Revamping the Homeworld 1 engine to be better than Homeworld 2

[MechWarrior001]

Hey guys, whats up? Long time no see. Since this thread involves both games, I'm not sure if this is the correct place to do it. I hope I'm not kicking a dead horse, but I have the urge to post this, so bear with me if you will.

I've been away from the Homeworld scene for quite some time but I've picked up bits and pieces of, if I'm understanding it correctly, general desire for a Homeworld 3. Now I know that this will take a long time, and there's a possibility that this has been proposed before, but why not simply overhaul the Homeworld 1 engine to be better than the Homeworld 2 engine, and on top of that revamp the modding api to be easier to use. A good start would be to utilize a newer rendering engine like Ogre3D or similar to bring the graphics up to date, improve the audio subsystem to support OpenAL, positional audio and etc, and possibly quite introduce a few other things, like perhaps physics for dynamic debris collisions, mesh deformation and other things. I believe I had previously created a thread titled "Homeworld: Revitalized" or somewhere along those lines which had a couple good ideas in it. I would like to utilize some of these ideas in this.

However before this project gets started a few points needed to be taken into consideration:

• Is the trade off of improving a open-source HW1 engine better than having a currently working and stable engine like HW2?

• Should the engine be limited to one rendering API or have support for both D3D and OpenGL like it's predecessor?

• Should the limit cap of 8 players be raised or lowered, or is it perfect as it is?

If you have any other questions or ideas concerning this, or if you want to help out, feel free to let me know.

[TON_Viper]

The player cap is fine, but I'd want to see the race cap removed, not to mention removing the hard-coded unit type count.

Another thing that I know has been on the wish-list of modding teams is the ability to trigger ship animations at need/will for individual parts of models. For instance, so it's possible to have a separate animation for each hatch on a mothership.

[MechWarrior001]

One thing that I would like to see is better hyperspace effects. Maybe cause the window to distort the space around it or even invert the colors of any screenspace that is viewed through it.

[Overmind5000]

How about a hyperspace effect with instead of a blank semi-transparent slate, but maybe like an unlinked portal, such as in Portal (the game). I also like your space-distortion-around-the-edges idea, sorta like a black hole. Another idea, and it sounds cool/silly, but as the gate passes, a funnel of particles comes out and re-assembles the ship. The particles could be mere dust or perhaps glowing blobs.

Also, how are you going to hassle with the ship models?

[TON_Viper]

The thing is, the actual look of the hyperspace portal isn't a part of the engine itself. It just needs the capability to actually support those effects. That said, effects like space distortion and similar would be nice to see supported. Just imagine a gravity well that distorts visible light as well.

[MechWarrior001]

I would also like to see better support for dynamic lights. Sure its there in Homeworld 2, but its not as simple and easy to implement as it could be (Or at least I don't think it is, it has been sometime since I've modded). For example, engine trails to natively support casting of dynamic lights would be sweet, along with improved shadows, and on top of that native support for bump/normal/parallax mapping. Does anyone know if the D3D11 SDK is free to use, or would we have to pay money to use it? For compatibility the engine would support the default D3D version it used (D3D6 I think) along with every consecutive D3D release above that along with various iterations of OpenGL support and software rendering so that way a variety of users can play the game regardless of hardware (Minus all the great graphics newer versions of OGL/D3D provide).

[Overmind5000]

NVidia recently released a DX11 SDK back in April. I have a link right here:
http://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-graphics-sdk-11
Enjoy.

[Overmind5000]

NVidia recently released a DX11 SDK back in April. I have a link right here:
http://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-graphics-sdk-11
Enjoy.

EDIT: Sorry about the double post... -_-

[MechWarrior001]

What did Homeworld use for video? Wasn't it Bink? I was thinking a good replacement would be Theora, unless someone knows of a better one.

[jkberna]

Is this going to be done?

[Star]

I guess it may be done if the OP actually knows how to program in C, but somehow i doubt that is the case. It would be much easier to remake HW1 entirely and port the movies over, using engines like Unity3D or OGRE. If someone a little knowledgeable with Unity3D did it, for example, it wouldn't even take a month to have the basic game set up with everything other than the movies and AI working properly. This means Homeworld in a Shader3.0-ready, multi-core optimized engine, ready for scripting, modding and model-updating.

The only issue would be getting permission to do so from Relic.

[MechWarrior001]

I am in the process of teaching myself C, but I don't know how long it will take for me to complete it.

[jkberna]

If this ever happens i will be available to make updated models and textures.

But why not do as star says, and use Unity3D or OGRE??

[Dnbfreak]

If you make it feel free to PM for scripting the ship files and tuff ;D

[I got BC'ed]

I saw this and got exited, where can we find the source code?

[TON_Viper]

Try a google search like this. The top three results at the time of this post look promising.

[Dryson]

To revamp Homeworld the multi-player maps need to be larger with set areas that must be captured and defended.

One such map could be that the opposing teams must destroy several different stations in order to win.

The map would be spread out over four maps with teams of two occupying each map. To access the map of the other player(s) you would have to use slipgate technology.

One team member could be dedicated to defending the stations while the other one is dedicated to attacking the other players stations.