Comments - hanzz10

Apologies to any who are ruffled by me asking technical questions here.
I went to relicnews forums and found the following links relating to hw2:

Homeworld War Room (found one useful thread about "post your fav hw site)
Homeworld 2 walkthrough forum (useless)
Homeworld technical help (also useless)

I was hoping to find experienced people somewhere on the net that both mod the initial HW2 game, and have the willingness to help others in their learning, so I came here. Thanks for the heads up about mod sites, I'll look into some other places.

Well, I solved the problem with animation only working in the CFhodEd instead of in the game itself. While tinkering with the animation file for a new unit, I did something (probably my attempt to 'clear out' unused parts/joints in the resource collector source file) that made the game crash. Had to reinstall the whole game, update to 1.1 (since the extracted .big files floating around the net don't have the .hod as far as I have seen) re-extracted and finally got my special resource collector back into the game.

And MY GOD! How very frustrating for a 3ds Max modeler/animator to instead have to use number entry for animation as they did for the original TRON. It's like trying to type with boxing gloves on. That said, at long last I finally got my animations working in the game, though there are some oddities when the little mining proboscis moves into place, where it jumps a little over the intended animation point.
No idea what that's about. I've been trying, thinking and tinkering, but no fix. And if anyone knows what I can use to modify .events files, or madstate files, please let me know asap.

Pouk,

The .xls files are the original spreadsheets used by the Homeworld team to assign attributes to each ship. And thanks for your continued insights!

I solved the texture problem, by noticing the original resource collector texture set had a standalone mask element. By creating a 16x16 all black .tga with a white alpha, and saving it to dxt5, and bringing it into the game, the intermittent flickering of texture has stopped.

However I've gotten animation to work in the CFhodEdit app, but it doesn't want to work in the game. Any thoughts?

Thanks for the insight again, Pouk!

However, the CFhodEditor only allows .dds import, not psd. And the lighting on my model seems to snap from being lit by the game, to be fully illuminated, at different camera angles and distances. Any thoughts?? I've tried reducing LODs on texture, changing texture size, eliminating the 2nd main psd native to the hgn resource collector (caused crash) and it seems to just be my texture. The native psd for the hgn resource collector seems to work fine, but it's psd. Please let me know any thoughts anyone has on this. Thank you for your help!

Pouk,

That Cf app is really promising! I've been looking at using the shiptuning and other .xls files, but after enabling macros and trying to export, the ubiquitous 'error 76' pops up. I've been looking through many forums, telling me one thing or another about how to put this in this directory, or that in that default install structure, and I've done what I 'perceive' they mean to be telling me to do.

Still, it doesn't work. I'm wondering if the raw .xls files are necessary for the game itself? Or could I simply copy/modify an existing .ship file while renaming the ship references in it to my modded/new one...?

Pouk,

I'm not sure if you received my last message. I've been trying to create a rather complex few additions to HW2. Mostly I've found non-functional software, dead links, and only some documentation though I've found the RDN docs pretty useful. You mentioned in one reply that any program that has .obj export ability can be used to make ships. I use 3DS Max. Do you know of a .hod exporter for it? This would give me a solid start, as I don't know maya and don't want to dl a copy of it. I currently use milkshape 3d since I can't find any .hod exporters for max. Please let me know if you can guide me to a 3dsmax user that can give me more info or someone that can shed light on why milkshape crashes when I try to export any object with a material into .hod format.

Pouk,

It's good to find a HW2 modding group that is still going. I've gotten into HW2 again recently, playing it and wanting to modify ships and finally create my own. I've been doing game development professionally for about 10 years now, and have some pretty strong delivered titles. But I'm interested to hear what you and other modelers, especially 3ds max users, have to say about creating functional units for HW2. I've been reading through the RDN tutorials on how to do things, and so far it's relatively clear, but ground-level experience with other 3ds users tells a more useable story, and getting ahold of functional utitlities and programs for Vista is getting harder as the years go on. Perhaps you or someone could direct me to a site that still has them. If I can get this all working, I'd like to make a model that's similar to the living planets Unicron or Primus (Transformers) just for kicks.

It'd be great to hear from you! My email is : davidsirmons07@gmail.com

David