Gearbox's Homeworld 1 & 2 HD Remakes - A New Hope

[Quatlo]

for example the Ghost Ship after Kadesh no longer seems to be mobile.

It ever was?

I don't think so, I always remember my bombers afking in sphere formation around it and blasting it to bits without any movement involved.

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

for example the Ghost Ship after Kadesh no longer seems to be mobile.

It ever was?

I'm pretty sure it moved very slowly and that part of the challenge of the level was keeping the thing at a distance from your capital ships while trying to disable it with your strike craft. I could be misremembering though: although I have played the Homeworld 1 campaign numerous times -- it is one of my all time favorite singleplayer games -- it nevertheless has probably been 6 years since I last played it.

 

[Hamanu]

God damn you Gearbox. I actually liked Borderlands, but you've been nothing but shit since. It really seemed like you were trying with this, it seemed like it could be good, maybe even great. How could you shit all over yourselves so badly. I wouldn't even mind so much if it looked like a quick cash grab, broken and worthless. It's so close to being good, it seems like there was care there, which makes this all the more inexplicable.

Also, the Ghost Ship never moved.

F2kzzzzzzz

 

[Severian Silk]

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with this remake. Most of my gripes center around the bugs that seem to have been introduced by porting HW1 to the HW2 engine, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Gearbox eventually sorts them out. I'm not holding my breath on it though. In the meantime, I haven't been this engrossed in a game for quite some time.

I don't know you any more.

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

I don't know you any more.

:shrug: Having just read through the past few pages, I have to say that many of the concrete complaints require a thorough, in depth, and easily recalled knowledge of Homeworld 1 mechanics to be noticeable. That's not to say the complaints are wrong per se, just that they are really only going to matter for the hardest of hardcore fans. For example, I didn't know that HW2 had ditched the physical ballistics model in favor of an RNG based model -- it always looked like hits were based off of physical impact -- and while I am disappointed to learn that that's the case I was hard pressed to actually notice such a difference over my campaign marathon the past few days. I'm sure now that I know that that's the case, I'll start noticing it, and being bothered by it, but if a problem requires being explicitly pointed out in order for you to recognize it, then I do have to wonder how big a problem it really is. Certainly, Homeworld 1 was diminished by the port to the upgraded Homeworld 2 engine, but I went into this knowing that it was all running off the Homeworld 2 engine and therefore I expected to see some subtle differences. Perhaps it speaks more to it having been too long since I last played Homeworld 1 than anything else, but given how subtle some of those differences are, I feel like this remake came off about as well as could be expected, pathing and AI bugs not withstanding. I really enjoyed my replay, at any rate.

 

[spekkio]

Perkel
Do you know of any way to get rid of skybox anims in Cata?

You can try some command line options I posted in "Unofficial patches" thread:
http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Homeworld#Command-line_parameters
http://forums.relicnews.com/showthr...-OpenGL-Help&p=3875655&viewfull=1#post3875655

Just use -trigger instead of /trigger for Cata.

 

[DraQ]

Perkel
Do you know of any way to get rid of skybox anims in Cata?

You can try some command line options I posted in "Unofficial patches" thread:
http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Homeworld#Command-line_parameters
http://forums.relicnews.com/showthr...-OpenGL-Help&p=3875655&viewfull=1#post3875655

Just use -trigger instead of /trigger for Cata.

There were no skybox anims in HW1 so I doubt any of the HW1 parameters is going to be applicable here.

 

[DraQ]

for example the Ghost Ship after Kadesh no longer seems to be mobile.

It ever was?

I don't think so, I always remember my bombers afking in sphere formation around it and blasting it to bits without any movement involved.

What about the missile destroyer?

 

[Quatlo]

What about the missile destroyer?

Evasive scouts

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

for example the Ghost Ship after Kadesh no longer seems to be mobile.

It ever was?

I don't think so, I always remember my bombers afking in sphere formation around it and blasting it to bits without any movement involved.

What about the missile destroyer?

Speaking of which, would the automaton vessels not stray too far from the ghost ship in the original game? If the ghost ship never moved, there was something about the original mission that was absent or poorly implemented in the remastered version that made it overly easy in comparison to the original. This time around I just positioned my capital ships out of range of the ghost ship, sent in some interceptors to pull the automaton cap ships, and then, once they were in range of my cap ships, salvaged the missile destroyer and roflstomped the rest. The missile destroyer ended up surviving until the end of the game, as did all of my super capitals now that I think about it.

