Pic of the week

A couple of Destroyers destroying something.

Headlines

 New URL for Vortex
 New beta patch
 Custom Controller
 Project Controller
 Homeworld mutiplayer
 Homeworld.net
 I hate computers
 Beta stuff
 Even more beta mania
 More beta screenies
 More beta mania

Days until Homeworld is released [35]

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New URL for Vortex
Gamers Alliance will be hosting Vortex from now on, the new URL is vortex.ga-strategy.com. Posting may drop off for a few days as I have to set up a news script (at last a news script :) ). When everything's set up I'll have a few surprises ready for you (I hope).

New beta patch
The 4th beta patch has just been released, here's a list of the features:

Changes:
-------
o Fighter flight AI tuned - improved vs. Capital ships

o Attack Bomber health decreased, plasma bomb speed/range increased

o Corvette build times decreased, costs decreased

o Minelayer Corvette force-drop mine damage increased, mine 'wall' size increased

o Heavy Cruiser health increased, Ion Cannon damage increased, flight AI tuned

o Defender cost increased, gun range increased

o Hyperspace time-to-exit increased

o Gravity Well Generator cost increased, speed decreased

o Research tree bug fixed: Destroyers require ion cannons

o Research times for Gravity Well Generator, Cloak Generator increased

o Heavy Corvette burst attack range/blast radius increased, damage decreased



Code changes:
------------
o Beam weapons modified to be less effective against Fighters

o Scuttling a ship now does appropriate damage to nearby ships and rocks them!

o Code fix to the way fighters attack slow moving capital ships

o Gravwell modified to push out strike craft slowly making it less potent, but still useful.

Looks like the relic guys have been listening :)

Custom Controller
SpacE VadeR (who dwells over at The Imperial Empire) has kindly put together a custom HW controller for Vortex, and I have to say it looks great (and I'm not been big headed coz he did it :P ). I've added it to the links section (its WAY down there on the side bar) and if you can't be bothered to go there you can look at it here.

Project Controller
SpacE VadeR from The Imperial Empire has put together a nice bit of kit called Project Controller, its a popup window that has links to all the major Homeworld sites and armadas. Just go to the site to see it :).

Homeworld mutiplayer
Here's the promised info on the mutiplayer options in the beta. First of some screenies of the game setup screens.

Basic Options.	Resource Options.
Advanced Options.

I think a lot of the options are obvious but here's a run down of the of the ones that might not be obvious:

Game Types

I Hate Harvesting: Turns off harvesting and give large resource injections instead.

Bounty Hunter: Sets bounties to high.

Carpe Diem: Turns off harvesting and research, gives you 2000 RU's every 15 min and makes capturing an enemy capital ship the condition of winning.

Custom: If any of the above games don't suit you can set it up how you like.

Advanced Options

Research: With this turned off you start the game with all techs researched.

Crates: If on crates appear randomly, moving near them gives you a new tech or some RU's.

Unit Capping: When turned on there is a limit on the number of each ship type you can build.

Fuel Burn: This decides if fighters/corvettes use fuel, if off then they never have to refuel.

Hyperspacing: If this is turned on you can hyperspace you capital ships anywhere on the map (if you have the RU's).

Well that's the options out of the way, now for actual gameplay. So far I've only had chance to play one game on-line (due to that nasty little thing called 'phone bill'), the game was a 3 player ffa. Two of us were in the UK and one in Canada but the lag was very good, I didn't notice any :). Both the other players were a lot more experienced than me (they both said they were on about their 10th game and this was my first), I don't have a great memory so I'll just outline what happened. 
     After researching frigate tech I send off a Assault Frigate to destroy a few unguarded Resource Collector. Once I had destroyed several the player dropped (if he quit or it was involuntary I don't know). 
     I then turn my attention to the other player (who happened to be the 3rd in command of the armada I run), he was doing damage to some of my Resource Collectors and managed to destroy my Carrier. I then noticed that he was using fighters almost exclusively I build a couple Missile Destroyers and they made short work of his fighters. I then moved a fleet with a few Missile Destroyers, Ion/Assault Frigates, Destroyers and a Heavy Cruiser. His fighter defense force got shredded then my fleet made short work of his Mothership :).

Homeworld.net
The Taiidan Proximity Sensor is this weeks ship for the Unit Viewer, you can get it here or over at homeworld.net.

I hate computers
I did have a lengthy report on Internet play in Homeworld ready to post up here but then for some then for some reason Front Page deleted it all and I hadn't saved it :(. I'll leave you with some more screen shots for now and try to post the mutiplayer info in the morning.

A Kushan research ship docking.	A large carrier fleet.
A fighter trail tangle.	A resource collector in action.

Beta stuff
Sorry I didn't get chance to post yesterday but I was out, I going out again tonight but I'm gonna leave you some beta screen shots. 

