Bugs, proposed improvements and other observations (HW1)

Homeworld Remastered Collection Homeworld: Remastered Collection Tech Support
#1

Having played through the first few campaign missions of Homeworld1, I have come across the following:

BUGS:
-Sound bug; Occasionally, strike craft engine sound effect loops constantly without any physical source. Moving camera does not cause sound to fade. Possibly related to docking ships or alt-tabbing.

-Gameplay bug; Salvaged vessels occasionally disappear, and are not added to the player fleet

-Graphics bug: Salvage corvettes lack “magnet” animation when latched onto a target.

-Gameplay bug: Ships appear to be unable to hold formation. The original’s beautiful, swooping claws of fighters become disorganized gaggles in the remastered version.

-Gameplay bug: Tactics no longer function as they once did: boosting ships’ speed and such in evasive and their weapons in aggressive.

edit:
Gameplay bug: Docked ship group assignments become bugged when saving/loading campaign mission. Selected vehicles will still display group number, but hotkeys will not select, and taskbar will not illuminate. Groups must be reassigned manually.

edit:
Gameplay bug: While pressing the R key will both open and close the research menu, the B and L keys can only open the Build or Launch windows.

edit:
Gameplay bug: Turanic Ion Array Frigates cannot be recycled for RUs. (Not a problem for me, since I’m a bit of a trophy collector, but some people might want to reclaim them and build other ships)

SUGGESTIONS:

1:Support frigates are currently next to useless, as they need to “dock” with a vessel in order to repair it.
Therefore, instead of the current repair system, substitute an ion-cannon type “weapon” with the green repair effect, no cooldown, and a negative damage value, which the support frigate can use to heal ships without docking.

2:Repair vessels set to “guard” vessels (and groups of vessels) should repair those vessels as default behavior. Currently, the player must manually order repair commands; an irritating process.

Edit: This can be accomplished by “Y-Dragging,” though the current “dock and repair” mechanic makes this… chaotic in combat, to say the least.

NOTE: The campaign seems to scale difficulty according to fleet composition. I’m… unsure about how I feel about that.

I will update this post as I come across more issues or suggestions.

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#2

Sound bug: No voice SFX during first bentusi cutscene. I pressed escape a few times during it trying to escape the sensors manager so that I could view it from a well placed corvette but to no avail, and I think somehow my audio SFX got muted as a result. Kinda odd.

About the dynamic difficulty scaling, HW1 did this as well. This is most obvious on mission 3 and 4, where it determines the assault frigate and ion array numbers that you have to deal with, but it affected every mission. If you did poorly in 4 you’d only have one destroyer (rather than the max of… 3?) to deal with on 5, for example.

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#3

Hmm. Interesting. I didn’t run into that problem, though the “echoey” Bentusi voice was somewhat difficult for me to understand at times.

edit: I wasn’t aware that HW1 scaled the difficulty. I was all prepared to fast-capture 4 assault frigates in Mission 3, only to be greeted with 2, instead. (Neither of which entered my fleet, by the way…) Thankfully, this allowed me to save all of the cryo trays, because the repair corvettes I’d built FOR THAT PURPOSE couldn’t repair the trays.

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#4

Can confirm the list provided by louischapmanfl as being accurate, these are the bugs I’ve been noticing in the HW1 portion of the remastered.

The lack of functional formations is problematic, especially for mission #6, Diamond Shoals, it makes it virtually unplayable as frigates and larger will semi-avoid the moving asteroids but will not fire. Strike craft do fire but remain in the direct path of the asteroids leaving few survivors if any. It cheapens the experience of the mission as it removes all strategy from it.

Additional Formation issues,
Sphere formation no longer forms makes the target being guarded the center of the sphere. This is true for attacking as well. The issue seems universal between all formations, targets are not centered. The long and short, formations are nonfunctional at present.

Salvage corvettes no longer have a group salvage selection. For missions like the Gardens of Kadesh or the Cathedral of Kadesh this creates a micromanaging nightmare as pairs of corvettes must be manually selected.

Additional note - The AI “balancing” in homeworld 2 was considered a mistake by the community. Can confirm that the AI in HW1’s remastered balances itself off of the same algorithm. The AI in 2 was cheap and poorly made to begin with, why it is in HW1 is a mystery to me.

