Being a very generic sort of spaceship game, the potential for modding
Homeworld into just about anything vaguely spaceship related is
very strong. If you're keen or have the hard disk space its well worth
the effort, just for the sightseeing alone. With such a minimalist backdrop,
custom mods and conversions usually only modify the ships in the game
or tweak variables and settings in the game to deliver a different style
of gaming. There's the usual procession of Star Wars, Star Trek and Babylon
5 conversions, all keen to see their favourite spaceships fight it out
in a solid 3D strategy engine. There's also a number of mods that extend
the stories around many of the single player mission races you encounter,
like the Turanic Raiders, the religious Kadeshi and the mysterious and
powerful Bentusi traders. At one point Homeworld mods were breeding faster
than rabbits, but many have died away, or migrated across to the sequel's
smarter looking graphics engine.
Homeworld mods permanently change your Homeworld install. Relic
Entertainment never counted on the enthusiasm of their fans, so Homeworld
has no provisions for custom modding, nor can it switch between them.
When you install one mod, you invariably have to remove all traces of
any other, or better still, just start on a fresh game install.
Homeworld blindly reads whatever happens to be sitting in its folder
when it boots. If you want to try out several different mods, you'll need
to copy your original Homeworld installation and then permanently modify
the copy - unless you like trying to uninstall old mods to install new
ones, a process that is dodgy at best. Most customs are large collections
of subfolders and files that are copied into the main Homeworld game directory.
A lot of game data, like spaceship classes, behaviour and even ship roles
have been hard wired into place, making customisation tricky and limiting
the scope of many a modder's dreams and ambitions. Its almost impossible
to add extra ship classes, or change the existing types of ships already
there. A lot of mods revolve around replacing existing ship "slots"
in the game with new models that are roughly comparable to the original
shipping's sizes and functions. All of them are entirely home grown and
derived from a bit of backyard reverse engineering, with mixed results.
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Homeworld Modding Sites |
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if you're really keen
to get in on the modding action, you can sign up on the Relic
Developer's Network (RDN) and enjoy some official support.
Relic recently released the Homeworld game engine to the general
public, so provided the modding community haven't been completely
distracted by Homeworld
2, there should be some interesting mod developments appearing
out there sometime. RDN requires registration
and legal disclaimers before you proceed, and looks like a serious
attempt to organise any talent out there with Relic's blessing.. |
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ArchonX's
Homeworld Editing Centre: A good modding and resource site
for all things Homeworld, even though it doesn't seem to have
seen any action since 2001. |
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B5Mods.com |
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Home to the Babylon
5 "Great Wars" total conversions: the Narn-Centauri
War, the Shadow War and the
Earth Alliance Civil War. You'll also
find extensive modding resources and tools for a lot of other
games here, including Impossible Creatures,
Dawn of War , O.R.B.
and Hægemonia. |
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Drunken
Pirates Clan. Home of the popular Battleship
Mod and a large number of in-house multiplayer maps. |
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Homeworld:
Access |
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Homeworld
Access is a relatively new fan site specialising in the
Homeworld series. Among other things, it does provide some services
to the RelicNews
forums, such as a file download service and some game resources
and info. There's a small selection of downloadable mods,tutorials,
and FAQ's for the Homeworld fan base. Its worth a look. |
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Homeworld:
Research Station |
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This is the RelicNews
Forums page that covers all kinds of custom modifications
for Homeworld, plus tutorials and advice on editing and coding,
scripting, tutorials, the lot. If anything's happening in Homeworld's
modding scene, this is the place to find it. |
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Unfortunately,
a number of Homeworld mods and modding sites have apparently
bitten the dust. Fortunately, you may still find many of the
missing mods in downloadable form at JST-Online.
This site originally started collating Homeworld map packs,
but now mirrors (or at least links to) every
mod for Homeworld that it can find in an effort to build up
a library for posterity. If you find a original site is
missing, try JST and look for the
mod there. In the meantime, I'm attempting to see if any of
these sites have actually moved on to new locations, although
this seems to have been a surprisingly awkward process. |
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Mad
Scientist Productions |
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Formerly Delphy's
Laboratory. Delphy has expanded
his interests into a general blog site, and the old lab's
materials are relegated to lists of files in his Homeworld
and Homeworld
2 pages.
Keen Homeworld and Cataclysm
modders may want to check out the Homeworld
Ship Editor (HWSE), and the HW2 map creation tool,
MissionBoySE, the two main achievements
of Delphy's Lab. |
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The moddatabase's
Homeworld
mods section. moddatabase has ambitions
of becoming a one stop online resource for custom mods for all
PC games. |
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The
Modder's Homeworld
Editing Centre |
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A blast
from the past: an old modding site that doesn't seem to have
updated since 2000 - and many of the links have long since dried
up. It does give you a glimpse into the first year of Homeworld's
fledgling modding community though... |
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Packrat's
Homepage |
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Home to the Newtonian
Mod, the Lightning
Mod retune and a compact strategy page. |
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MISSING or DEAD Homeworld Modding Sites |
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HWMods.de:
This is the home of three custom mods: the Derelicts
Mod for Homeworld, the Cataclysm to
Homeworld conversion, Turanic Prowlers
plus an extra section for all the leftovers, screenshots
and other bits and pieces from HWMod's efforts. Site
lost! Search for these mods at JST-Online. |
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Another
repository of lost Homeworld mods and downloads can also be
found at the Homeworld
Mods list within mods.relicnews.com.
In RelicNews' forums there's the Monstrous
Homeworld/Cataclysm Mod List discussion post, permanently
"stickied" and providing an ongoing effort to collate
a single list of all live and developing Homeworld and Cataclysm
mods in existence. Site missing. |
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The
OutPost (a.k.a.www.imperialproductions.ws)
was another cool site full of cool mods that
just disappeared, taking a number of promising mods with it.
I'll just refer you all to JST-Online.
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The
Second-Best
Place for Effects |
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This is
nothing more than a large list of customised weapon effects
that you can apply to Homeworld, not to mention a new section
devoted to modding Relic's latest release, Dawn
of War. Some actually modify weapons, so you can have infinitely
long ion beams, streams of rainbow coloured plasma bombs, glowing
asteroids, Star Trek photon torpedoes or even Quake railguns!
There's some really cool and very clever trinkets here and many
of these effects have been commissioned by other mod makers.
Site...down? No, its still there, except
the Homeworld bits have disappeared. World of War bartering
plug-in, anyone?
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Homeworld Formations
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