Star Trek Homeworld 2 mod Beta RELEASED

[TON_Viper]

Yeah, that would look cool, but CnlPeppers shaders are hardcoded to use ambient light along with no more and no less than two directional lights. I could add more of a green tint to the ambient light, that may help. I'll experiment a bit with it when I get home from work.

As for the Orion Nebula, I remember I've made a version with a local star, and a version without it. I just can't remember which one is included in the mod. The local star used in various backgrounds in the Babylon 5 mod is the one made by CnlPepper, but the rest of the flares used in my backgrounds are original, made by me. (And far simpler than the composite effect CnlPepper made the sun with.)

[Nathanius]

If you can't add in a third light source don't worry about fiddling with the colours, it might look a little off unless you get lucky with an aqua-esque light in between the green and blue patches of cloud.

The mod team's asked if we might be able to share map objects, specifically with an eye on your awesome planets, I might even be able to give you guys a whole ready-done map with the Eagle Nebula as a thank you for all your generosity

[TON_Viper]

IIRC, CnlPepper is fine with other mods borrowing the planets as long as proper credit is given, so go ahead. I'd love to see the map you get out of the Eagle Nebula background.

[Nathanius]

Smashing! Watch this space, you're going to see a few interesting map screenshots in the coming weeks

____________________________________
EDIT:

Just thought you'd like to know that I've been having a touch of bother with the B5 planets. I went about trying them out in the following way:

1. Copied PLN_Earth, Moon, Mars and Jupiter to Data/Ship folder
2. Replaced "zzz_Earth" and "zzz_luna" with "PLN_Earth" and "PLN_Moon" in the map file.
3. Fired up the game, there were no planets there though.
4. Replaced the entire "addSquadron" line from the B5 Earth Orbit map to the ST:HW2 Earth Orbit map
5. Fired up the game, still no planets
6. Copied the B5 Shader folder into the Data directory, replacing our copy
7. Fired up the game, still no planets
8. Extracted the textures from the B5 Earth and placed them on our Earth, copying precicely the "planet" material and using the megalith shader.

This was the result:


And this is our current zzz_earth:


Now, keep in mind that i'm using Shader 2, that the planets display properly in the B5 mod and that the "planet" material that I copied across to zzz_earth.hod to be able to see the planet at all in the ST:HW2 mod is set up exactly the same as in PLN_Earth.hod.

Any thoughts?

[TON_Viper]

Try it again with the addSquadron line from the B5 map and take a look in the hw2.log file. There may be a clue to why the planets aren't showing up.

[Nathanius]

Ok, I did that, fired it up and twirled the camera around for a while looking for any plantes. Once I found none I closed the game down to windows and retreived this HW2.log:

Spoiler

Wed Nov 10 06:24:34 2010
Loaded Archive: 'Homeworld2.big'
UTIL -- filepath failure, path doesn't exists 'C:\Game Files\Sierra\Homeworld2\data\locale\english'
Loaded Archive: 'english.big'
Uing ..profiles\ for profiles folder
GAME -- Using player profile Nathanius
Changing from a 32 bit colour depth in winNT (6.1 build 7600),
Using ATI Technologies Inc.'s 3.3.10151 Compatibility Profile Context ATI Radeon HD 4770 renderer (Suspected driver is atioglxx.dll 6.14.10.10151)
Loaded Archive: 'englishSpeech.big'
Loaded Archive: 'Music.big'
SOUND -- created destination [ fdaudio ], handle [ 4 ] with [ 48 ] channels created
SOUND -- created destination [ fda streamer ], handle [ 5 ] with [ 8 ] channels created
Build name: The Dust Wars - AutoBuild3569 - Ordered by smmatte
Built by : mrbuild
Data path : C:\Game Files\Sierra\Homeworld2\data
Program "!!ARBfp1.0

OPTION ARB_precision_hint_fastest;

#OPTION ARB_precision_hint_nicest;



#######################################################

# Modified by CnlPepper to remove lighting stages #

# Modified by CnlPepper to remove unnecessary code #

# Modified by CnlPepper to add bilinear interpolation #

#######################################################



### IF YOU ARE SEEING THIS TEXT IN THE HW2.LOG FILE THEN THE SHADOWANDLIGHT.FP SHADER HAS FAILED TO LOAD

### THESE SHADERS REQUIRE A GRAPHICS CARD CAPABLE OF AT LEAST SHADER MODEL 2.0B



ATTRIB coordShadow = fragment.texcoord[0]; # shadow texture coordinates

ATTRIB coordTex = fragment.texcoord[1]; # alpha (diffuse) texture coordinates



#PARAM texScale = { 4096, 0.0002441406, 0, 0}; # scale factors for shadow texture (4096x4096)