Replayed Great Wastelands part II a dozen times with different fleet composition, the fleet assigned to the carrier was always a “to the T” match for anything thrown at it. The workaround for this obnoxious tactic in HW2 (And I can confirm, much to my chagrin, that it works in HW1 now) was to dissolve your entire fleet for RU’s upon entering the mission and then building up once it’d started. - Not terribly happy to see this incorporated into homeworld 1’s gameplay.

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#5

-Loading a save game on Gardens of Kadesh causes massive stuttering or even slideshow framerates. I’m not sure if it happens on any other level. I tested loading a save on Diamond Shoals and it worked fine.

-Units seem to want to target the front of the raider carrier on mission 4. This causes most of the fire to pass through the massive gap in the carrier structure and cause no damage.

-Docking large amounts of corvettes seems to cause their engine sound to hang.

-Pressing B and L to close the build and launch menus doesn’t work.

-Can’t map all special functions to the Z key like in the original. I shouldn’t have to learn highly specific keyboard commands to get my units to use their special functions.

-Right click menu does not work despite having checked the box.

-Captured carriers spit out bugged enemy fighters and cannot be used to produce units.

-The launch menu is a pain to use. Tones of space but the list of ships only uses 1 column. Can’t select all ships of a single type. Classic HW1 launch manager was much superior.

-Canceling a hyperspace jump renders sensor manager inoperable.

-Captured assault frigates from mission 3 are not added to the fleet.

-Capital ship pathing is horrible. Manuvering around the mothership is a pain and destroyers appear to ignore orders when in close proximity to the mothership. Likely pathing related.

-Attacking the bentusi during Diamond Shoals triggers strange dialogue. The bentusi and Fleet Com have no voiceover and their dialogue consists of:

Bentusi: $60484

Fleet Com: $60485

Bentusi: $60486

-RNG based weapon accuracy makes very small battles a chore and is lame in general.

Many more bugs out there than the ones I listed here. I seriously hope Gearbox is in this for the long haul.

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#6

Saw some odd behaviour with badges, it was fine occasionally and other times it was as pictured


It was also on the support frigate, but is less visible in this picture

#7

I have a few bugs to mention for HW1R:

If removing all UI elements from the screen using Backspace, so that nothing shows up, if ‘R’ is pressed to bring up the corvette research panel, then pressed again to hide it, the UI element displaying the available RUs at the top of the screen doesn’t disappear automatically, and Backspace is needed to be pressed 4 times in a row to cycle through all UI concealment options again until no UI elements are present on the screen.

Pressing Escape doesn’t open up the game menu, so when playing with all UI elements turned off, in order to access the options or leave the game, or pause the game, the UI elements need to be turned back on by pressing Backspace. Then, if the game is continued, Backspace is needed to be pressed multiple more times to cycle all the UI elements back to off. It will be better if pressing Escape opens up the game menu, so the UI elements do not need to by cycled through as a result of accessing the game menu.

Also, the game doesn’t remember the UI concealment setting upon exiting the game. It is desired that each game be started with no UI, or the same specific setting of UI concealment as before, rather than needing to manually hide the UI every single game.

There’s a square patch in this background environment which is off-colour with the rest of the background:
picture link
It stands out more in the game than it does in this screenshot, but the seams that appear are disrupting of the atmosphere.

#8

Misused weapon sounds:

Assault Craft, all interceptors and scouts have ‘laser sounds’, the same as Lance Fighters, instead of kinetic weapon sounds.

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#9

Amazed at how much people don’t realize B and L shortcuts are used to cycle between all the building and launching capables vessels. The shortcuts work as intended. To close the menus you need to press either Ctrl-B or Ctrl-L.

#10

Was so looking forward to this remastered addition, until encountering all of the bugs listed, in addition to the following -

  • Issuing keyboard commands as events occur will often cause the screen to go black with only the UI visible forcing restart.
    E.g. pressing Esc to issue stop command or similar just as scripted mission event occurred has caused this issue several times.
  • At the start of mission 3 I paused the game to re-assign groups to fighters and corvettes and issue attack commands on the frigates attacking the cryo-statis pods. Game crashed. On HW original you could pause game and issue multiple commands without issue.

