Friday, March 15, 2013

Homeworld 2 - Backgrounds


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17 comments:

  1. Possible to post a couple of large image files perhaps?

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  2. Thanks for the article. These images would make absolutely awesome multi monitor wallpapers (thinking eyefinity 6000~ x 1024 resolution+), any chance you could provide some really high resolution versions? cheers!

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  3. Hi "-" and "Pete". Thanks for your comments! I think i'm not the right adress for highres pictures. But i know a place where something like this is the topic: http://deadendthrills.com/

    I wrote them an email about your comments and that you would like to see something about Homeworld. With a bit luck we'll get it :D I would love to have them also.

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  4. So this is awesome to find out, I would have never imagined. Not to derail or hijack but since this is Homeworld related and you profess a certain love for the game, I wanted to put this out here. Some guys are working on a kickstarter to try and revive the old homeworlds for digital distribution and touch interface, then move on to make a Homeworld 3. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/teampix/homeworld-touch-ios-android-and-homeworld-3-pc-mac/

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    1. Yeah thanks for the link! But do you think this will be working? I mean buying the license, building the game for only 50.000?

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    2. http://www.controlcommandescape.com/articles/beware-the-homeworld-3-kickstarter/

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  5. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  6. This guy pulled the backgrounds somehow.
    http://walter-nest.deviantart.com/art/Homeworld-2-Space-Backgrounds-200251891

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    1. Thank for the hint! I wrote him i message how he did it. I hope he'll answer. :)

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  7. What is even more impressive is that the Spyro Games and Crash Team Racing on play staion One did their bachgrounds that very same way. I guess it saved them memmory back then and they were not so constrained by polycounts, but still a curious and non-intuitive trade-off. CTR even did that for textured surfaces, more specifically, for the Boss Portraits over the boss race door on each world hub in that game, there is a drawing of the boss which if you look at in wireframe, you can verify it uses no texure, but a bunch of gouroud shaded polys.

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    1. I noted you comment you maybe i get the chance in the future to look into it. Thx!

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    2. I noticed the same thing on Spyro, and remembered this article.

      When you have a big gradient represented by only a few vertices and their interpolated colors, you're saving all the memory an equivalent texture map would take.
      This must've been an important optimization for these classic Playstation 1 games.

      Super Mario Sunshine for the Gamecube also does vertex color, but for the environment shadows as seen here ( http://blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=90523#1029305 ).

      Regards.

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    3. By the way, the water in SMS looks amazing. I was impressed by that effect and went on to research what kind of technique drives it.

      ( http://www.gamedev.net/topic/614608-specular-highlights-on-water/#entry4881841 )

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    4. Thanks for these links! Really interesting...the shadows and the water look really good. I tried around with MipMaps for water too - to fake the total reflection :)

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  8. Does anybody knows a tool which will do the same with arbitrary models, not with sphere? My idea is to bake lightmaps to vertex colors, and with this kind of tessellation the end result might be almost the same if not better than high-resolution lightmap. Maybe somebody knows games which used this kind of tesselation for lightmapping?

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    1. Personally i can't say anything about this :(

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