Technicalities of Homeworld 2 Backgrounds | Hacker News Reader

Technicalities of Homeworld 2 Backgrounds

simonschreibt.de

211 pointstodsacerdoti72 comments

Fun fact, when I was like... 12, I made a presentation to my parents based off the Demo of this game as to why they should buy it. I sold them on it when one slide was just a photo of a single perfectly rendered missile being fired, traveling across space.

Adorably nerdy. Was it a powerpoint on the livingroom TV?

Okay, I actually found the presentation, if you want a laugh (/ be impressed at game that's >20 years old), here you go https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vR18QhznFBRK....

This is absolutely adorable. Thank you for sharing!

Thanks, this made my day! No wonder your pitch was a success.

Don’t tell my kids (hi kids, if you’re reading this!) but the first thing they ask for with a freaking presentation they’re probably getting.

Ah, was thinking the same thing

My son sends me an annual presentation with his wishes for Christmas presents…still works after many presentations, probably would work without presentations too.

This is so great!

You even had call to action links on your “where to buy?” slide.

I enjoyed the “Special thanks to dad for paying the electricity bill and Internet bill for this project” XD

Thanks for sharing this amazing bit. I love the "our team has found out..." At the end.

Like....who is the 12 year olds team?

Tom, Tom, Tom and Tom. It's right there in the credits!

Great pitch! I now want to play homeworld 2! It was only a tenner in Tesco? Why so cheap?

This is bloody brilliant!

Hahaha amazing! This is better than the some of the presentations our junior hires do at work.

2 weeks later, a presentation why you need a new hardware to run your Homeworld 2 smoothly on.

As someone who love the homeworld games as a kid, I can totally understand the type of kid who likes those games is absolutely the type that would make a presentation like this. The conclusion is fantastic, 12yo you had a great sense of humor!

Dude, I'll buy you a copy right now

This is actually amazing, thanks for finding this and sharing it!

Great presentation. I like that both buy links actually link to Tesco. The illusion of choice!

Please tell me that next you've written an Excel file with macros etc. to explain why you should be allowed to play EvE Online at 3 in the morning?

I guess I'm that predictable. Here I was in 2014 running what I now believe would be called a price fix on Eve (https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10154142396180554&set=a...).

It really is some of the most beautiful looking space games ever made, I used to play this a lot as a kid and I was so disappointed to learn that nowhere in space looks like this game. I wish more sci-fi media embraced this kind of aesthetic, bright colorful space with nebula sunsets, almost makes the void inviting.

and don't forget about the music !

Absolutely, back then I was in love with some of the tracks in the second game that had this tribal ambiance mixed with electronic music. The entire art direction in the series is fantastic in fact, all those colorful ships straight out of Jodorowsky's Dune... Beautiful!

I had high hopes for the recent Homeworld 3 "reboot" of the series but apparently they butchered it

Gearbox was involved so there were no surprises there, seems like everything they touch turns into crap. They also screwed up the remaster of the first two games, the geniuses there decided to port the first game into the second game's engine, only they forgot the first Homeworld had a ship formation mechanic that was absent in the second one, they tried recreating it post-launch but the AI was pretty much lobotomized in the process. Such a shame, because it looks gorgeous on the newer engine.

The Remasters of first two Homeworld games play just fine, there's nothing "screwed up" there. They changed a few things due to engine change, but it has very little effect on the gameplay and it certanly isn't the massive drama bunch of nerds on forums are making of it.

Everything that makes Homeworld great is still there (without all the technical issues due to 1999 engine).

butchered is an understatement - randy's Shitty Midas touch has struck again.

That game is worse in every aspect than homeworld 1 and 2, except in visuals. Even ship behavior is worse(!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taMsuR5VqAA - in hw3 they pick a flat plane between themselves and target and use just it for combat.

Plot is dire marvel-tier character focused drivel, with even it's premises being contradictory. I don't blame the writers either - they were put in project that obviously mismatched their style. Just watch the ending cutscene to see how bad it is.

Gameplay wise it introduced micromanagement but no strategy depth - basically ships have funny buttons that increase DPS for a short while. the best strategy is to have biggest blob of ships.

So for a while I briefly worked the same company as Aaron Kambietz. During my time there, I asked him how the developers came to the conclusion to use a vertex-coloured skybox like they did in the article.

If my memory serves, he said the primary reason was wanting to hit a particular memory budget for the appropriate minspec at the time. Or, they felt any memory dedicated to textures was better spent on the spaceships. The vertex data was hand-authored by the artists tracing over original artwork (I think on a Wacom-style tablet). He stressed that it was arduous work and took a few weeks!

Hand drawn skybox compression. Now that is some dedication!

A friend showed me the Homeworld (1) beta in… 1999 I think? The beauty of the backgrounds was a huge part of the appeal. I wound up administering the Relic forums for many years. Delightful to see the franchise here on HN.

Also the music. First time you play the 3rd mission was impactful. And when you get to the last one.

All served by a really easy to learn and use UI for giving 3d orders to units.