 

[DraQ]

for example the Ghost Ship after Kadesh no longer seems to be mobile.

It ever was?

I don't think so, I always remember my bombers afking in sphere formation around it and blasting it to bits without any movement involved.

What about the missile destroyer?

Speaking of which, would the automaton vessels not stray too far from the ghost ship in the original game? If the ghost ship never moved, there was something about the original mission that was absent or poorly implemented in the remastered version that made it overly easy in comparison to the original. This time around I just positioned my capital ships out of range of the ghost ship, sent in some interceptors to pull the automaton cap ships, and then, once they were in range of my cap ships, salvaged the missile destroyer and roflstomped the rest. The missile destroyer ended up surviving until the end of the game, as did all of my super capitals now that I think about it.

I believe that in the original the vessels either tumbled slowly in their inert state or fired at targets. I'm not sure if they ever moved around, except perhaps to maintain LOS to target and I'm pretty sure they never pursued (ion sphere frigs OTOH did pursue which let you do lulzy things with a bunch of probes).

 

[DraQ]

ScottishMartialArts

I'm not sure if they ever moved around, except perhaps to maintain LOS to target and I'm pretty sure they never pursued

Then again, I may be wrong:

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

ScottishMartialArts

I'm not sure if they ever moved around, except perhaps to maintain LOS to target and I'm pretty sure they never pursued

Then again, I may be wrong:

Yeah, I think I'm going to have to just replay the original version to figure out what was so different between the versions' implementations of this mission. It definitely felt off.

Finished the Homeworld 2 campaign a little while ago. I wish they had gone with the unpatched difficulty, or at least offered it as a hard mode. The campaign was legitimately challenging before the patch, and even though that difficulty was somewhat artificial -- enemy fleets were scaled to the size of your fleet at the start of the mission -- it made for some absolutely thrilling battles. Mission 12, the rescue of Captain Soban, was extremely impressive: the size of the Vaygr fleet and the rate at which it reinforced, made it impossible to overwhelm at once. Instead you had to fight this full intensity gauntlet for 45 minutes, replacing your losses, retreating and counterattacking, carefully managing your strike craft and capital ships to keep them alive as long as possible. It was a battle of attrition where you tried to keep the momentum on your side and gradually build on it. Patched, the Vaygr could easily be overwhelmed, and the mission was trivialized. I wish Relic hadn't listened to the forum people back in 2003: it was the sheer quantity of bitching about the difficulty that led to the patch. Oh well.

Off to play Cataclysm now. My copy is in storage but thankfully there's an active torrent.

 

[Astral Rag]

Hey folks! Want to check in to let you know that your feedback is not falling on deaf ears. As mentioned by a few folks on this thread (and this blog post: http://www.gearboxsoftware.com/community/articles/1324), part of the remastering process for Homeworld 1 Remastered involved moving it over to the Homeworld 2 engine.

Please keep in mind that the engine swap changed the way things like support frigates, repair vessels, and some formations function in HW1R.

We'll continue to pass this feedback along to the team to evaluate the feasibility of making and implementing changes in future updates, and let you all know when we have something more to report. Right now, the team is focusing on bugs that cause crashes or prevent players from progressing through the game (that I just got out of a meeting about!).

The team left the meeting to go work on some of these fixes today. We're hoping to push these into testing in the near future and are aiming to have an an update for you all on that first patch sometime early next week.

Some helpful steps you can take to make it easier to digest your feedback:

- Be sure to submit your feedback through our feedback/support system: https://gearboxsoftware.zendesk.com/entries/63326590-Submitting-Feedback-for-Homeworld-Remastered
- Keep specific feedback separated by topic. While large lists are great for the sake of discussion, it makes it difficult to track updates that only apply to specific issues/feedback in a larger thread.

http://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/t/gameplay-bugs-feedback-megathread/95069/70

That forum layout

 

[Norfleet]

Nothing can compete with the multiple ways to cheese the ion sphere mission, though.

Is there a better way of doing it than jacking the entire thing? All your ship are belong to us, etc.

