Beginner HWRM Modding & Editing

Homeworld Remastered Collection Homeworld Mods and Modding
#13

Yeah I figured that would not be proprietary as that would basically be putting your new games assets up for download. Doesn’t matter much anyways, the program used to convert the models, SEToolbox, didn’t like the RM models and they came out LESS detailed when rebuilt than original HW models. Bah.

::DESERTS OF KHARAK SPOILER ALERT::
On the scale note, are the ships in HW not to scale with each other, because the Taiidan carrier in Deserts of Kharak is about 4x the length of the Kapisi, putting it at about 2km in length! It was previously believed the Taiidan carrier itself was about 500m long, as indicated by numerous size guides online. But the Deserts of Kharak expedition guide garage is the only definitive canon source for unit scales to my knowledge, and that about fits with the size of the freighter fleet shipwrecks you find in Deserts of Kharak.

#14

I talked to Rob about that, and it seems the answer is actually a lot simpler. They forgot to Homework. I asked about that in the Reddit AMA and followed up on Facebook with him, and what I imagine happened is they used the original files from HW1, which is assumed that the units for those models were in feet (blasphemy on their Canadian heritage) when compared to HW2 models which are assumed to be in meters. The RM scaling i like best, as it accurately portrays the HW1 ships to scale with HW2 ships were the HW1 model units to be in feet, or about that at least.

There has been long debate on Relicnews and the Facebook group over scaling and I’m glad it’s finally being put to rest since I obsess… and I mean OBSESS. over ship sizes.

#15

What do you mean? I’m editing ships with CFHod for RM and the joints I’ve put in CFHod are working just fine in RM, with or without going through RODOH/HODOR.

#16

I’ll see about cracking open your mod when I have some spare time and see if I can make ships look any better via RODOH/HODOR. :wink:

#17

Well, I would be very interested if you managed to crack it open. If you get through DerpSec**, can you PM me how you did it?

** the nickname of the security feature I and some other modders implemented to avoid getting some assets copied without permission by for-profit teams, particularly code. Of course, if you want it, I can send you some samples from the mod. So, apparently, the trick is no longer working. Crap.

#18

A few notes… (all stuff I’ve said before)

  • CfHODED isn’t saving out all of the data in your HOD correctly. Maybe a hacked version is just cloning data it doesn’t understand to ‘keep’ it - but that’ll cause problems too. They may be subtle, at first.

  • CfHODED isn’t going to work with newer HODs and you’ll lose your changes - there are a ton of internal revisions to the data format coming. Your edited HODs will need to run through HODOR to work in-game at all, and without a DAE to start that, you’re going nowhere fast.

  • Go to DAE, use HODOR to go to HOD.

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#19

Thing is, I’m the only actual coder in the mod (we have people doing models and textures, but I’m the only one doing the actual integration, scripting and the rest), and I have little to say no experience in 3D editing software. That plus finishing a PhD in Physics right now means I do not have the time right now to learn that to get all the files in the proper way (aka most likely restarting them from scratch).

I know I’ll have to tinker with the stuff, especially the multi-mesh models I’m using for some of the bigger ships (200k+ polys), but as long as RODOH will allow me to end up with a working version of the .dae for HODOR, editing the .dae directly is going to be out of my reach for quite some time.

#20

Assign your 3D modellers to get a grip on the DAE to HODOR pipeline. They should do it.

#21

Yeah, there’s a few technical aspects to it, but the dae-hodor pipeline does give you the opportunity to combine the related ship modeling and rigging tasks, at least if you can convince them to learn blender or 3dsmax

#22

Also, RODOH is not liking your modified HODs. I can’t dump em to DAE, as RODOH doesn’t recognize the version type.

Edit: BTW, feel free to send questions my way if you want to transition the mod to custom races instead of replacing the existing ones.

#23

Probably because they’ve been saved with the ‘new’ CfHODED - which is EXACTLY why I told people not to do that. That, or they are variants of the HWRM HODs, which won’t fly either.

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#24

What “new” CFHodEd? I’m using the old 4.0.2.4 one that came before Remastered got out.

@sastrei: I’ll have to do that transition later on, though given how large a work it will be, I’d rather have a finished stuff before diving into THAT part. About the modified .hod, well, some of them are HODORed, some aren’t. For almost all .hod, I edited them in CFHod 4.0.2.4, then did RODOH/HODOR, but for the carriers, large capital ships and large stations, it didn’t work, mainly because there were multiple meshes around and when I tried going through the pipeline, it messed up the ships pretty hard. I’ve had some info on how to correct the stuff to make these multimesh CFHod-made files more compatible, though I’ve yet to do it properly for these ones (time, time, time).

Though, did you open the Steam version of the mod or one of the older ModDB ones?

#25

Steam version with ID 403171608, last modified 28 Jan 2016.

#26

Huh. That’s interesting, and I bet the guy who found how to make unfBig crash is not going to like it. ^^ Can you PM me the way you unpacked the mod, please?

#27

The ‘trick’ of uploading a BIG file modified after the Workshop tool is a great way to not have a Workshop Mod online. The game will detect that ‘trick’ and reject the BIG, BTW - So stop using that. My own tools ignore it, so I can open any of them :wink:

#28

Oh, no, I am not talking about modifying the .big AFTER uploading it. Definitely not. But, as I was shown, and I verified it worked back then, having a .max file in your mod folder before compression would make unfBig crash on decompression while allowing the mod to work properly in other cases.

It actually worked back then, at the beginning of January: unfBig and another related decompression software both crashed when reaching the .max file while the mod was playing normally, but not anymore.

#29

The decompression software has generally worked just by providing a front end for relic’s archive.exe, so if gearbox’s version is updated to get around those issues, it’ll apply to unfbig and such.

Also I haven’t had any insurmountable trouble rodohing large multi-mesh ships, the only real blocker I’ve had has been animations. A weird work around is that if rodoh isn’t liking a ship, try opening and resaving it with CFHODED 3, I use the ‘tangent’ versions that were the most recent ones before hoded4 came out. This seems to solve some weird edge cases.

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#30

Yeah, CFHod4 had issues with too large meshes. But for the decompression software, that’s the thing: I haven’t updated it, it’s still using Thy Olde Archive.exe.

#31

What does RODOH/HODOR stand for? I assume it’s an (acronym?)?

#32

The format is HOD, which HODOR creates, like a verb… And GOT reference… And RODOH does the opposite. Easy.

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