making support frigates something that keep your fighters alive longer when sent into the furball. And on top of that, they'll provide a way to get quick reaction strike craft across large maps without committing a carrier.

We think that'll be a sufficiently distinct role for them.

[23-down]

Hm if it is linked to the max unit limit you wont get like 100 fighters.. Of course you can also play about with the strength of the fighters or just let it be 1 fighter at all. There are plenty of ways to balance it and give the other factions another similiar feature of some kind.

Anyway your idea sounds great as well. Do what ever pleases you more.

Greetings 23-down

[Avatar II]

Saturday Update Day Update II: It's on Sunday Again
- table of contents -

i. the newspost: some piccies and news
ii. the Frerrn: oh so many words
iii. Where's the Patch!?

NEWS: The new frigate-class explosion events have been succesfully propagated to all the fully modeled and textured frigates; vaygr, confederate, and UNH ion frigates are all now simultaneously more prettier and also more efficient. Yay! We've also got a dockpath fix for the UNH mothership placeholder in deathmatch, meaning motherships can now... well, dock resource collectors. Basic functionality, woo

ion frigate variant of new explosion fx

The new tech tree is indeed implemented ingame as per Siber's planning earlier; furthermore he's created another Deathmatch map that will be going in to the next patch, a 6p variant of his 4p map, Ring Madness. He's also tweaked harvester sensitivity so they'll look further afield for rocks. This should make it more likely for harvesting operations to take you afield as in Homeworld 1.

We've got three new tracks in Survival mode courtesy of Waterflame, and we're coming closer to removing some irritating track-length issues that would play a few seconds of the song loop again before cycling to the next song. Sorry for the inconvenience.

On the concept art front, I've only got a few offerings this week. I'm fully prepared to let Aralonia take the blame for that on account of buying the entire team copies of Mount & Blade. I wasn't completely idle, though. I worked some on the back and top of the Goddess-class, trying to figure out exact proportions and operation of stuff. I've not got a lot ironed out but I'm getting a bit closer.

Back/top view of MS

Right now my chief concern is getting functionally-sized frigate and capital ship docking bays worked into the geometry without making the ship too back-heavy. So far it's semi-successful, but who knows for sure.

Fortunately, Dark Sentinel did not receive an incredibly addictive medieval action simulator so he's been really productive (if secretive). He's making big strides on the Vaygr Destroyer's texture, as well as working some more on the engine section animation. There will be animated flaps like on the Assault Frigate to go with the rotating rear section. Since one project is apparently not enough for him, he's also been working on the Frerrn "project Venom" as he calls it.

MORE THAN YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT: THE FRERRN: The Frerrn more or less lost an arms race with the old Taiidani Empire due to the latter power's immense industrial base. A century later, the Frerrn Aggregate possesses a much more favorable position in the balance of power with the other junior members of the Galactic Council. Unfortunately the fractious nature of the Frerrn aggregate have given them many growing pains in recent years, especially since the revitalized Confederation has galvanized unrest in Frerrn-controlled, Taiidani-populated systems along their shared border.

Though myriad in number, the individual Frerrn states have not had the level of low-intensity deep space warfare that characterized the galactic core region and such their ships are not quite as cutting-edge nor as mobile as their UNH and Republic counterparts. On the other hand, the Frerrn fleet and military was organized to respond to a doomsday, massive incursion by Imperial-era battle fleets. Their defensive capability is matched only by the Higaaran system's immense level of militarization and super-inhibitors. Frerrn tactics make copious use of minefields, overly durable capital ships, and dependable general-use ships that can be thrown into almost any situation and expect to make a difference.

More seasoned UNH commanders view this level of generalization as crippling when it comes to acquiring critical, battle-winning levels of force concentration but admit that such a design scheme was the only sane response to Riesstiu. Had the mad Emperor mobilized his personal guard flotillas, potentially thousands of frigates and dozens of full carrier battle groups could have struck in force anywhere along the shared border between the old Empire and the Aggregate; Aggregate naval planners had to have tactics ready to slow such an onslaught and units capable of responding both to the massed strike craft forces such a fleet would present and surviving to pose a credible threat to the Emperor's capital ships.

Frerrn units would have to cross nearly two kiloparsecs of Republic space to threaten the systems of the Higaaran Control Zone, but due to the mutual defense agreement Higaaran mothership battle groups routinely undergo joint exercises with Republic assault units along the Frerrn border whenever the Aggregate begins rattling its saber in the Council meetings. Analysts predict that should open fighting begin between the Republic and the Aggregate, the Frerrn would have extreme difficulty holding back the combined strength of the high-technology Republic fleet and the high-mobility Higaaran mothership battle groups. Strategy for the Frerrn would default to a war of attrition; bleeding the allies white as they punched through Aggregate defenses. A broad-front Frerrn attack on the Republic would require depleting so many system garrisons and patrol fleets that the UNH could, almost unopposed, blaze a trail to the Frerrn core systems and force a surrender.