I had some reservations about buying the game despite my love of the originals due to gearbox having taken the reigns (I’m thinking Aliens Colonial Marines among other things). Seems my concerns were well founded. :\

#11

Having played the Original and the Remastered editions, a couple of “BUGs” come to mind.

To start off, Auto Launch/Remain Docked options in the Launch Manager. Having Stay Docked selected the jump to hyper space at the end of mission, when you start the next mission all ships will auto launch.
I have yet to reach the “new” Mission 10: Supernova Research Station but with that mission if the Stay Docked doesn’t work the chance of losing all small craft (fighters/corvettes) will increase by a great deal. Even if stay docked only works for that mission it is something that should be fixed and should be viewed as a bug.

Second is with Dual monitors the edge of screen pan is buggy if you have something up on the second monitor, and takes afew Alt-Tabs to get it back to working properly.

Some may not se these as bugs, but when playing the Original and then coming in to the Remastered version it is not playing nice.

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#12

Another small visual bug, in Homeworld 2 Classic the engine trails aren’t properly rendered

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#13

I have also some Bugs regarding Homeworld 1 Remastered:

=== PATHFINDING ===
*When leaving the flagship (Taiidan) the ships fly down like 100km, then to the right and 90km up again to go into parade formation. Why do they do this? It takes them almost 2 Minutes until they’ve reached their position.
*The parade formation is bugged. The Ships keep bouncing into another, also the positioning doesn’t seem to work properly.
*Best example are the ressource collectors. They pile up in front of a carrier and noone can reach the docking station.
*In general, the ships sometimes fly wierd paths. It seems the pathfinding in generals has some problems.

=== General AI ===
*The AI sometimes just…stops and i do not mean the CPU enemy, i mean my ships and even the enemy just stop flying for a few seconds. Dafuq?
*The CPU sometimes just “gives up”. It’s like with the bug above, but limited to the CPU enemy.

=== Formations ===
*The Sphere formation doesn’t work in guard-Mode. I assume that is due to the HW2 Engines inability to deal with it, but PLEASE add it! Look at how it works in HW1 Classic.
*If ships are behind (i encountered that with fighters and the claw formation) the others do not seem to wait for the rest to catch up, or at least not every time.

=== UI ===
*The UI scaling is just awful. Level 1 is too small and level 2 looks like what SHOULD’VE BEEN level 4 (Still a bit too big but manageable). However, 3 is too big and 4 almost fills the whole display! I am playing on 2560x1440.

=== Ressources ===
*This is a bit of a wierd one, but the ressources i get in an asteroid field are WAAAAYYYYYYY to low. Per asteroid like 30. Even with ressource injection and 3 res operations i hardly got enough resources.

=== Fighters and Corvettes ===

*It seems the Game has a problem with the HW1 way of NOT handling ships in squads. As i said, formations are a problem, but also:

  • They do not seem to concentrate their fire on one target. They just fly around and do their thing. Annoying as hell, because it can cause total disaters. Leading to:
  • They do not stay in Formation during combat.

=== GENERAL THOUGHTS ===

The main issue Homeworld Remastered has, is it’s AI!
be it Pathfinding, UnitAI, you name it: The game has a problem there!

I admit: I am disappointed here and i HOPE to the gods, that you guys from gearbox do not just have these Forums for fun, but actually read the posts!

I THINK that is all!

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#14

The bad and the good, bad first as it sticks in memory longer. The remastered was expected to have bugs by most when it was released, heck even the original had some unique bugs (See mission 3. Especially mission 3. Still mission 3. Rescuing all of the cryo-trays or capturing all of the assault frigates can break the ability to jump to the next mission. Forgot to include this one in my initial post so here it is.)

There also seems to be balancing issues with Kadeshi swarmers and advanced swarmers. Does not seem like they imported properly into the HW2 engine as they take less damage to dispose of than scouts, significantly less. A theory of why; their armor and weapon damage isn’t being properly calculated as someone mentioned ships occasionally containing zero information.

The good, look at who they have working on this project. It’s a good sized chunk of the original staff from HW1 and HW2 working on it. We’ll hopefully have most of these issues addressed before the end of March.

