This simple patch causes all ships and objects to appear at their proper size at any distance.
Description
'NLIPS' stands for Non-Linear Inverse Perspective Scaling. When the camera gets far away from a ship, Homeworld will render it larger than it should naturally appear at that distance. This is an intentional feature meant to make it easier to see smaller ships from a distance. With NLIPS disabled your strike craft will appear as indistinguishable specks next to your colossal mothership and what they're doing in large fights can be very difficult to understand at a glance. You will definitely need to use the tactical overlay a lot and it helps to play at a higher resolution. Despite all that, it's fun to be able to see the vast differences in scale between ships and this does fix some graphical issues (such as Taiidan research ship modules overlapping).
It's a really easy mod that's been done many times before but it's surprisingly hard to find these days. If you look for information about how to do it yourself you'll just get links to long-gone forum threads. There are a few mods you can track down which do disable NLIPS but they also do a lot of other things you might not want. I spent way too long figuring this out for my own use and am releasing it so that others don't have to go through the same thing.
Installation
Place the folders in the Homeworld install directory (the folder where homeworld.exe is).
This mod will conflict with any others that modify the .shp files. You can merge them with a program such as WinMerge.
Don't want it applied across the board? Each .shp file controls the properties of an individual ship or object so it's easy to pick and choose which ships you'd like to have always appear at proper size. The file names are mostly self explanatory and they're organised in folders by faction (r1 = Kushan, r2 = Taiidan, p1 = Turanic, p2 = Kadesh).
Warning
I recommend NOT using this mod if it's your first time playing the game.
Tested with a full playthrough on the original Homeworld (patched to 1.05). It may or may not work fully on other patches. It may or may not work on Homeworld Classic from the Remastered Collection. Let me know.
DIY
Here's how you can replicate this mod. You can also use this to disable NLIPS on ships added by mods!
You will need a program to extract Homeworld's .big files (e.g. WinBigw), a program to automate find-and-replace edits to many text files (e.g. Notepad++), a program to find differences between similar files (e.g. WinMerge) and the two files Homeworld.big and Update.big which are in your Homeworld install directory.
1) Prepare an empty folder to work in
2) Using WinBigw, extract Homeworld.big to your folder
3) Using WinBigw, extract Update.big to your folder and overwrite all conflicts
4) If you have any mods that add new ships or objects, put them in your folder and overwrite all conflicts (if they come as a .big file, extract them with WinBigw)
5) Delete everything in the folder except for files with the .shp extension and the folders containing them
6) Make a copy of your entire working folder, you'll want it later
7) Using Notepad++, press Ctrl+Shift+F to bring up "Find in Files" and set the directory to your working folder
8) Replace all instances of "N-LIPS" with ";N-LIPS"
9) Using WinMerge, compare your working folder with the copy you made earlier
10) Delete all .shp files that are identical to the old copy, you will be left with only those that had NLIPS in the first place