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

Nothing can compete with the multiple ways to cheese the ion sphere mission, though.

Is there a better way of doing it than jacking the entire thing? All your ship are belong to us, etc.

I recall one playthrough where I used multiple cloak generators to mask my cap ship fleet until it was at the hyperspace inhibitor, then I decloaked, quickly destroyed the inhibitor, then did a quick dock hyperspace to end the mission before the ion frigates could close the distance back to the inhibitor. Doing it this way required some very careful cycling of cloak generators so that one is on while like 4 others are charging, and you also miss out on having like 100 ion cannon frigates for the final two missions, but the upside is that the mission is a heck of a lot faster, and the race to destroy the inhibitor before the ion cannon frigates get there is pretty exciting.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

This one always puzzled me, what's with the Ion-Frigates slowly moving outside the map?

 

[DraQ]

Overal, as far as I understand it, going from physics to %hit system wouldn't have been that bad, or noticeable if it wasn't for strike craft. For capships I don't see it making much difference apart from pushing or flipping vessels with concentrated gunfire, but strike craft pretty much relied on the intricacies of physics system to remain viable - for example a fighter might have dodged fire from few vessels almost indefinitely, but with numerous enough attackers there would be no room for it to weave between the bullets and it would get trashed in no time - you can't emulate something like this with naive RNG, and HW1 was far more strike-craft centric than HW2 (at least on Hiigaran side). HW2 also had point defense guns on pretty much everything which helped explain the strike craft loses.

Finished the Homeworld 2 campaign a little while ago. I wish they had gone with the unpatched difficulty, or at least offered it as a hard mode. The campaign was legitimately challenging before the patch, and even though that difficulty was somewhat artificial -- enemy fleets were scaled to the size of your fleet at the start of the mission -- it made for some absolutely thrilling battles.

Nah, it was shit.
Especially given that sometimes if you played superbly enough you could get facerolled by hilariously overwhelming force the moment the mission start cutscene stopped playing (this could only be remedied by reverting to an earlier save and playing poorly).

Nothing can compete with the multiple ways to cheese the ion sphere mission, though.

Is there a better way of doing it than jacking the entire thing? All your ship are belong to us, etc.

There are certainly faster and more exciting (or just plain funnier) ways.
Like unpeeling the sphere with a handful of probes.

Plus there is this problem that jacking the whole sphere may cause the game to seize up on hyperspacing and then you're fucked.

 

[Beowulf]

So... The general consensus regarding HWR is to wait and see if they fix the bugs and "features"?

 

[Ulminati]

Speaking of which, would the automaton vessels not stray too far from the ghost ship in the original game? If the ghost ship never moved, there was something about the original mission that was absent or poorly implemented in the remastered version that made it overly easy in comparison to the original. This time around I just positioned my capital ships out of range of the ghost ship, sent in some interceptors to pull the automaton cap ships, and then, once they were in range of my cap ships, salvaged the missile destroyer and roflstomped the rest. The missile destroyer ended up surviving until the end of the game, as did all of my super capitals now that I think about it.

The automatons had very little fuel. They had to go back to the ghost ship and resupply often. There is no fuel in HW remastered, so they don't have to deal with that downtime and can stray further from the ghost ship.

I haven't played HW remastered much, so I cna't say for sure. But a large part of the strategy for those missions was to take out the carriers so the attacking drones became inert. I imagine the missions are a bit more difficult/tedious now that you can't use evasive scout distraction + bombers on the carriers and then leave the inert drones behind.

 

[DraQ]

Speaking of which, would the automaton vessels not stray too far from the ghost ship in the original game? If the ghost ship never moved, there was something about the original mission that was absent or poorly implemented in the remastered version that made it overly easy in comparison to the original. This time around I just positioned my capital ships out of range of the ghost ship, sent in some interceptors to pull the automaton cap ships, and then, once they were in range of my cap ships, salvaged the missile destroyer and roflstomped the rest. The missile destroyer ended up surviving until the end of the game, as did all of my super capitals now that I think about it.

The automatons had very little fuel. They had to go back to the ghost ship and resupply often. There is no fuel in HW remastered, so they don't have to deal with that downtime and can stray further from the ghost ship.

