Monty Block

Hi guys,

I know you've been jonesin' for this info from the moment you heard that a patch was in development. Well, at long last we present to you...the 1.1 Change List!

The patch is in final testing and translation at Sierra and just about ready for prime-time. The only question now is whether or not it will be out before Christmas. Everyone here at Relic has their fingers crossed (I know you do too) and we're doing all we can to support Vivendi in thier efforts. Here's hoping!

Thanks to all of you for tracking down and reporting these bugs (and a special thanks to our team of Tricky Ninjas for testing the balance changes!). As usual, we couldn't have done it without you.

-geoff


CHANGES TO HOMEWORLD 2 IN 1.1 PATCH

Multiplayer Improvements

a. Players will now be able to host and join games from behind NATs and Firewalls.

b. The whisper function in the GameSpy lobby no longer misdirects messages to the wrong recipients.

c. The number of players in a given game is now reported correctly.

d. Players can now ignore people in the Gamespy lobby.

e. Players can now whisper to a group of people in the Gamespy lobby.

f. The ignore list in the Gamespy lobby is now automatically saved.

g. The Whisper list in the Gamespy lobby is now automatically saved.

h. There is a new ‘Suppress’ button to the GameSpy lobby. This adds the ability to ignore the join / leave lobby messages.

i. Lobby chat has been updated so that private game chats will no longer being displayed in the lobby chat.

j. Game chat has been updated so that lobby chat won’t cause the messages to be lost anymore.

k. There is a new PRESETS button that creates a default setting for gameplay options, including CPU difficulty, open/closed slots, and CPU player colours. Settings are only saved to the profile when you start a game.

l. Players can now kick a lagging host.

m. DirectPlay sessions are now closed asynchronously. This corrects the long wait at the end of a game.

n. Badges with long filenames (>32 characters) no longer cause multiplayer games to crash at the loading screen and/or the waiting for content download screen.

o. Players that have been defeated or have dropped from the game are no longer listed in the diplomacy and chat menus.

p. A random race setting has been added to the race selector.

q. The game now looks in both data:LevelData\Multiplayer\<GameType>\*.level and profiles:Levels\<GameType>\*.level for level content.

r. Users can now add a file called <LevelName>_Thumb.tga. It will be loaded as the preview image in the level picker. Unfortunately preview and loading images cannot be autodownloaded with the levels.


Fixes to Game Crashes

a. Using the rally to object command on a moving ship will no longer result in a crash.

b. If a ship is destroyed in the frame before it executes an order, the game will no longer crash.

c. The game will no longer crash due to rapid switching between tactics.

d. Matrox Parhelia users will no longer experience loading crashes after installing the latest drivers for their cards.


Gameplay Fixes

a. Probes and scouts no longer attract mines when passing through mine fields.

b. Defense fields will no longer stay active after the frigate that generates them has been destroyed.

c. Scouts with the EMP upgrade will no longer lose their ion trails after using the EMP attack.

d. Fighters can no longer undock while the carriers are in hyperspace transit.

e. It’s no longer possible to control enemy player and enemy AI ships.

f. By using hyperspace gates, platforms no longer can be issued more than one move order.

g. Platforms no longer attack when moving.

h. Players can no longer hear ships outside of visible range.

i. Research abilities that are transferred when ships are donated no longer stays if the ship is transferred back.

j. Ships that are docking or being built no longer cause ships already docked to launch when the ship hold is full.



Tuning and Balance Changes

a. General
i. Resource Collectors repair rate increased (from 25 hitpoints/second to 35 hitpoints/second)
ii. Start positions have been updated on the multiplayer map Shields.

b. Hull defence guns (located on Vaygr and Hiigaran Carrier, Mothership, Resource Controller, and Shipyard as their main weapon):
i. Hull defence guns have increased accuracy vs. fighters - 40% increase in accuracy vs. fighter (from 0.1 to 0.14).
ii. Hull defence guns have increased accuracy vs. Corvette (from .4 to .45).
iii. Hull defence guns vs. Resource Collectors Penetration Decrease (from 100% to 75%).
iv. Hull defence guns vs. Platforms penetration increased 300%.