Though the Aggregate's various leaders make a lot of noise and wield a lot of political clout in the Council, the unspoken truth is that neither the leaders of the Republic nor the Aggregate could hold power should war break out. The two nations are far too well matched; without some shift in the balance of power such a war would be unimaginably costly compared to its potential gains. Trade has also been beginning to occur between the Republic and the Aggregate, especially in Aggregate-controlled Taiidani systems annexed during the chaotic years following the Exiles' return.

The Confederation under the young and willful Empress Corrstei also represents a wildcard; though she is extremely dependent on the Republic for long term economic viability, the border states of the Confederation are notoriously tumultuous and garrison units stationed there frequently join pirate raiding expeditions into Republic and Aggregate territory alike. Currently Corrstei is undergoing a massive internal security campaign in an attempt to reduce diplomatic tension with the Aggregate and stop the waste of her units in such attacks. Should war between any of two of the three major powers break out, victory would go to whichever could gain the assistance of the third. Isolationist, xenophobic, and highly vocal elements in the Aggregate have almost guaranteed that in such an event, the two Taiidani nations would cooperate in their destruction. In the last three council meetings, Aggregate diplomats have lobbied for legislation limiting the maximum total tonnage of combat starships to be produced by all junior council members with some headway made.

PATCH UPDATE: It'll be really soon. Just a few more bugfixes, then packaging, then ModDB authorization.

[Siber]

Another update. The details of what we've changed are outlined in the notes below, as well as listing the changes of the last few versions.




Grab it now

0.2.0.2, 12/07/2010

• New techtree
• Three new songs for survival
• Improved frigate deaths, better performance and looks
• New map, 6p Ring Madness
• Fixed broken starting fleets
• Adjusted jukebox behavior to reduce track length mistakes
• Added faction prefix to ship display names
• Reordered build lists
• Buffed UNH Defender firepower
• Nerfed minelaying
• Nerfed resource controllers
• Improved UNH mothership dock paths
• Added UNH mothership resourcer docks
• Further adjusted energy cannon hits
• Cleaned up deathmatch options panel

0.2.0.1, 11/24/2010

• Vaygr assault frigate firepower reduced from erroneously high levels
• Build and research speeds increased in skirmish games
• Skirmish unit caps reexamined
• non-UNH units added to skirmish mode.
• explosion effects fixed to work with more graphics cards
• added map thumbnails

0.2.0.0, 11/20/2010

• Switched over to new shipname scheme, HWAT_faction_CLASSshipname:
• Factions currently include UNH (United Navy of Higaara), VAY (Vaygr), CNF (Taiidan Confederation), REP (Taiidan Republic), CZA (Czalkir), SIM (Simulator mode), NUT (not a unit), TRN (Turanic Raider), KAD (Protector of Kadesh)
• Classes currently include DR (drone), FT (fighter), CT (corvette), FF (frigate), DD (destroyer), CA (cruiser), NC (noncombat), MS (mothership)
• Added fully textured units VAY_FFAssault, CZ_DDStandard, CZ_FTTag, CNF_FFAssault, CNF_FFIon, TRN_FTInterceptor, REP_FTScout, UNH_CTHeavy, UNH_NCHarvester
• Added placeholder or untextured models VAY_DDIon, VAY_FFIonArray, VAY_FTLight, UNH_CAStandard, UNH_CTIon, UNH_DDDrone, UNH_FTBomber, UNH_FTDefender, UNH_FFDrone, KAD_FFHunter
• Improved or fully remade effects and sound effects for nearly every unit, impact, and weapon. Animated multilayer beam cannon textures.
• Implemented Wave Combat gamemode, available in skirmish vs. cpu. Battle neverending waves of randomly generated and increasingly dangerous enemies on four different maps. This gamemode will play random pieces of music instead of looping the same track endlessly. Score reporting is available in [your homeworld 2 directory]/bin/Release under the filename "HWAT_SURVIVAL_SCORES.txt"

[Blaze]

how can i add more maps to play on? playing on 4 or 5 maps on the mod get boring.

[Siber]

New maps placed in \data\leveldata\multiplayer\HWATDeathmatch should probably be detected and run properly. I've not tried it myself, but if it doesn't work with the .big version it certainly will with the file archive version. I intentionally excluded the stock HW2 maps because I want a different design philosophy, long strands of resources that force constant movement rather than HW2's hold-and-defend resource patches. However, if you want to add more back in, that's your call. The various converted HW1 maps would likely work pretty well with the intended gameplay, too.

