A look at the less glamorous updates of the next version of Homeworld:@ and some general words on progress.

Posted by EatThePath on Jan 29th, 2016

As we work towards getting a remastered version finally out to you folks, I'd like to say a few words about our placeholder ships. Making ships takes time. A lot of it. None of the team can devote as much time to it as we'd like, and that's been true for most of us for most of the mod's production. With design goals as ambitious as ours, that means a lot of gaps in our finished ship list. At the same time, our ambitions are just as much gameplay oriented as art oriented, and we can't test those ideas without full factions. Spending weeks on building a ship and then finding that we can't make it work after all is something we want to avoid!

These two facts together lead to the placeholder models you've seen if you've played the mod before. Unfinished models, in many cases just long rectangles with rough textures, filling out gameplay roles. They do the job, but they admittedly look rather unsightly, and not all of them even display all the team/stripe colors of a player.

Obviously we can't just snap our fingers and replace them with finished ships, but we've been doing what I refer to as a 'placeholder refresh', replacing the lowest effort placeholder models with slightly higher effort ones, some based on unrealized concept art for their ships, some on improvisation, and most on a mixture of the two. I expect this this will be an ongoing feature of future releases, but for the upcoming one we've focused on the placeholders in the UNH ship list. Pictured below are the UNH fighters(minus scout) in one screenshot, and in the other there resource controller in front of the missile, drone, and cloaked destroyers, as seen in the last release.

And now these same ships as they are in the current development build. For the time being the UNH missile destroyer is disabled and replaced by the republic missile destroyer.

Special thanks to Doci here, I asked him to do a minimal effort drone destroyer model and he rather exceeded his mandate there. His model draws significantly on as-yet unreleased UNH destroyer concept art, and is a decent indication of what we might do with the class in the future.

Beyond these new placeholders, many of the unfinished UNH ships now use the appropriate remastered kushan ships. While these ships in some cases diverge notably from how we might have handled an update of them, they never the less are pretty impressive pieces of art and will do the job of placeholders fairly well.

A word on the mod in general: I don't want to commit to a hard time table, because my estimates have been pretty off in the past and certain things will take unpredictable amounts of time, but we *are* closing in on a release. I've got a fixed list of requirements for the HWR debut, and anything beyond that can wait for the next one. With any luck, we'll get it out before gearbox's next big update!

In the lead up to the next release I've been posting our models for online viewing, initially on p3d and more recently on Sketchfab. I took a bit of a break while Deserts of Kharak's launch dominated the community, but will be resuming shortly. If you want to be notified as they're posted, you can follow me on sketchfab where the rest will appear, or on my twitter. I don't use it for much, but will be tweeting these there in the future.

Next time, we'll take a look at the awesome work Dark Sentinel has been doing in updating the Frerrn fleet to take advantage of HWR's engine. There's already a few screenshots of that in the image feed, but there's more we haven't yet shown