c. Platforms
i. Platform controller build time increase (from 30s to 70s).
ii. Hiigaran Platform controller cost increase (from 500ru to 650ru).
iii. Ion Platform accuracy vs. corvettes and fighters has been decreased (from 10% to 4% for fighters and from 8% to 4% for corvettes).
iv. Ion Platforms Penetration vs. Corvettes and Fighters has been decreased from (from 100% to 1% vs. fighters and from 100% to 10% for Corvettes).
v. Ion Platform research time has been increased by 70 seconds (from 30s to 100s).
vi. Missile Platform research time has been increased by 45 seconds (from 60s to 105s).
vii. Speed for all platforms has been reduced by 75 (from 200 to 125).
viii. Platforms have had significant reduction in amount of damage done to collectors (75% damage reduction for gun platforms 50% damage reduction for missile platforms and 60% damage reduction for Ion Platforms).

d. Resource Controllers
i. Number of Hull Guns reduced from 8 to 4.

e. Corvettes
i. Missile Corvette Damage vs. Platforms has been increased by 90%
ii. Pulsar Corvette Damage vs. Platforms has been increased by 60%
iii. Laser Corvette attack style changed to an attack run vs. subsystems
iv. Vaygr Corvette armour upgrades reduced (from 1.5 to 1.3 for level 1 and from 2.0 to 1.6 for level 2)

f. Frigates
i. Vaygr Assault Frigate cost has been reduced by 50 RU (from 700 to 650).
ii. Vaygr Assault Frigate research cost has been reduced by 150 RU (from 800 to 650).
iii. Marine and Infiltrator Frigate HP has been increased (from 18000 to 20000).
iv. 10 second reduction in build time (from 55s to 45s) for Ion Frigate, Vaygr Assault Frigate, and Vaygr Missile Frigate.
v. 5 second reduction in build time (from 55s to 50s) for Flak Frigate and Marine/Infiltrator Frigate.

g. Bombers
i. Bombers are weaker vs. platforms: 20% decrease in penetration vs. platforms (from .55 to .45).

h. Vaygr Battlecruiser
i. 20% decrease in engine repair speed (from 250s to 200s).
ii. 20% increase to engine subsystem HP's (from 30000hp to 36000hp).
iii. 20% decrease to duration of inactivity after damage (from 80s to 64s).

i. EMP
i. Recharge - 10 second increase (from 60s to 70s).
ii. Frigates - Shield vs. EMP increased 40% (from 220 to 310).
iii. Research time - 10 second increase (from 60 to 70).


Singleplayer Game Fixes

a. General
i. Players unit caps will no longer be lowered when they load a game from the in-game menu.
ii. The shipyard is no longer listed as having two sensor spots.
iii. The Vaygr laser corvette now displays badges correctly.
iv. The Hiigaran Sensors Array textures are no longer inverted.
v. Vgr Refinery badges now display properly.
b. Mission 2
i. Bonus corvettes and bombers are now delivered 100% of the time.
c. Mission 4
i. The difficulty level has been reduced.
ii. Destroying the station before destroying inhibitors no longer results in a lock up.
d. Mission 6
i. The Derelict Mover is no longer targetable by your ships.
e. Mission 8
i. Scuttling Dreadnaught will now cause the mission to fail.
f. Mission 13
i. The difficulty level has been reduced.
g. Mission 14
i. The difficulty level has been reduced.
h. Mission 15
i. Ships can no longer be led out of the area of play in pursuit of the planet killer missiles.

ÜberJumper

WEEE

Eiden

w00t

shutupandshave

Congrats relic - fantatsic

Eiden

Errr, I don't see anything about MP sync issues ....

blood_angel

No flak frigate moving off on its own accord fix?

Monty Block

Eiden,

MP sync issues fixed through other fixes. There may still be some lurking out there, but we caught all we could find.

-geoff

Kroggy

Yes!

Eiden

We'll have to see if 3v3's become much more reliable....

Monty Block

I have no idea what you are trying to say here.

DrunkPSA

YES!

Almost everything I wanted.

Plats balanced vs collectors.

Laser exploit gone.

Vaygr Vettes nerfed.

Frigs boosted!!!

Emp nerfed!!!

AF boosted!

YAY RELIC!!!

Dan Van Crone

This might be a no-brainer but will v1.0 savegames be compatable with v1.1 ?

ÜberJumper

Probably not I wager.

Kroggy

He must mean the nasty habit of Flak frigs of always charging ahead of a battle group.

Homer Jr.

Thank you Relic!