I haven't played HW remastered much, so I cna't say for sure. But a large part of the strategy for those missions was to take out the carriers so the attacking drones became inert. I imagine the missions are a bit more difficult/tedious now that you can't use evasive scout distraction + bombers on the carriers and then leave the inert drones behind.

I think you've got the missions mixed up.

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

Especially given that sometimes if you played superbly enough you could get facerolled by hilariously overwhelming force the moment the mission start cutscene stopped playing (this could only be remedied by reverting to an earlier save and playing poorly).

Or by upping your game and continuing to play superbly rather than crying on the Sierra forums begging for a difficulty patch.

Seriously though, your fleet could only get so big due to the unit caps, and there were more than enough resources to ensure that you entered each mission at or near the unit cap. The end result was that you almost always faced the most difficult version of each mission, and yet the game was still very beatable, and the resulting battles were much more intense and larger scale.

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

So... The general consensus regarding HWR is to wait and see if they fix the bugs and "features"?

That's probably the wisest course, since Gearbox is at least making noises that they recognize and want to fix the gameplay issues introduced by the port to the Homeworld 2 engine. On the other hand, I still had a lot of fun replaying it, even its deficiencies are becoming more glaring as I replay Cataclysm, which obviously is only available in its original engine.

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

Speaking of which, would the automaton vessels not stray too far from the ghost ship in the original game? If the ghost ship never moved, there was something about the original mission that was absent or poorly implemented in the remastered version that made it overly easy in comparison to the original. This time around I just positioned my capital ships out of range of the ghost ship, sent in some interceptors to pull the automaton cap ships, and then, once they were in range of my cap ships, salvaged the missile destroyer and roflstomped the rest. The missile destroyer ended up surviving until the end of the game, as did all of my super capitals now that I think about it.

The automatons had very little fuel. They had to go back to the ghost ship and resupply often. There is no fuel in HW remastered, so they don't have to deal with that downtime and can stray further from the ghost ship.

I haven't played HW remastered much, so I cna't say for sure. But a large part of the strategy for those missions was to take out the carriers so the attacking drones became inert. I imagine the missions are a bit more difficult/tedious now that you can't use evasive scout distraction + bombers on the carriers and then leave the inert drones behind.

I think you've got the missions mixed up.

Yeah it sounds like your talking about the Kadesh missions. And the drones in Kadesh do still retreat to their fuel pods.

 

[DraQ]

That's probably the wisest course, since Gearbox is at least making noises that they recognize and want to fix the gameplay issues introduced by the port to the Homeworld 2 engine.

The problem is that unless they reintroduce ballistics and dodging there is no fixing that.
The only other fix possible would be to remake units and unit balance HW2 style - strike craft squadrons, point defenses on almost every ship, increased strike craft firepower, maybe new capship types to skew the gameplay towards units that don't mind lack of ballistics - resulting in much less faithful remake.

(Incidentally this proves me right in every single of my endless arguments with abstractfags ).

Or by upping your game and continuing to play superbly rather than crying on the Sierra forums begging for a difficulty patch.

There is no upping your game if you hyperspace in with built up fleet, trigger cutscene, then face a wall of frigs about 10x your entire force just facerolling your MS the moment the cutscene ends.
You pretty much die before you actually regain control over your fleet.

This is exactly what happened to me in that hyperspace inhibitor mission, IIRC.

After I reloaded an earlier save and downgraded my playstyle to level I breezed through the entire campaign.

Seriously though, your fleet could only get so big due to the unit caps, and there were more than enough resources to ensure that you entered each mission at or near the unit cap. The end result was that you almost always faced the most difficult version of each mission, and yet the game was still very beatable, and the resulting battles were much more intense and larger scale.

Actually, IIRC the game scaled based on both your fleet and RU. The former capped but the latter didn't, neither did enemy fleet.
So if you played really well, your fleet remained at cap but your RUs keept increasing as you only really spent them when you could build new unit types or had to change your fleet profile. And increasingly massive enemy fleets kept producing increasingly massive amounts of salvageable debris, bloating your RUs faster and faster. It was like Morrowind's alchemy, except with computer using it against you.

It was especially awful in missions where you'd gain ability to produce new unit type, because then you had massive enemy force and your fleet not yet at cap and lacking vital units.

Multi-orifice raep ensued.