Aside, if anyone ever wants to make more maps for us, I'd gladly look at submissions.

[Blaze]

Oh, it looks like i dont have a HWATDeathmatch folder, i should put one them, thx!

[Siber]

just tested it on my local release testing copy, works as advertised.

[Vipey]

Didn't notice the new version.
Downloading now.

[Vipey]

lol I pwned at the one game where you fight off wave after wave, then again i play sc2 so im good with unit counters and resource management

[hzjd]

What wave did you make it to? I've only survived wave 10 once, did you make it past that?

[MatthCoFreak]

Made it as far as wave 20 once. You must have both a good building strategy and some degree of luck to make it that far, but it's usually not that hard to make it to wave 15.

********************************************************************************
* Scores for game on 11/30/2010 12:36:48 AM
* Game lasted 5079.6044921875 seconds 
* Survived to wave 20, which was an example of type SuperCruisers
* Vaygr Ion Array Frigate kills: 14
*      total value: 9100 RU
* 
* UNH Assault Frigate kills: 13
*      total value: 7475 RU
* 
* UNH Standard Destroyer kills: 1
*      total value: 1500 RU
* 
* Turanic Interceptor kills: 60
*      total value: 3000 RU
* 
* UNH Interceptor kills: 118
*      total value: 6490 RU
* 
* Republic Scout kills: 33
*      total value: 1155 RU
* 
* UNH Grougaloragran kills: 1
*      total value: 30000 RU
* 
* UNH Ion Corvette kills: 12
*      total value: 2880 RU
* 
* Vaygr Gunship kills: 403
*      total value: 68510 RU
* 
* UNH Ion Frigate kills: 10
*      total value: 6500 RU
* 
* UNH Heavy Corvette kills: 7
*      total value: 1680 RU
* 
* UNH Scout kills: 59
*      total value: 2065 RU
* 
* UNH Defender kills: 211
*      total value: 13715 RU
* 
* Vaygr Assault Frigate kills: 50
*      total value: 23750 RU
* 
* UNH Drone Destroyer kills: 14
*      total value: 21000 RU
* 
* Confederate Ion Frigate kills: 20
*      total value: 13000 RU
* 
* Vaygr Ion Destroyer kills: 25
*      total value: 31250 RU
* 
* Confederate Assault Frigate kills: 17
*      total value: 9775 RU
* 
* Vaygr Light Fighter kills: 419
*      total value: 12570 RU
* 
* UNH Drone Frigate kills: 3
*      total value: 2400 RU
* 
* Republic Interceptor kills: 192
*      total value: 10560 RU
* 
* UNH Heavy Cruiser kills: 6
*      total value: 22200 RU
* 
* UNH Bomber kills: 64
*      total value: 5440 RU
* 
* UNH Corvette kills: 27
*      total value: 3240 RU
* 
* Total value of all kills: 309255 RU 
********************************************************************************

I know Siber made it to 25, but he used an unbalanced part of the mod that was re-balanced since then.

[Vipey]

26 and i had to go play sc2 because it made me want to play it

[Vipey]

Made it to 34 before I had to stop.
Started really hurting my framerate, 10-15 fps. Unplayable by my standards, but having 150+ units out there at a time probably did it with all the higher res FX and shit and sounds.
That super powered heavy cruiser was a pain in the ass. I had to keep microing my shit so it'd attack it all at once rather than everything getting picked off one by one.

[Siber]

What kind of ship choice and tactics were you using to get that far? The supercruisers are supposed to kill you off before you get to patently unplayable levels, but apparently they're not hardcore enough yet.

[Vipey]

Mostly Vagyr Destroyers. Lots of them. Noticed in numbers they counter pretty much everything <.<
Them and the Taii Assault frig, and defenders. Most of my stuff wasn't dying tho, micromanagement ftw. When I play i try to prevent everything from dying. Even fighters, I put everything into control groups.

[Avatar II]

SOME KINDA LATE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WEEK UPDATE UPDATE :/
- table of contents-

i. Avatar Report
ii. Siber Report


Avatar Report: So, between travel, upcoming holidays, and family, the HW@ team has been pretty busy. Nonetheless I found some time to be semi productive, so let me show off the fruits of my labors.

finished MS rear concept

I showed off this image a while back when it was in its infancy and it took a rather embarassingly long time to get to this state, but it's accomplished all I need it to so I'm going to be moving on from here to turret structure studies, then maybe some closer looks at the strike craft docking assembly. The real objective here was to commit to specific geometry for the engines and the capital ship production bay. Splashing in some color was as much for fun as it was to help restate the shape. Plus it gives me some thumbnails for the inevitable texturing project.