Looks like this Christmas will be very merry indeed!

silencio

gg guys

The5thElephant

DVC while I don't wanna speak for Relic I think that is most likely a yes. It wouldn't really make sense for everyone to have to redo the entire SP game.

GREAT GOING RELIC! Great fix list!

Go Tricki Ninjas! Kill Katsumodo!

Dan Van Crone

Could go either way, Elephant. There's been plenty of games that have seen patches that break older savegames. I can't cite an example off the top of my head but you can take my word for it.

ilia1986

Holy shit!!!!
THis is AWESOME!!!!!!!!!

W00T!!!!!!!!!!

Hw2 is like I always though it should have been accoeding to that list!!!!!

about 90% of the things were fixed!

ÜberJumper

Now you just need to actually get the game ilia.

Qwaar-Jet

Nice work guys.Thats no small list of fixes.Also it proves just how much was wrong with the game.

Thanks guys, now get that patch out before Chrimbo

ilia1986

Ill get the game right after the patch is out. promise.

NovaBurn

w00tness, hell ya Relic.

can't wait for this. Maybe you guys can sneak the support frigate model and a few others in the patch *wink*

Dauvin

no battle chatter fix? =(( on my comp they say the same damn 3 things and everything else is high pitched beeps.

Ah well, the rest looks allll good.

see here! Battle chatter thread

Panama Jack

1. Platforms are now completely and totally useless. There is now no reason to ever make them. They won't fire while moving, they are less accurate, less armor, do less damage and other ships do more damage against them. Heck before this change they were almost useless in the beginning of the game and WERE totally useless after 5-10 minutes of game play. And don't talk about platform rushes. Those only worked on games where the players were very close to each other. They might as well have just removed platforms all together. I was hoping they would make them more accurate and a little tougher so they would be USEFUL though most of the game.

2. Not a word on any of the multiplayer cheats, other than controlling other players ships, that came out within days of the games release, insta building, insta RUs, insta research, ect).

3. Nothing mentioned about recordings being restored to the game.

Some nice changes but too many things left out.

Zone_alarm

fine list,

bud i miss the possibility to record mp games.

please spend some ru for building a researchmodul and research
record mp games.

and please upgrade the patchlist after that

ÜberJumper

PJ:

1. Plats were designed to be a quick defense, not an offensive unit. The changes to them turn them back into a defensive unit. It is now no longer possible to destroy an enemy resourcing op (effectively eliminating your opponent) with a platform rush right from the start of the game. They are still useful in the defense.

2. I am not aware of any cheats which allow you to insta build, get instant money or instantly research. Perhaps Relic's dealt with trainer issues and such in another manner. The laser vette exploit is fixed.

3. That's because they were never in the game properly in the first place.

severijn

ultimate w00tage! Way to go!

Deus

What about the problem when loading a save game and the frame rate drops considerably? Last I checked, there wasn't a fix for that...

ÜberJumper

I was unable to find recreation steps for it, to provide Relic, outside of a couple of save games where it seemed to do it for me. However, that may have been resolved by some other fixes in the system.

mecha

1. Then you don't know how to do an effective platform rush...

2. Those cause instant sync errors.

3. It's a shame, yes.

Monty Block

Couldn't reproduce. Likely it was fixed in the process of fixing something else.

DrunkPSA

What the hell are you smoking?

1) Plats are an early game STATIC defense that is supposed to DEFEND you from early strike craft raids. How do they not do that now? I guess you will have to find out a new strat besides plat spamming all game

2) There are no cheats that anyone is aware of. Care to elaborate?

3) We all want recorded games. Now stop complaining and praise all the fixes which happened.

Sil said it best.

GG relic.

rc mad

That there is a big list of fixes, way to go relic :bow2:

Thanks for busting your butts the past 12+ (?) weeks to sort out the bugs. You'd best release it before Christmas though or there'll be hell to pay


:jk: I'm away from my poot for 6 weeks starting boxing day, knowing the patch came out whilst I'm away would be to much to bear.