PARAM texScale = { 2048, 0.0004882813, 0, 0}; # scale factors for shadow texture (2048x2048)

#PARAM texScale = { 1024, 0.0009765625, 0, 0}; # scale factors for shadow texture (1024x1024)

#PARAM tetù
Loading low quality shadow fragment program
Resetting fp control word.
CmdLine: -overrideBigFile -luatrace -noMovies -windowed -h 1010 -w 1410
Starting Level: data:LevelData\Multiplayer\stdeathmatch\EARTH ORBIT.LEVEL
ROM_SHIPYARD is marked as captureable in the shiptuning but has no capture points!
ROM_SHIPYARD is marked as repairable in the shiptuning but has no repair points!
Cannot overwrite function HGN_PROXIMITYSENSOR_Open_OnSet
Cannot overwrite function HGN_PROXIMITYSENSOR_Close_OnSet
build available
generic build available
Killing player 2 () at time 0.000000
Killing player 3 () at time 0.000000

I had one difference to my earlier attempt, I set the map limits to 100,000 from 50,000 in case the planet was actually too far off the map, that didn't help though.

That log is actually pretty helpful... I should fix those points on the Romulan's Shipyard...

I tried it again with the HW2 default shaders, still nothing! This is making absolutely no sense to me considering the B5 mod works perfectly...

[TON_Viper]

What does the log say with the default shaders?

[Nathanius]

It said:

Wed Nov 10 20:10:27 2010
Loaded Archive: 'Homeworld2.big'
UTIL -- filepath failure, path doesn't exists 'C:\Game Files\Sierra\Homeworld2\data\locale\english'
Loaded Archive: 'english.big'
Uing ..profiles\ for profiles folder
GAME -- Using player profile Nathanius
Changing from a 32 bit colour depth in winNT (6.1 build 7600),
Using ATI Technologies Inc.'s 3.3.10151 Compatibility Profile Context ATI Radeon HD 4770 renderer (Suspected driver is atioglxx.dll 6.14.10.10151)
Loaded Archive: 'englishSpeech.big'
Loaded Archive: 'Music.big'
SOUND -- created destination [ fdaudio ], handle [ 4 ] with [ 48 ] channels created
SOUND -- created destination [ fda streamer ], handle [ 5 ] with [ 8 ] channels created
Build name: The Dust Wars - AutoBuild3569 - Ordered by smmatte
Built by : mrbuild
Data path : C:\Game Files\Sierra\Homeworld2\data
Resetting fp control word.
CmdLine: -overrideBigFile -luatrace -noMovies -windowed -h 1010 -w 1410
Starting Level: data:LevelData\Multiplayer\stdeathmatch\EARTH ORBIT.LEVEL
ROM_SHIPYARD is marked as captureable in the shiptuning but has no capture points!
ROM_SHIPYARD is marked as repairable in the shiptuning but has no repair points!
Cannot overwrite function HGN_PROXIMITYSENSOR_Open_OnSet
Cannot overwrite function HGN_PROXIMITYSENSOR_Close_OnSet
build available
generic build available
Killing player 2 () at time 0.000000
Killing player 3 () at time 0.000000

[TON_Viper]

I'll try doing the same on my machine some time tonight then. I'll put CnlPepper's planets into your mod and see what happens on my hardware.

[Nathanius]

Thanks TON_Viper, this was supposed to be an easy thing to do too~ Who'd've thought that swapping one name in a map file could lead to so much trouble?

[TON_Viper]

I can tell you one thing: You're not crazy. The same thing happens to me. I'll see if I can figure out where the problem lies.

----------

I'm pretty sure I've identified the cause, though not how to fix it. I tried your planets as they were. That worked. I tried your planets at the B5 planets distance. That didn't work. I tried the B5 planets at your planets distances. That didn't work.

This tells me that the distance is the key here.

The reason for this must be that the B5 planets are significantly larger than the ones originally from your mod. When they are as close as your planets originally were, they envelop the battlefield, and as they can't be seen from the inside, they don't show up. When they are as far away as they're supposed to be, I'm guessing you have some line of coding in your mod that tells the game not to render them. I haven't been able to find out where in the mod's code this might be, since my extractor crashes when I try to extract the big file you've released.