The heavy energy cannons are likely in the mold of the Cruiser-class double guns. Perhaps I will be a bit blockier. Part of this ship class's ingame fluff is that it is very fast. Well, it has twenty engines. Hopefully that is enough.

In other news we've got another three combat tracks lined up for Survival. In earlier versions there was a problem with the majority of music in the shuffle being ambient tracks as opposed to action tracks. We've now brought the two families more in line with each other with a pretty highly varied group of songs.

Dark_Sentinel continues to make progress on the Vaygr Destroyer, animatin' and texturin' like crazy. Per his request we're not posting any WIP screenshots. The engine rotation animation has been deactivated for now as it interfered with bridge blast shields closing and with the rear-facing panels folding in and out during hyperspace. Maybe we'll get it working, but for now it's commented out.

Siber Report: So what have I been up to? A good question! In addition to traveling, visiting family, and doing some tinkering with backstory, I have made some modeling and coding efforts.

With modeling, I have more or less completed the mesh of the workbee ship. This ship is intended to serve as a civilian construction worker, with lots of cool animation in the arms.

workbee

I have also undertaken a military conversion of the craft, with the concept that it would have a large armor hood, and park over damaged sections of a warship, protecting breaches from additional weapons fire while it repairs them. I've gone through some iterations on the hood, and am still looking.

military repair corvette variants

More recent versions also include additional engines for the military version, as it has more to move and more reason to zoom.

more repair corvette variants

I'm going to try to explore thicker structures next, as all these seem flimsy to me.


As for the other side of things, I've once again started digging into how to modify the HW2 UI. The ultimate aim is to allow for a new build interface and parallel build, but that's a hell of a mountain to climb without any tools yet. So to practice, I worked on the testing mode, and did this:

testing screenshot

All those keys work as advertised, and this lets you set up fights between whatever forces you want in testing. Useful for testing balance and so forth. And will be available to users on next release.

[hzjd]

Nice addition to testing mode, haha. I'm defs gonna want to use this at least once or twice just to set up an epic battle. Also, instead of a hood, what if the drone worker could have a small defense field? If you use a hood tho, my favorite is definitely the first of the three shown in your post.

[Siber]

There are a lot of things that could be said, but instead of getting bogged down in saying them, I'll give you some pictures.

[Zephyr]

Very cool!

[monolith]

LOVE IT!
I am totally suprised how the Vaygr designs came out. Especially the frigate has some kind of mysterious, frightening look. That's great!
Oh, and I love the Taiidani ships too!
Keep it on!

EDIT: Found a possible Freudian slip in the Manual:
"(FFA) Warhammer-class Assault Frigate
A light crapital ship spotted first by independent traders in the far galactic south."

EDIT#2: Oh, and one little question: where is the difference between the normal and the low-fi version?

[Siber]

Good call on the typo. That'll be fixed. Also possibly freudian, we may never know! It's not an exceptionally powerful ship, so maybe. Glad you like the designs.

The low-fi version has lower resolution textures on certain very large ships, removes the improved shaders and removes the textures that are necessary for them. In the past and perhaps again in the future it also has lower resolution version of certain animated effects.

[Avatar II]

On the modeling front, we've got some awesome renders of the Frerrn heavy assault carrier available.

large image

large image in THREE DEE

Since Dark Sentinel loves anaglyphic 3d he went ahead and made a variant that shows this lovely ship off nicely.

The assault carrier is 767 meters in length making it quite a bit longer than cruiser-class vessels, though it is also somewhat narrower.

In terms of armament it has four ion beams in the forward turret for capital targets, three quadruple mass drivers for engaging frigates, and fourteen quadruple light railguns for engaging fighters and corvettes.

The ship sacrifices speed and maneuverability to combine heavy armor with strong all-rounded weaponry and production/docking capability. While it has good weapons for fighting off small ships, it has no counterpart to the heavy energy cannon turrets on heavy cruisers and thus is at a disadvantage in a one on one duel.

Of course, since it is a carrier and since it is covered in smaller weaponry, this ship is never meant to fight unescorted. Its fighter and corvette wings more than even the odds, and the ability to engage the enemy's defensive fighters with its light weapons lets it field bombers to harass or defeat enemy capital ships pinned down by its heavy ion guns.

[Siber]

Been working on a map and aimed at the HW@ time period and politics.





Really big version

Hope you enjoy it.