Monty Block

Oh, and for you graphic card whizkids...here are some technical fixes that we didn't add to the readme...


a. Disabled color bits in P-buffer to speed up the rendering of shadows and hyperspace FX.

b. We now handle a pbuffer error correctly.

c. We now only use WGL_TEXTURE_TARGET_ARB if renderToTextureCap is supported (so Parhelia can create a pbuffer).

d. We now only use 8 megabytes instead of 24 for the shadow buffer.

d. We removed a dust cloud workaround as nVidia updated a driver feature.

e. New 4 texture ship shader (Matrox/Intel).

f. We've stopped disabling multisampling on every frame.

g. Shadow map quality is increased from 1.5 to 4.0.

h. We now always clear the stencil for improved performance on Intel systems.

i. We've turned TXP into TEX when getting texture coordinates in fragment programs to save an unneeded divide for better performance.

j. Intel
Added driver dll name.
Updated driver version.
Disabled smooth points.

k. ATI
Updated driver version.

l. nVidia
Updated driver version.
Wrote a new nv2x shader (gives us a nice performance boost).

m. Matrox
Updated driver version and disabled display lists.

n. SiS
Updated driver version and disabled some features.

o. XGI
Update driver version.
We've disabled VBO and pbuffers as they don't work correctly with XGI beta drivers.

Zone_alarm

ok drunk i stop complaining and praise all fixes at the patchlist.

engine stop. bandbox all hitting f3 spacebar spacebar

DrunkPSA

hehe.

cateye

gg guys

ÜberJumper

[13: 34] < soul|FL > this new patch calls for only one sort of song
[13: 34] < soul|FL > i believe in miracles where you from you sexy thing.. sexy thing you, i believe in miracles since you came along you sexy thing
[13: 35] < soul|FL > where did you come from baby how did you know i needed you how did you know i needed you so badly how did you know i would give my heart gladly
[13: 35] < soul|FL > now you lying close to me making love to me

farsight

Excellent. This fixes a lot of the issues I was wondering about, especially the Carrier dock bump issue. And to all those who want to complain, these guys are doing the best they can - you're lucky they've got this much fixed in the first patch.

However, I really, really hope my 1.0 savegame doesn't get screwed up by the 1.1 patch - I just got the game and I'm trying to get through. I would break me to have to go through all the missions again!

Eiden

Gun platforms have not changed in accuracy or damage, only ion plats have. Gun palts take down fighters as effectively as before, and ion plats take down frigs as quickly as before.

I find platforms QUITE useful because they are 300 RU and 20 seconds for 5000+ armour and good antifighter or antifrigate - nothing in the patch changes this. Clearly, you haven't seen platforms used effectively at all.

Rampage1

yEEE HAAAWWW!!

"j. Ships that are docking or being built no longer cause ships already docked to launch when the ship hold is full."

hehe, that one got me introuble a couple of times before I knew what was going on. I really needed full carrier for mission. When I hyperd in, I was missing a wing of bombers. LOL

Great NEWs team.

No, Fantastic!

Rampage1

As far as old saved games. I think I would rather play from beginning again with the new changes. Looks like it will be a lot easier. I think the most I had to replay a mission was 5 times. And that was 12.

Skeeter

anyway to join a game that is already in progress cos say the game is loading and all is going well but 5 mins in the game somehow u get booted, maybe crash for example, so can u click on the game in the lobby that is active (have games display untill ended) and if there is empty slot u can try to join and a message to host can either allow or not for them to join the game. Primareily for those that are booted out of the game and want to get back in if for example ur either in a good long game or somit. For ships well i supose if u were originally in the game and half way through and u quickly rejoined u would get back ur ships just have the game save ur data in case of crashes so it calls back the data from a file or somit...

i know its a long shot but id like this feature cos most games i play are team games so if were having a good game and a member crashes i hope they could get back in the game somehow or similar examples...

cheers if this can be discussed in depth relic.

ÜberJumper

That's not gonna happen Skeeter.

Even if it was possible, which I don't think it is without massive programming changes, the coding fixes are done for this patch, and its in testing.

Monty Block

Skeeter,

That would require a drastic overhaul of the entire networking system...I can safely say this won't happen for Homeworld 2.

-geoff

yasotay

Thanks for the hard work Relic.

and yes I guess Sierra as well...

CoreyGH

Fantastic news. I have a couple clarification questions.

What exactly is "Penetration"? How does it affect battles?

Platforms no longer fire while moving

There are 2 situations in which a platform will move. 1)Given a move order. 2)Following the ship that just built them (i.e. a carrier that is building plats while on the move). Does the "no longer fire while moving" clause affect both situations?

ÜberJumper

Platforms don't move with the building ship if it is in motion anymore.