You must have messed around with some kind of camera setting, preventing the game from rendering the planets due to their distance. The weird thing is that ships are supposed to have their own setting defined for how far away they're visible, but there must be some kind of global modifier too, since this isn't working.

[Nathanius]

See PM for detailed reply to this TON_Viper, but thanks for verifing that I'm not a loon :P

---------------------

EDIT:

I FIGURED IT OUT!

The Camera.lua file in the UI folder has a "farclip" value that between our two mods has a considerable difference!

ST:HW2 was "farClip = 440000"
B5 mod is "farClip = 1e20"

Here's a picture of our Terraformed Mars, beautiful B5 mod style, to demonstrate!

[TON_Viper]

Glad to see you figured it out. Now you can get on with the proper work that needs doing in the mod instead of using your time on issues like this.

[Nathanius]

Once you said "global" modifier I remembered that i'd seen a Camera.lua file in the UI folder, thanks for your help! The planets look incredible

Now! Back to thrusters...

[herbyguitar]

I tried to post on the dev but I can't seem to pull it off.

Can someone help me get this in game please? Sorry it took so long. I've been re-doing most of the textures and a bit of the mesh also. The bump maps gave me some fits.

I'm not sure about the shaders. I use MAX to model and I don't know how to get the correct shaders in place.

thumbnail

[Nathanius]

That's awesome Herby/Chervell (what should I call you? "Herbie" sound nice:P)

I will send you a PM showing you how to post, that should get you on there! If you want you can just zip everything up, email it to me and I'll have it in game this afternoon! Not neccesarily animated though, as that's Stargazer's speciality...

The shaders are part of homeworld 2, so you can't really get the correct shaders onto a model... you just need an _diffuse, _glow and _normal texture map. The _normal map is optional of course but you said you had bumps for it so I wrote it there

If you're going to include bump maps then you need to use the "matte" shader in the material in CFHodEd, otherwise a _diffuse and _glow only material should be the "ship" shader

I'll get to that guide...

[herbyguitar]

Too many channels to export (5)

Questions:

Delete the alpha then export as *.DDS (DTX5 ARGB 8 bpp | interpolated alpha) ?

Number of mipmaps, other parameters ?

After save, open file and fill ALPHA with (opacity 100% @ 127, 127, 127) 50% gray?

Do this for three files. (*_diffuse.dds *_glow.dds *_normal.dds) Make three files from three layers ?

My files don't turn out like they're supposed to. I'm missing something important.

More questions: In Photoshop / Filter / Relic

Fake Overlay
Opaque
Raise Zero
Safe Transparency

What are these and do I use them ?

Sorry for stupid questions.


"EDIT"
The problems seem to be mostly with the 'bump' map. Mine doesn't look anything like the samples I have... Is there a conversion I need to do on them?
Thanks.

[Stargazer]

If I understand you correctly you're using the photoshop plugin to export .dds-files. I'm not using Photoshop, but Paint Shop Pro, but the save-dialog should be the same. This are my settings:

Spoiler

As we're not using the player-colours by now, we don't need alpha channels - so delete it without scruples If you want to save a grayscale heigh map as a normal map, then click on "Normal Map Settings..." and activate "Convert to Tangent Space Normal Map".
I haven't changed any other values.

Hopefully this helps!

[herbyguitar]

Thank you sir

that was the ticket.

[Nathanius]

Thank you Stargazer! I couldn't have said it better myself! Literally :P

Now, I have also noticed that the Mod Of the Year awards are on again! Please can everyone head on over to our mod page on Moddb and vote for us!

Link: http://www.moddb.com/mods/star-trek-homeworld-2

Stargazer, you're better with media than I, would you like to do a movie for a news post to drum up interest?

[Nathanius]

G'day citizens, denizens and alien imposter's of Earth!

As it is "that time of year" again (no not just summer...) all you you have been voting for your favorite mods hoping to elevate them into the hallowed halls of the top 100. Being a comparatively new mod, at least in its current form, the Star Trek: Homeworld 2 mod hasn't yet participated in this great event! Help us make our mark, in indelible ink, on the MOTY competition this year!

As your local political type would know the acquisition of votes requires delicate manipulation of the public psyche via liberal application of torrents of propaganda. To that end, while we are cooking up another video clip for your enjoyment, I thought I might ply you with eye candy and give a brief run down of what we've done since the 0.5 beta hit the web.

United Federation Of Planets

The first thing you might notice is that our Earth now looks remarkably like the beauty in the Babylon 5 mod, that would be because it is! I would like to express the ST:HW2 team's heartfelt gratitude at the generosity of the Babylon 5 team!

