Happy 4th HHF day! news

It has been 4 years since I and a few others from the Halowars forums began working on HHF knowing literally nothing about what modding would entail other than a Homeworld was a game we'd all played and agreed the idea that a Halo mod for it would be pretty cool.

I am the only survivor of this horrid mistake. Nah. Most of us have parted ways over the years, some of us have started up our own mods, even i left for a while to pursue another project at one point. What we thought would take a few months ended up taking far, far longer simply because we had no idea what we were doing, it was literally a year before we realised we basically hadn't gotten any ships in game, had no textures and only had concept art and bare meshes to show off.

As you can see by our gallery, that's definitely no longer the case. The addition of Zero to the team was HHF's first big boost, providing excelent textures that were well suited to the style of my models, as well as having the ability to code and alter scripts to let us explore some of our key gameplay ideas. We realised alot of them wouldn't work very well and had to abandon them or go for much simpler versions, but it allowed us to move on and keep working rather than waiting around for a key element of the game we wanted to be implimented.

The second great boost was when Aliah joined the team. Having played with homeworld 2 modding on her own for a long while she's provided HHF with the muscle to get alot of our ideas in game, as well as being able to make the mod genuinely play differently to the vanilla game through hours of working on balance, AI scripting, attack style tweaks, and generally making lots of little changes so each ship in HHF feels like it should - nothing feels static like the original game, battles are dynamic in both look and feel thanks to her.

Both of them will get their chance to have their own write up in the next update when we release the next version of the beta, but i thought i'd take my chance to big them both up my self in this one.

In terms of new content, I couldn't really make anything for this update as i found out so last minute was busy doing stuff that'll be awesome.

However, we've been teasing you the past few weeks with a ship that's been under witness protection after witnessing a rather harrowing event, the details of which are undisclosed but we suspect closely related to the release of the new spy kids movie. We were saving her for the beta update as the design means alot to me, but it's fitting that we reveal it today, after all, it was the first ship we ever revealed.

I'll upload these to the gallery along with some shots of her in action as soon as the update is authorised.

You'll also spot we have a new logo thanks to Mikey Ramone who's been helping us with some photoshoppery buisness lately, mainly working on some flashy special effect sprites that'll work their way in, as well as a few other things.

Hopefully we'll also have some new voices and sound effects in the game courtsey of Metalmouth and Cas by the time we release the next update, and I'll be working on a new UI so we have as few artifacts of the vanilla game in HHF as possible. This is a very early WIP of it, focusing on a simple, holographic design that feels less obstructive than the default HW2 GUI.

Details of it will certainly change based upon the way the GUI actually has to be implimented and how it actually works, but i figure eye candy is eye candy, and it's the direction that we'll probably go in.

And to finish up, a concept for something that's already modelled, but we're keeping some stuff held back so we have something to show for our next update, when it's textured with some other stuff:

So, look forward to the beta update some time in the future, we've got a few plans to get you guys involved like setting up a live stream, organising some developer vs fan matches, a new forum, and maby setting up a way for you guys to contribute even if you haven't got any technical skills.

In the mean time, you guys should go check out the other Halo mods around and lend your support to them too:

Starside Intercept
Covenant At War
Halo Conflict
Campaign Commander
Sins of the Prophets
Fleet Command

There's lots of talented people within the Halo community working on bringing Halo to a multitude of different engines and fulfilling the universe in their own ways, by showing them support you guys are simply making sure that these talented people are getting the recognition they deserve and giving your selves more choice in what you play.