What you see here
is the stunning background art
of one of the most beautiful sci-fi games.
H o m e w o r l d 2
Thanks for reading.
Some people asked in the Polycount thread how these Homeworld spheres (see this Article) were created. Let’s do it together! What we’ll use here are modding tools. I have no idea how near these are to the original Relic workflow.
Download
Download this mod tool collection and use the command line tool “HW2BGBuilder”. There’s also “HW2 – Spookysoft – HOD Tool 1.5.0.1″ but it didn’t worked out very well for me.
HOD Viewer
For viewing your .HOD file you should use “CFHodEdit 3.1.5″ (open your .HOD, then at the bottom of the program scroll to the lat tab “Miscellaneous” and press “HOD Preview”).
This is not only the first header picture i use for an article, it shows also one of my favorite effects of Homeworld: The trails. But the engine effects don’t only consist of trails.
Engine Glow
The engine glows i know, are crossed planes which maybe fade out if you look in a narrow angle at them. But Homeworld has two interesting approaches how to do engine glows.
Sorry for the color bending, it’s not that strong in the game! I hope you can see, that these are three slightly animated “spheres” sticked into each other. So they get a nice volume for their engine glows for the big ships. Here you can see the geometries:
Of course, the shader has to fade out the sphere polygons depending on their angle to avoid the hard edge you see in the picture above.
The effect for smaller ships is a bit simpler. They seem to use several round sprites and scaling them down to create kind of a “tail” (move up and down if you can’t see it, maybe you’re in a bad spot of your flat screen):
Do you remember the days where i just mentioned what impressed me instead of how it was made? Today it’s like that. But i hope you’ll enjoy the article anyway. Oh and by the way: feel free to suggest games or tricks you think this blog should cover.
When ships jump around in Homeworld, there’s a neat Hyperspace Effect:
Source: Homeworld 2
I would state 3 points why this is technical kind of complicated:
- You have to “cut” the ship and render only a part of it
- You have to “fill” the cut surface
- You can create a white “outer glow” around the cut
Feel free to put your Sherlock hat on and guess how Relic did this effect. If you need some clues, here’s what i got:
Clue I
I thought, maybe the ship geometry is completely there but drawn transparent behind the plane. But the wireframe tells a different story:
Clue II
The ship doesn’t move through the plane. The plane moves through the ship. And it uses the ship coordinate system – or it’s just “linked” to the ship (because it moves with the ship):
I’m sorry about the missing background information but i can talk about one interesting thing i learned during the investigation:
None of the tools i usually use to have a deeper look were working with Homeworld. Maybe it doesn’t use DirectX? But how can i find out, which mode my graphic card is running?
I asked the Internet and some coders but it seems that there’s no tool for it. But you can check which .DLLs are laying in the game directory and/or check which file are loaded with Process Monitor.
I found out that Homeworld uses OpenGL and thanks to the great GLIntercept i was able to force a wireframe mode.