I meant to play this again last year, but it turns out that it’s another casualty of the mac 32-bit kill-off, and there doesn’t seem to be an obviously easy way to get it running with Wine or equivalents. Maybe I’ll look into it again…

With intel and amd getting much better in the low end power and performance-wise, Apple should look at going back to x86. The developer situation is still a mess with Docker x86 and arm mismatches, and it was so convenient just to throw Windows on to a mac to game.

I really hope they don't do this. Apple never cared about desktop gaming and I hope they don't sacrifice the amazing gains that Apple Silicon made in power and efficiency just to support a niche use case that's often better served by GeForce Now anyway.

The Apple Silicon machines I've had were tremendously better than any x86 one I've ever used, at any price point, for laptop work. Powerful, silent, battery efficient. Definitely worth the tradeoff of losing x86 support IMHO.

I guess the x86 compat depends on what you work on. For the web teams I've been a part of, it was a real headache in the first couple years (the M1 era) but hasn't been an issue at all since then. But that's just anecdotal.

The M-series of chips is quite possibly the most universally beloved thing Apple has done in a decade.

Def not universal. It annoys me to no end when I need to cross-compile on my windows machine so the content guys at my company can use it, and then I have to walk them through how to allow their machine to actually run it. God forbid someone wants to just run internally developed software on their own hardware.

I didn't realize there were still companies doing this. What sort of use case is it where a cross platform desktop app is chosen over a web app or a webview?

My guess would be performance.

We are operating on content on physical portable hardrives from the studio. A webapp would be pointless and inefficient (these videos are hundreds of gbs). Most of the internal software we write for our content team is basically glorified macros. They need to adjust 100's of videos sometimes, and doing it one by one would take months. If they can define what needs to be done, an engineer can usually get it done in a few hours or days instead of weeks.

Makes sense. Thanks for sharing!

Isn’t this more a problem with Apple’s application security than the CPU architecture? You’d be jumping through the same hoops to run unsigned software if it was still Intel.

Realistically, Macs are meant to develop for Apple devices only. Apple creates their own ecosystem where nothing else matters.

Want to develop on Docker (Linux)? You should use Linux.

AMD and Intel getting better means now you can have a very, very good Linux experience too.

It's also huge in web dev, graphics, marketing, etc. Every single web dev I know uses a Mac. The hardware guys prefer some Linux variant or another, though.

Windows has WSL, but otherwise it's a lot easier to run a lot of the CLI tools on a Mac, while still having access to a polished GUI and mainstream apps (Adobe and Microsoft, etc.)

Didn't say it's not big, only that Apple themselves build it to service their own ecosystem only. The fact it runs any of these tools is simply a result of the Unix-y core. If you want 100% compatibility with Linux tools, Linux is still the best bet (obviously).

As someone who has about 800 Steam games (mostly various indie titles, some free games, few AAA games grabbed on a discount:

  * all 800 of those work on Windows, in very few cases any of those work better on another platform
  * about 600 of those can be made to run on Linux distros with Proton (with varying degrees of success, relatively few actually have native versions)
  * when it comes to Mac, only about 120 of those have native versions that run and Proton doesn't seem to be an option
  * I know that Game Porting Toolkit exists, but haven't really looked that much into it, I probably should in the future
  * none of that, not even Proton would be really necessary, if people bothered to export versions of their games for all platforms, which is at the very least an option that is offered by all big mainstream game engines, or even smaller ones like Godot; but we don't live in that kind of a world, sadly
  * oddly enough, in many cases games won't run because the developers explicitly choose not to support additional platforms, especially in the case of the various anti-cheat solutions, which plain sucks

It's quite unfortunate, because otherwise I could definitely enjoy more gaming even on my slightly dated M1 MacBook Air - because while I wouldn't be playing that many cutting edge AAA games, if you could have a satisfying gaming experience even on a Nintendo Switch, then I see no reason why the same couldn't be said about Apple hardware.

There's just not a big gaming market for Macs (and I say that as both a gamer and a Mac user). It's a chicken and egg problem. Apple historically has not cared about desktop gaming much, and don't provide an easy way to port games to it. They don't even support Vulkan, so developers have to port to Metal or use GPT. A lot of devs in turn skip the Mac because it's a lot of additional work for a tiny market. And without the devs, there are very few Mac-only gamers.

Apple had a chance to do what Valve did with Proton here, using GPT and custom first party patches or configs to certify a collection of games as working. But they never bothered, instead handing that off to Crossover (who does an OK job but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of UX). It's still a huge pain to get games running on Mac, even worse than Linux. Way worse, actually.

Unless Apple suddenly has a change of heart and really tries to support and help game devs, they're not going to entice anyone no matter how good the Apple Silicon GPUs are. And they're probably not going to do that since Steam is so dominant and they wouldn't be able to make the 30% they do on iOS. Even for their new platforms like Vision, gaming was an afterthought. It's just not part of their culture. Apple Arcade on Mac is a sad little market compared to any other games ecosystem.

