As you all probably saw, the Remastered Edition of Homeworld is coming out shortly on Steam. We, the dev team were very impressed by it and decided to drop the Complex Enhanced project, and move into Rebirth - to do this, we will have to do a lot of work, though. Meanwhile the latest Complex Enhanced release will forever be downloadable for the old game.
While we will still have to work out how we are going to implement the features seen on the summary page of the mod(which are subject to change), as well as test the new Remastered edition to see what can and can not be done. We are definitely looking forward to seeing the new game in action, and once we get the hang of things, we will get to work. Meanwhile, we are simply internally discussing how the game should roughly be.
In Complex Enhanced, we simply modded the existing Complex mod, altering the mechanics, removing things, changing the balance and design. However the entire under-the-hood part was still Complex. That's something we intend to break away from.
In Rebirth, we are going to build our mechanics from the ground up. Even though we are inspired by Complex(we worked on that mod initially, after all), we do not agree with how a lot of things went. This is why we are taking a new approach to the whole design, while keeping some of the true-and-tried elements, such as crew and officers, but with a few improvements and differences here and there. As for the coding of it, it will be considerably simpler. 50-60 lines of code per mechanic sound better than 5000, am I right or what? :) In the long run, this will make our own work considerably simpler, and it will let people alter our mod easily as well if they wish to pick it up.
A very difficult aspect of building the mod up from scratch, with just the few assets that we do have already is going to be updating the ship models to match the quality of the Remastered edition - this is mostly going to be texturing work. We already have a couple of replacement models for some of our added ships, which will be posted here once we decided which ones will be used ( you can already see some older ones in the gallery).
The UI has been completely torn apart and re-built in Remastered, so we will have to adjust to that. This should not be that hard, we will only include things that are necessary.
New races! This is now a confirmed goal, as the Remastered edition includes the Taiidan and Kushan. We are putting the Kadeshi on the waiting list, as we wish to provide a full modification for the game. Initially however, we will stick to releasing just Hiigarans and Vaygr - consider that an Alpha of Rebirth.
We are also still planning a campaign. This is so far off into the future though that I would just leave it at that. It will not be a Homeworld 3, but it will be a side story rather, potentially featuring gameplay as each race(not Kushan for obvious lore reasons).
Another thing that is on our to-do list as soon as our Alpha comes out is some multiplayer support. We will host tournaments, potentially with some small prizes for the competitors. Hopefully the Remastered edition will feature a good spectator mode, otherwise we'd have to make one... We are planning to make videos(or perhaps streams) of such events if possible.
Our team has it all covered, except for one, very big issue. We have no one at the moment who can handle texturing. If you wish to help us out with that, or know someone who might, please do not hesitate to contact us either here or on our forums. Texturers are of course not the only people we are looking for. If you have any other skills that you feel are relevant to developing a mod, please let us know. Remember that just playtesting is very useful as well!
That's all for now. Follow our work at: Homeworldrebirth.userboard.net
Looking forward to this.