Technicalities of Homeworld 2 Backgrounds

Don’t tell my kids (hi kids, if you’re reading this!) but the first thing they ask for with a freaking presentation they’re probably getting.

This is so great!

You even had call to action links on your “where to buy?” slide.

I enjoyed the “Special thanks to dad for paying the electricity bill and Internet bill for this project” XD

2 weeks later, a presentation why you need a new hardware to run your Homeworld 2 smoothly on.

As someone who love the homeworld games as a kid, I can totally understand the type of kid who likes those games is absolutely the type that would make a presentation like this. The conclusion is fantastic, 12yo you had a great sense of humor!

This is absolutely adorable. Thank you for sharing!

Hahaha amazing! This is better than the some of the presentations our junior hires do at work.

Great presentation. I like that both buy links actually link to Tesco. The illusion of choice!

Thanks for sharing this amazing bit. I love the "our team has found out..." At the end.

Like....who is the 12 year olds team?

I guess I'm that predictable. Here I was in 2014 running what I now believe would be called a price fix on Eve (https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10154142396180554&set=a...).

The Windows version should work on Crossover: https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/homeworl...

If you enjoy tedium it runs really well on ARM Windows in Parallels.

I really hope they don't do this. Apple never cared about desktop gaming and I hope they don't sacrifice the amazing gains that Apple Silicon made in power and efficiency just to support a niche use case that's often better served by GeForce Now anyway.

The Apple Silicon machines I've had were tremendously better than any x86 one I've ever used, at any price point, for laptop work. Powerful, silent, battery efficient. Definitely worth the tradeoff of losing x86 support IMHO.

I guess the x86 compat depends on what you work on. For the web teams I've been a part of, it was a real headache in the first couple years (the M1 era) but hasn't been an issue at all since then. But that's just anecdotal.

The M-series of chips is quite possibly the most universally beloved thing Apple has done in a decade.

As someone who has about 800 Steam games (mostly various indie titles, some free games, few AAA games grabbed on a discount:

  * all 800 of those work on Windows, in very few cases any of those work better on another platform
  * about 600 of those can be made to run on Linux distros with Proton (with varying degrees of success, relatively few actually have native versions)
  * when it comes to Mac, only about 120 of those have native versions that run and Proton doesn't seem to be an option
  * I know that Game Porting Toolkit exists, but haven't really looked that much into it, I probably should in the future
  * none of that, not even Proton would be really necessary, if people bothered to export versions of their games for all platforms, which is at the very least an option that is offered by all big mainstream game engines, or even smaller ones like Godot; but we don't live in that kind of a world, sadly
  * oddly enough, in many cases games won't run because the developers explicitly choose not to support additional platforms, especially in the case of the various anti-cheat solutions, which plain sucks

IMO it was a mistake switching to x86 the first time. Repeating that mistake would once again kneecap the one major thing differentiating Apple's desktops and laptops from your average Windows PC.

Realistically, Macs are meant to develop for Apple devices only. Apple creates their own ecosystem where nothing else matters.

Want to develop on Docker (Linux)? You should use Linux.

AMD and Intel getting better means now you can have a very, very good Linux experience too.

Absolutely, back then I was in love with some of the tracks in the second game that had this tribal ambiance mixed with electronic music. The entire art direction in the series is fantastic in fact, all those colorful ships straight out of Jodorowsky's Dune... Beautiful!

butchered is an understatement - randy's Shitty Midas touch has struck again.

That game is worse in every aspect than homeworld 1 and 2, except in visuals. Even ship behavior is worse(!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taMsuR5VqAA - in hw3 they pick a flat plane between themselves and target and use just it for combat.

Plot is dire marvel-tier character focused drivel, with even it's premises being contradictory. I don't blame the writers either - they were put in project that obviously mismatched their style. Just watch the ending cutscene to see how bad it is.

Gameplay wise it introduced micromanagement but no strategy depth - basically ships have funny buttons that increase DPS for a short while. the best strategy is to have biggest blob of ships.

Gearbox was involved so there were no surprises there, seems like everything they touch turns into crap. They also screwed up the remaster of the first two games, the geniuses there decided to port the first game into the second game's engine, only they forgot the first Homeworld had a ship formation mechanic that was absent in the second one, they tried recreating it post-launch but the AI was pretty much lobotomized in the process. Such a shame, because it looks gorgeous on the newer engine.