Thankfully there's at least GeForce Now, which works way way better anyway.

> I know that Game Porting Toolkit exists

There's a wrapper over this called Whisky (https://getwhisky.app) that makes it really straightforward to install and run Steam or other Windows binaries.

I use it on an M1 Air and an M1 Pro. Less demanding titles run very well, heavier games like Cyberpunk 2077 don't really reach a stable 30fps even with Steam Deck-like settings so keep your expectations in check.

The problem with Whisky is they are a major Wine version behind as to not step on Crossover: https://github.com/orgs/Whisky-App/discussions/257#discussio...

Some games like Half Life have sound issues on the older Wine versions.

Even Crossover doesn't work all that well. It has a small list of supported games, many hundreds of untested games, and even on the games it supports, there are frequently glitches, significant slowdowns while loading new textures & levels, occasional crashes, etc.

I'm a paid customer, occasional beta tester, and frequent compatibility database submitter. I don't think I'll continue using it after my subscription expires, though. It reminds me of the DOS days of having to tinker with config.sys to get your game to run... which is the last thing I want to do these days, in middle age, just to play a game for an hour or two. I often end up spending more time fighting Crossover than actually playing the game =/

Some games work better in Parallels than Crossover, too. (Parallels uses Windows for Arm, which uses Microsoft's own x86 emulator instead of Wine.) Some the other way around. Neither is anywhere near Proton-level seamlessness, much less native Windows gaming. Neither would come anywhere close to passing the "girlfriend/wife/mom test" in terms of ease of use.

I still game on my Mac everyday, but almost entirely in Geforce Now (streamed from the cloud) instead of fiddling with all the virtualization and emulation. Hugely better graphics and no local fan noise or heat to deal with, or any incompatibility issues. Just one click and the game launches and runs at max setting and runs flawlessly for hours, which is definitely not something that I can say about Crossover.

IMO it was a mistake switching to x86 the first time. Repeating that mistake would once again kneecap the one major thing differentiating Apple's desktops and laptops from your average Windows PC.

I'm going to disagree. Moving to x86 moved to native windows compatibility speeds and was a massive boon to our security team. We could interact with everything in our Windows environment, use FOSS tools natively, and the support for battery and power management was streets ahead of our Dell laptops.

x86 -at the time- was the right things to do, because IBM wasn't going to get them there...moving to NeXT's underpinnings also opened the door to a TON of pre-existing code.

Same… I’ve tried everything (or hopefully not). Does anyone have a recommendation on how to play this on M-series macs?

The Windows version should work on Crossover: https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/homeworl...

Ah, right. I’d been looking at the remastered version, which definitely doesn’t get anywhere near as good results: https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/homeworl...

Ah, I didn't realize that was a different executable altogether. Thanks for clarifying!

If you enjoy tedium it runs really well on ARM Windows in Parallels.

This is just a note to say Aaron Kambietz is great. [buy the book https://www.homeworldremastered.com/artbook/]

Would that it were possible, it's been sold out for years and it's $485 on Amazon for a used copy as of this writing.

If you know a cheaper way to get a hold if it please let me know!

I love the Homeworld games (especially the Cataclysm expansion), but I think EVE online has far superior backgrounds.

https://evetravel.wordpress.com/visible-nebulae-in-new-eden/

Cloud ring is my favorite.

I used to work at CCP and asked about the backgrounds, and Homeworld was an influence. In fact the main reason they made a space game was it was easier to render detailed and beautiful spaceships/backgrounds with early-2000s tech, homeworld was proof of that. Aesthetics was literally the subject that made them all agree on a space game, which is interesting because what people tend to think of with Eve Online is the complex systems, but it also a really gorgeous game, even by todays standards.

There was a pre-release interview with the EVE devs in Edge magazine sometime around 2003. It described them creating backgrounds for the game by dropping milk and various coloured foodstuff into a fishtank and photographing light filtering through.

If you're in UX or product and thinking about 3D applications, you must dig into this game.

It's one of the only 3D interaction models I've ever truly enjoyed and felt efficient in.

I've always wondered if there was a way to manage servers using the same 3d UX as homeworld

Yeah!

I love the idea that we carry some context with us (the mothership), and we move from one large context window to another, with the ability to instantly zoom in and out to see very granular details.

I want to see all kinds of information projected like this (File system, networks, servers, DBs, etc.)

The personal project linked in the article is so beautifully done. A joy to interact with

The early Spyro the Dragon games on the Playstation 1 did this too. Looked gorgeous.

This is interesting. Although a bit overkill nowadays with just about every computing device supporting 4k textured skyboxes easily

Only in the recent past

Seekers fought to realize

Skyward shone like beacons

A question of origin

Is it possible to play homeworld 1 or 2 on linux? Should I try to run originals or the remakes?

Originals (+ Cataclysm!) should run well via WINE. Remakes are prettier but the gameplay changes are a bit... controversial.

i loved cataclysm then a bit less hw2 but still was amazing. how is hw3?

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