How necessary is migrating Cataclysm to a different engine in order to remaster it?
Couldn’t you just replace the assets? Or is the engine not optimized for high res textures, multi threading, special lighting etc…?
Signed - no matter what the chances might be or where and when or if we get it at all.
I really wouldn’t want this until they fix the engine to make it more similar to how Homeworld 1 really was.
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It’s on their agenda naturally they should focus on something like that once they’re & we’re satisfied with the engine changes. Mp itself wouldn’t have to be finished balance wise if they would intend to merge that as well.
It’s not broken… So maybe the word ‘change’ is more reasonable? I don’t plan to fix the engine at all. Changes? Often, with somewhat reckless abandon.
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I nominate the word limited to be used.
I’m relatively convinced that at this point in time the most likely avenue to pursue for Cata would be modding. Apart from what the devs here have said regarding the complexity of re-mastering Cata without the source code there’s a couple of other facts I’ve found while doing some reaserch on this. Note these numbers are somewhat rough but we’re looking at ballpark numbers here so please forgive the estimations 
Here is the soruce btw: http://steamspy.com/sale/ (Just type in homeworld)
- Total sales for HW has been around 332,781 copies give or take a few thousand.
- 214k of that was before the summer sale
- at least first 100K or so of that we know was preorders(might be higher) was sold at $30
- the next 115K or so was sold at $35 (Current price on steam)
- another 118k or so copies sold at at $14 (the summer sale 60% off)
Taking into account Steam takes I believe 30% of the sale means HW:R has made around 6mill, give or take. How the money is divided up after that is not something that I could find on google (nor did I expect to 
)
Now lets assume that Cata would be an ‘expansion’ DLC. What would you expect to pay for this DLC? Well if we look at the price of the game and what it contains (Two campaigns + MP) and the DLC adds a single campaign + Extras for MP then at a first guess I’d go with half the current price or lets say $15 to make it easy. That said it wouldn’t include the original Cata because no source code so that’s a bit of a snag but we’ll overlook that for now.
The number of DLC/Expansion sold per copy of base game sold is…I want to say all over the place but I’d need to do more research. Interestingly the two games I looked at (although as always the numbers are not 100% reliable) had very similar % of base copies sold to expansions sold. Heroes of might and magic 5 for example with a base copies on steam of 250k has 200k of the first expansion owned and 170k of the second expansion. Interestingly Company of Heroes 1 has 2.5mill copies owned with the first expansion at 2mill and the 2nd at 1.8mill (Yes was very surprised at the ‘similarity’ of those numbers lol). That means a very high 80% first expansion coverage.
So a fictional HW Cataclysm Remastered DLC/Expansion would sell around 265k copies of a Cata DLC/Expansion or around 2.79mill in revenue.
Now there’s a lot of online resources regarding game development cost with estimates ranging from 1mill to 50mill. Here’s an example doc I found: http://theesa.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Essential-Facts-English.pdf
So even with just a few Google searches I can already tell you that developing a Cata DLC/Expansion without the source code, Taking extremely favorable numbers, having to re-do everything from the ground up and to the same quality as the rest of remastered AND without a ‘Cataclysm Classic’ to sweeten the deal looks iffy at best. The bean counters at Gearbox will have a lot more accurate numbers than me of course access to actual development costs etc.
Also, yes I was a bit bored.
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Nice work. Although I would consider Cata a separate game (I know officially it’s am expansion.
From what I’ve been able to gather it would not make sense financially to implement Cata as a separate/standalone or even a true expansion game. The team is too small, there is too much groundwork in place, the MP community is too small, the game is already set up to add campaigns as DLC, etc.
Another issue that reduces the likelihood of a Cata DLC is the way the community… received HW1 being ported into the HW2 engine. Cata has a LOT of unique and very interesting mechanics, mechanics that would be difficult to port over accurately on a comparatively lower budget.
The reason why I would recommend looking towards modding is because of the incredible support the team has been giving the modders. It does seem that they really do want to try and arm the modders with as many tools as is humanly possible.
Anyway, just my 2 cents.
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Hmm maybe. By the way, who did Cata’s audio? Paul Ruskay? Does he have the original audio?
The engine may not be “broken” but it still doesn’t allow formations to do anything.
Example : Play the first mission of HW1 Classic , put the scouts in sphere formation and tell them to attack the drones. See how they stay in a sphere and systematically move from one target to the next firing continously with the target in the center of the sphere?
Now play remastered version and do the same, notice how they stay in formation until they start shooting? Then they break off and start doing attack runs! Takes longer and they don’t even focus one one target at a time.
Now tell me this isn’t a problem.
The engine may not be “broken” but it still doesn’t allow formations to do anything.
Only that’s not strictly true though. Formations function exactly as they are intended to function and thus they are not broken in any way. They do not function the way some people want them to function and I believe this has been both acknowledged and is actively being worked on.
See the problem with that statement is that saying something is broken means it is not working or does not function the way it was intended. When you click on a formation does something happen? Yes, does the ships move into a formation/strikegroup? yes. Does the ships move into the correct formation/strikegroup? yes. Do they keep this formation when you move your ships? Yes. None of this is an indication of broken formations. The design of the game can be different to what you want it to be(the formation breaks up into smaller squadrons when engaging the enemy) and if you communicate that clearly the devs have show a great willingness to change said mechanic.
However, think of someone that is new to the series and does not have the background to make the distinction between ‘broken’ and ‘different design’. When they hear something is broken, they expect it to not function or be buggy or even crash the game. So not only is the statement completely incorrect but it actively harms the game people claim to love. Worse is some people do so intentionally and maliciously out of some effort to ‘spite’ the devs or company.
The problem is stuff you write down on a forum or steam group stays there forever. Think about it.
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When they started remastering the game I seriously don’t think they intended to have the formations change like this.
They just had no choice since they don’t know how to do it in the HW2 engine.
They didn’t intend for this to happen (at least I hope so) they just had to settle for it.
So yeah, formations don’t work as originally intended.
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Got some design documentation to back that statement up?
Point is moot anyways because they are changing it since they listen to community feedback. No way you can argue with that and that’s the message people should hear and will actually help grow the community.
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Yeah. I’m actually really impressed by Gearbox, how they are really taking feedback and ideas from the community and incorporating them into the game.
Don’t know how many other developers would do this.
Good show!
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I agree that HWC is good enough as is. The only tweaks it needs is to let it run on the newer flat screens, PC’s or game stations. That could be doable from looking at the original game code loaded from the CD.
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So basically what they did with the classics + newer resolution support.
Maybe some updated textures or models, doesn’t have to be the standard of Remastered. Or UI.
HWC remastered with this game engine would be as unfaithful to its original game mechanics as HW1 remastered is.
I would love to see Gearbox enable MP for the classic versions, but there has been no response to that as far as I’ve seen. So, I have to assume they aren’t interested.
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Thank you for saying what I wished to.
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I wholly agree.
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