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#15

I have a problem with dynamic shadows in the game, they are mostly flickering or being displayed in a very low resolution, even at highest graphic settings. I’m using a Geforce GTX 770, with newest drivers and DX.

Other problems that I noticed:

-Context menu won’t open, even if activated in the options menu.

-When fleet makes its hyperspace jump at the end of a mission the hyperspace windows appear for all ships but then disappear again except for the mothership, the other ships then reopen a hyperspace window again and jump after the mothership.

-In Mission 3 I had 5 harvesters, after the hyperspace jump one of them was missing in the next mission. Also I tried to capture both Taiidan Frigates in that mission, but they were not added to my fleet.

-In Mission 5 I captured the Taiidan carrier at the end of the mission. After it became part of my fleet it launched about 15 hostile Taiidan strike craft.

-At the begin of every mission all ships are set to evasive mode, so they don’t fire back if they are being attacked, which leads to high losses in missions where are you being attacked right in the beginning.

-In german version of the game, the research ship in the build menu is entitled in spanish

#16

First an foremost, I have to give creds to Gearbox for making an exceptionally beautiful game. The graphics are great, the cutscenes are wonderful and all of the remade sound effects (except for the new gun sounds - where are the old fighter sounds? They were perfect, and awesome!) and dialogue, and music are amazing. Great work!

However. There are lots, and lots and LOTS of bugs. At first I just thought I was having a bad day when I was playing the game and my fighters and ships were all over the place, despite assigned formations, but the game mechanics feel quite different to the original game in many ways.

I’ve noticed basically all of the bugs mentioned above, apart from a few of the graphical ones. The ships not keeping formation (my fighters are dying :frowning:) , the salvage corvette problems, captured ships vanishing, and I just finished the Asteroid mission without anything happening. The game didn’t load to the next level.

One “new” bug that I haven’t seen anyone mention yet is that my newly captured Taidaan carrier was unable to build anything. I tried reloading the game; didn’t work. I waited until the next mission; nothing happened. When I try to select it for building, or keeping ships docked, nothing happens.

Dear Gearbox! Like I said, I think we can all see that you’ve put your heart into making this remastered version of HW1. However, buying a product that has this many gameplay altering bugs (compared to the HW1 gameplay) doesn’t feel right to me.

I sincerely hope you take the feedback from us fans seriously and that you really try to put an effort in trying to address all of the issues discussed here in the forum.

I don’t want to sound bitter. I’m happy you made this remastered version. If you just fix the bugs I’ll be really happy :smile:

/Hank

#17

On second thought, I am a tiny bit bitter.

I started to replay the original HW1 a few minutes ago, and the game mechanics are fundamentally different in almost every aspect to the remastered version. I AM happy Gearbox made the remastered version, but I’m quite unhappy with the game mechanics. I was hoping for something along the lines of Halo: CE - Anniversary edition (i.e. purely a graphical update). I don’t think the mechanics will be 100% close to the original, no matter how many patches they will release, but one can only hope I suppose.

I will most likely not continue to play the game until it’s been patched properly. If I do continue, it will mostly be to try and help people find where the problems are so they can be addressed.

Edit: Upon reading a few other threads I realize that the remastered version uses a modified HW2 engine. I can’t say I was aware of this when I bought the game.

#18

Hey folks! Want to check in to let you know that your feedback is not falling on deaf ears. As mentioned by a few folks on this thread (and this blog post: http://www.gearboxsoftware.com/community/articles/1324), part of the remastering process for Homeworld 1 Remastered involved moving it over to the Homeworld 2 engine.

Please keep in mind that the engine swap changed the way things like support frigates, repair vessels, and some formations function in HW1R.

We’ll continue to pass this feedback along to the team to evaluate the feasibility of making and implementing changes in future updates, and let you all know when we have something more to report. Right now, the team is focusing on bugs that cause crashes or prevent players from progressing through the game (that I just got out of a meeting about!).

The team left the meeting to go work on some of these fixes today. We’re hoping to push these into testing in the near future and are aiming to have an an update for you all on that first patch sometime early next week.

Some helpful steps you can take to make it easier to digest your feedback:

On that last note, I’m going to lock this thread so we only have one mega-feedback thread going at a time. Please use this thread moving forward: Gameplay Bugs & Feedback MEGATHREAD

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#19