Among other balance tweaks and polish for the UFP you will find:
- A fully implemented Research tree, one that the AI uses to the hilt
- Some new, more attractive, ship models
- New photon torpedo texture
- Phaser arcs improved upon 1000-fold (you'll have to see them in action to appreciate this!)
- Utilisation of the HW2 "thruster" shader so thrusters light up when the ship's moving
- Other surprises!

Klingon Defence Force

You can see above that the B5 team's planets weren't left at the copy-and-paste stage, through the miracle of "importing" textures into a HOD file we were able to utilize the president set and bring to life every single world which once sat dully just off the map in v0.5!

With the Klingons you will find improvements like:
- Almost half of the ship models have been updated
- Cloaking has been programmed to work, you wont see it with Shader 2, but the AI pretends for you!
- Utilisation of the HW2 "thruster" shader so thrusters light up when the ship's moving
- A fully implemented Research tree, one that the AI abuses to the hilt
- There's more, but you'll have to vote for us to find out!

Romulan Star Empire

The enigmatic Star Empire has eluded our attempts to provide a list of updates and improvements on, some would say that's because they're entirely new and everything counts as an update, but I prefer to blame the Tal'Shiiar...

Rest assured though that the Romulans are also equipped with a full research tree, fully functional AI and cloaking devices for all and sundry!

As I stated at the beginning of this news post Stargazer is currently putting together a video demo for the new features that we've cooked up in the past little while, but he's a busy man, and there's not much time left to vote! If we don't make it into the top 100 then there'll be no point in him putting time into it...

[CnlPepper]

Cool

[herbyguitar]

Game Shots

[Nathanius]

That is much improved, are these the "parallax" normal maps you were talking about? How do you make them?

[Sastrei]

Hot damn that looks pretty.

[herbyguitar]

Nathanius. Any news of when I can use SVN to update? Having access would really make this much easier. Also, you might want to slow down a bit

CnlPepper and TON Viper have been very helpful in explaining things to me about parallax shader attributes. I salute you both and special thanks to CnlPepper for giving us this cool toy to use.

Sastrei, thank you. Coming from you, that means a lot.

[CnlPepper]

Nice Job

[herbyguitar]

first attempt at engine glows

[Nathanius]

Hi Herby, unfortunately only PhatBoyGeo has admin rights on the SVN, do you have a sourceforge account and requested access like I said in that message?

What do you mean slow down?

The BOP is looking damn sexy, make sure the wings have the "cruising" position as the default position, it looks like you've got absolutely everything under control now

EDIT:

Stargazer has released a couple of items on Moddb that people might like to take a look at!

The news post is here: http://www.moddb.com/mods/star-trek-...cut-setup-tool

Included is a trailer, done by Stargazer, that must absolutely be seen!

[Stargazer]

As Nathan already said in his edited post above, we have a new News item!

Shortcut Setup Tool

Because so many had problems setting up a working shortcut, we created a Shortcut Installer, which should make it much easier to create a desktop shortcut to run the mod. The Shortcut Installer will not only work with the Star Trek mod, it can be helpful to get other mods to run, too!
Link to: Shortcut Installer


Beta 0.6 Trailer

There's a lot of progress on the mod, as Nathan already told you in the last News post. We created a Trailer that you can see most of the changes ingame. Enjoy!
Link to: v0.6 Trailer

Be aware that this is just a Trailer and not the final product

----------------
Does anyone know how to embed a video from ModDB on RelicNews?

[LeviathansWrath]

all i can say about the vid and all that is YUMMY! Nice work guys.

[yokozuna]

The ships from the latest screens look awesome!

just check out this one again, I`m speechless:

Can I ask you for some more screens, a Federation ship, etc. Pleeease!

[yokozuna]

BTW are the Federation ship`s models/textures going to be improved as well in 0.6? And do you have some preliminary ETA?

[Nathanius]

We've been working on the Federation ships too, while there isn't much changed there is a sizable quantity of elbow grease applied to all areas of the mod

No ETA at the moment, we were never going to be able to get it out before Xmas so we're just going to take it at a healthy speed and get it out when it's out. Rest assured there hasn't been a week without any additions yet

[yokozuna]

Another thing I wanted to ask. Regarding shields. Do you plan on adding shields and does the game engine allow that. The closest to shields in HW2 that I`ve seen is the field the defense frigate projects. 2 problems though: if they could be made elliptical and closer to the ship not in the shape of a big bubble; it they can be made to appear automatically only when the ship receives some hits and to stay turned off when it isn`t fired at.

