I am heading into a new direction news - Homeworld 2 Ultra High Graphics mod for Homeworld 2

Good evening Vaygrs, Hiigarans, Kadeshi, Taiidan's, fellow Turanics and Bentusi who deem this important enough to attend.

allow me to start by addressing concerns over the shinyness of my ships. I can give countless arguments (as I have) as to why it should be like that.. but in the end the most important thing is that me and my adjudicator loves them like I do them. If you don't like it, nothing compels you to play this mod, there is this version of homeworld that makes absolutely brilliantly unnaturally matte ships called homeworld 2, v1.1 and I am not trying to please anybody other than myself and my adjudicator in any case, never mind a majority of people. If you would do me the favour of remembering homeworld, you would remember that it did not try to please a majority either. So what I am saying, if I am saying anything, is complain all you want, I will not yield. I'm stubborn that way.

Now on to what I have done. I threw out the gritty effect. it is random and looks good on only a handful of ships. I was playing around with the Hiigaran Battlecruiser and just for fun tweaked the glow map a little.

This was after I got the foundry debris to look something like this:

I take these in earth orbit because that is where the ships tend to look most natural, the map has no ambient lighting that discolours everything and you can bet your life that it would look perfect on other maps too if it can rock this one.

The idea with this new direction is to make certain bits of the ships shiny and other a bit matte, say stuff that looks like armor are a bit matte and stuff that looks like it was made of metal has more of a shine to it. I also tried to nail that metallic glint onto the foundry, going matte where it has corroded.

The other half of the new direction, is tweaking the meshes a little, or rather the way the are shaded. I have been playing with this for months and even posted a few of the ships already packing this treatment, the Hiigaran mothership(although in these pictures it is a bit broken, I have fixed it when I decided it will become a major component in the mod), the collector, and gunships had this treatment, and yesterday I finishe with all the vaygr frigates, here is an infiltrator for you:

if you can't see the difference straightaway, don't worry, it is quite subtle.

Lastly I would like to report a funny glitch I got that somehow disabled some lighting or something, it hasn't happened since, but it gave me the opportunity to take some screenies along the line of this:

Someone mentioned debris... I would love to have frigates spawn some debris but the thing is, that would alter gameplay as it would mean you can harvest from dead frigates too, nobody ever gives their opinion on these subjects, they always try to jump the bandwagon with the shiny stuff or the bumpiness. for now, I won't alter the debris just yet, maybe when I finally dive into my own mod or help with another, we'll see.

finally I would like to say, I will try to post some pictures, I have a lot of them. if you don't like this mod, wait for HWHD, and let's see.. I am going to tackle some megaliths now.

have a good one :D