Homeworld 2 Campaign

[Tadeo Lentz]

Asfor the other lessons we can take away from these other successful games. PVE needs to be compelling. Campaign missions tend to try to make the player solve puzzles or approach a problem in a unique way, rather than just brute forcing a solution.

Thanks for the effort of writing it, but the NPC content desigers at CCP have proven for years and even decades that they are completely unable to come up with any interesting, non-repetetive, non-easily exploitable and remotely immersive PvE design.

True, there would have to be some writing involved on the part of CCP, but it would all be pretty general information. The more unique a situation is, the more it stands out and will be easily spotted as being a repetition.

example: mission generation chooses between static system pois and a deep space instance. It determines a setting of a deep space station instance, with a military shipyard (dynamically generated from over 100 different potential mission assets). The generator then chooses the objective of retrieving a vip from that station (one of 50 potential general objectives.) Once on location the generator decides whether or not the objective will continue without triggering any events, or if 1 or more or 50 potential dynamic situations happen.

Even in a campaign setting, I think it would be wise to make use of the dynamic mission generator. To a lesser degree of course, but still make use of it a little so the campaigns retain more replayability.

Good news, star admirals with decent CPM! Gearbox and Blackbird Interactive's strategy escapade Homeworld 3 has a demo on Steam. It's been live for a few days, actually, but whether due to the bombardment of other Steam Fest goodies or my being led astray by the similar-but-nerdier Nebulous: Fleet Command, I didn't try it till last night. The demo includes a tutorial mission, four maps and the War Games mode, a one-to-three player affair which essentially turns Homeworld into a roguelike - pitching you up against unpredictable opposition while unlocking new fleets and doling out Artifacts that augment your vessels.

If you already have your heart set on the game, you might feel like waiting till the space sim's full release on March 8th (Feb 8th update: it's been delayed till May 13th). But here's the kicker, O would-be Commander Adama: any War Games progress you make in the demo - Steam link here - will transfer to the final release. Besides, I have a feeling you'll want to give the controls a try before buying.

Homeworld 3 gives you a choice of two, somewhat deceptively-named camera control schemes, "modern" and "classic", which determine whether you'll need to say, right-click to engage WASD camera movement, or whether you can mouse-wheel-zoom right through the ship you're locked onto. Neither system feels intuitive, with much of the tutorial given over to belabouring their differences, and there's been a certain amount of player pushback on the Steam forums and Reddit.

Part of the problem is that Homeworld 3's encounter design emphasises precise control more than its predecessors. One of the threequel's headline selling points is the ability to have units take cover behind larger celestial objects, including your own capital ships. There's also more in the way of micromanaging formations than I remember from Homeworld Cataclysm, the last Homeworld outing I played properly, with different groupings suiting specific combinations of little and large starcraft. Interceptors gain a defensive advantage when they fly in a V, for example.

There's a slow-mo option to alleviate the stress of managing fleets. You can spin it up from almost-stasis to 25%, 50% and 75% of real-time. Slowing time also gives you a chance to admire each ship's workings, of course - turrets swivelling, hulls blackening under fire, smaller ships emerging from hangar bays, all manner of greebly wonderment. The maps are as gorgeous as the ships. It's been decades since the last brand new Homeworld game, but somehow no other space series has ever managed quite the same majestic underwater ambience, with cubic lightyears wrought in hazy shades of blue and purple.

I'm surprised by how finicky Homeworld 3 feels in the hands, but I feel like I'll acclimatise with practice - and I'm prepared to put up with a fair amount of unwieldy camera behaviour for the sake of a new Homeworld single player campaign. What's the story this time? "Since the end of Homeworld 2, the galaxy enjoyed an age of abundance thanks to the Hyperspace Gate Network," the Steam page details. "Cycles of plenty and war have come and gone. Now the gates themselves are catastrophically failing and Karan, who has passed into myth and religious idolatry, is the key to the mystery threatening a galaxy's future."

The Karan here is Karan S'jet, visionary neuroscientist and Cortana-style cyborg soul of the original game's Mothership. In Homeworld 3 she's been replaced as Mothership-minder by her apparent descendant, Imogen S'jet. Amongst other things, this means that Homeworld 3 will avoid any undesired Twitter popularity resulting from somebody misspelling the Karen meme.

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Homeworld was released around the time we finished Opposing Force and I remember having played it a bit back then. Being somewhat of a packrat I still had my boxed copy of the game on a shelf in a closet at home. A month or so ago I dusted it off and it is now sitting on my desk at work. I had also worked for a while on shipping a real-time strategy game, Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3, at the company I worked for before coming to work at Gearbox. Getting involved with working on the Homeworlds would allow me to step back, for a little while, to what I did before working on first person shooters.

The source code for Homeworld that Brian had downloaded was released by original developer Relic Entertainment at the end of September in 2003, not long before they shipped Homeworld 2. Homeworld was released at the end of 1999 which means, at this point, the source code was over 13 years old. Compiling the code with the tools I had available was going to be a challenge.

Homeworld shipped using, it appears, Microsoft Visual Studio 97 as the main C/C++ compiler. I decided to go ahead and try to build the game with the most current Microsoft compiler to see what I would get. This did result in a number of warnings and errors due to the changes that compilers have gone through in the 13 or so years that have passed since this code was written.

I was eager to see the contents of the files I had only been able to see as a list in an Excel document. Given that the original game was in straight C code I imagined things would be quite different after the transition to C++. Given the issues I encountered compiling 13 year old code with a modern compiler I was interested in seeing how much would compile right out of the box. I fired up Visual Studio 2012 and got ready to open one of the projects in the Homeworld 2 source directory.

When writing code a programmer relies on the compiler to catch errors much the same way a writer relies on spelling and grammar checking in word processors (or a human editor reviewing the story). If the code compiles, we move on and might not notice the error until running the code produces obviously incorrect results. When dealing with massive amounts of code, and the occasional typo, the chance exists that some issues will go unnoticed.

The time came when the above issues were resolved, the compile succeeded, and it was time to try running the game. I was a little amazed that the first time I ran Homeworld 2 the front end menu came up with working mouse cursor and sound. I could navigate through the menus and everything was working fine. It was gratifying to see all those changes culminate in something I could see and hear. With all the changes I had made I expected the game to eventually crash, which it did when I tried to start a campaign or skirmish game.

That first crash, and the few that followed, were mostly related to two things. One goes back to what I mentioned about the changes that have been made when managing lists in C++. Some of those changes caused the way Homeworld 2 sometimes goes through lists of things to not work in the same way. The other change is that more checks have been added to compiled code to identify potential problems while the game is running. There were not that many areas where this was causing a problem so after a few more changes to the code I was up and running with the 1st mission of the game.

After feeling some amount of success from this accomplishment I decided to move on to compiling Homeworld. I now had some experience with the issues I might encounter migrating older code to the latest compiler. It was easy to imagine that the solutions to many of the compile errors I had seen in my prior attempt to build the code would be easier to take care of.

I started by creating a Visual Studio 2012 project for Homeworld. Builds for Homeworld were set up to be run from the command line, so I needed to create a project file from scratch. Luckily Homeworld is built as a single executable so it was very straight forward to drop all the source files into a project and to pull the compile options from their build script. Once I could compile it I did a build and worked on fixing the compile issues. Most of the issues were related to the warnings I mentioned above where Microsoft had made changes to conform to current standards.

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