[Nathanius]

Homeworld 2 has a... special... relationship with shields. There isn't any traditional way to implement it but there are work arounds, one in particular that is on the "to consider" list. But it is a lot of work and not even on the list of possibles for v0.6

[Pegman]

In Path to Victory, the Keepers have shields that work on a similar principle as the ships in your [very fantastic] mod. I'd ask mololu about this, but I think the principle is based on an extruded ship mesh, which is textured to look like 'close-in' shields, and scripted to come into effect at a certain point. I'm no expert in ship-making though - my strength is my writing. :P

[yokozuna]

I don`t think those shields are suitable for Star trek ships. The shield should be invisible until the ship is fired at, secondly the PTV shield are exactly following the ship`s contours and are closer to the hull compared to ST shields which are more like an elliptical bubble:
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Deflector_shield
Anyways I hope the team comes up with the best solution in some past 0.6 version of the mod

[KeyBored]

I remeber seeing this on moddb

http://www.moddb.com/mods/star-trek-...images/shields

[Sastrei]

If you let the ship use a default auto-generated cm, and make the hit effects look like shield impacts, it should resemble star trek shields well enough. I think that's what you're seeing in that screenshot anyways, isn't it?

-Stefan-

[yokozuna]

O.M.G. KeyBored, that looks better than everything I expected! Gotta have these shields in game! This mod never ceases to surprise me...

EDIT:
BTW I just saw that amazing borg cube:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/star-trek-...se-up#imagebox
...
speachless

[yokozuna]

Hey guys some questions:
1. Do you have plans for adding more weapons? For instance quantum torpedos for the Federation and plasma torpedos for Romulans, maybe as a special recharging ability?
2. That probably is not in the "to do" list but can you at some point change the constant: "Mothership" that can be heard when selecting the base, to some more individual for the races cues?

[Nathanius]

1. There are already quantum torpedoes, even in v0.5. They will be more obvious in v0.6 but in case you can't tell, the quantums are the blue torpedoes... As for plasma torpedoes they're just the default for the Romulans, there's no TOS style giant plasma ball to speak of in our plans at the minute. At least that i've heard of~ The mod team like to surprise each other with cool stuff every now and again

2. Vocal audio is very very very low on the to do list, you are absolutely correct! But it is there, and it will be a headache when we run out of things to do instead of it... Possibly v0.8 or v0.9... far into the undefined prokect future

[yokozuna]

thanks for the info

[Nathanius]

Pleasure

[yokozuna]

Just out of curiosity, how many people the ST modding team consists of?

[Nathanius]

There are 4 people on the team at the moment

[LeviathansWrath]

LOl nat seems like we are even for team members on that end :P Anyways love the work you guys are doing for this mod, cant wait to get my claws on the next version.

[Nathanius]

We may have been... omitted... from the Moddb top 100, but despite this oversight we're far from out! As most of the remaining work to be done is out of my specific skill set, and there hasn't been much in the way of updates for a while, here are some images of map tweaks or brand new maps!

Please note that the native size of all of these images is 1680 x 1050, you'll be able to access them from Moddb, I myself am using the first one for my Win7 logon screen

Without further ado, here are the worlds in question:

Bajor



Bajor has be one of the maps that turned out best, visually, after the gifting of the Babylon 5 planet template to us. Further tweaks to the map have enhanced its visual appeal significantly.

Here's another shot, just because i'm so proud of it



Another world which received a few tweaks is Earth, don't worry if you really can't see the difference, I can barely see it when i'm not in-game and I did the tweaks m'self!

You can almost feel the balmy (bloody humid) December heat waves rolling accross the open brown grassy plains... until they get to the cool sea air and just to keep things interesting erupt into violent thunderstorms :P

(My condolences for everyone in the wintry north currently inundated by mountains of frigid snow!)

Earth



As promisedin the rather epic trailer by Stargazer there were new maps, as in map (plural). Here is one of the few items that I myself actually modelled from scratch and even made a texture for, not the planet, but the ring...

Bolaris IV



It brings to mind alot of interesting questions, does the colour of the light affect plant growth? Would a chlorophyll based ecosystem be able to use light of different wavelengths in photosynthesis? These questions of course have nothing to do with the game...

I am still unable to give you a specific date for v0.6, my apologies, but you can rest assured that it is being worked on as you read this and your mind is not going to be safe from being blown when you get your hands on it!

[herbyguitar]

Very nice. I love the ring