A couple of Destroyers destroying something.	A Heavy Cruiser and Destroyer  attack on something.
A Taiidan scout about to die.	A group of Kushan Cloaked Fighters attacking a Taiidan Resource Collector.
A wing of Kushan Scouts.

If I get back in time tonight I'll post the promised beta info.

Even more beta mania
Today info about the 'special stuff' in Homeworld was promised I believe, well here it is.

Hyperspace: This can be great fun but it can also cost loads. Its great for attack and retreat, hyperspacing a small fleet of destroyers and stuff in behind a Mothership can be very deadly. If your much prized carrier is under attack with support to far away to be of any use you can just hyperspace it out, IF you have the RU's. Cost is one of the two downsides of hyperspacing, the larger the ship the more it costs to send it through hyperspace (and with the Mothership been so large it costs LOADS to hyperspace). The other down side are gravity wells, I've never actually had them used on me but from what I hear they stop your hyperspace attempt cold. 

Gravity Wells: These can be great fun and stop any strike craft (fighter/corvette) it there tracks, any strike craft caught in its area of effect stop moving and are easy picking for anything else. Their major down side is that they have a limited life span, once they have used up all their power they shut down for good and can't be used again.

Cloaking: I've not had much experience with cloaking but if used right it looks like it has the potential to be deadly. Kushan Cloaked Fighters can stay cloaked for as long as needed and only uncloak for a second or so when firing. The Cloaking Generator has an area of effect and anything up to frigate class in that area is cloaked, unlike the Cloaked Fighters the Cloaking Generators need to uncloak every so often to recharge but with clever use of multiple Cloaking Generators your ships can stay Cloaked indefinitely.

That's all for tonight. I was planning to give you more but I've got a lot to do so I'll try to post it tomorrow.

More beta screenies
And now some more HW shots for you to drool over.

A Taiidan Resource Collector	A large fighter attack on a  Mothership.
A Field Frigate in action.	A Taiidan Defense Fighter
A Heavy Cruiser under heavy  fire.

More beta mania
As promised yesterday here's some more Homeworld info for the beta deprived Homeworld addicts. Today I'll start with attacking, to attack an enemy ship you just select your ship(s) and click on the enemy. If you have several enemy ships you just hold down Ctrl and drag a box around them (this can also be useful for attacking fast moving enemy). That's about all the basics (your ships make any 3D movement necessary so there's no messing around with that), now on to the more advanced stuff. All ships have three aggressiveness settings. 

Evasive: Ships pump more power into there engines but at the cost of firepower, this makes them less likely to be hit but also means that they don't hit as hard back.  

Neutral: This is the standard setting for all ships (and probably the setting you should leave your ships in when they're not doing anything), nothing special about it but its worth taking note that ships in this setting will not move from their current position to attack enemy ships, they'll just shoot from where they are.

Aggressive: Ships in this setting pump more power into their weapons but decrease power to their engines, no evasive maneuvers are performed making your ships easier to hit but you can damage your opponent a lot faster in this setting (I find it useful for attacking unguarded Resource collectors with strike craft).

Ok, now onto formations, there are about 8 formations but I'll only talk about the ones I've found useful for now (all but info on all the formations in the formations section when I get around to it).

Claw: This is my favorite formation for strike craft, its like a large X with the center pushed back. It is great formation for focusing firepower on enemy ships and the one I always have my strike craft in when attacking.

Wall: I use this one for capital ships, it arranges your ships into a 3D wall. This stops capital ships from getting in each others way so they can deliver there full fire power.

Sphere: I use this one mainly for defense (although it can be deadly against unguarded and unarmed ships). It arranges your ships into a ball around the ship you want to guard/attack. For defense it is great because it allows to place ships at all angles around a ships. For attack it can be good because it allows you ships to continually bombard their target with firepower, however if the ship your attacking has anything other than a light guarded and almost no firepower of its own you ships will get shredded very quickly as they tend to stay in the same spot.

I think that about cover attacking, tomorrow I will try to post about some of the interesting stuff like hyperspace and cloaking.

UGN3D Review
UGN3D have a large Homeworld review up, it dosen't seem to have any new info but its worth a read if you beta don't have the beta.

Beta tournament
RickyC{TSL} has e-mailed me to inform me that he is organizing a beta tournament, he already has 32 people signed up for it and is looking for 32 more. Go have a look here and here for the details, if you want to join up e-mail him at ricky.clement@bigfoot.com.

Beta mania
For all you HW junkies out there I've got some info about the HW interface as I promised yesterday. I'll start with the movement, to move horizontally you just hit the M key and the the movement circle comes up. If you want to move long distances just hit space bar and the Sensors Manager comes up (see yesterdays screen shots). To move vertically you just hold down shift and you can adjust the high you want your ship(s) to move to. At first this can be disorientating but soon it's second nature. The most important part of Homeworld is camera control, to center the view on the ship(s) you've got selected you just press F or your third mouse button (pressing either again causes it to zoom all the way in). To adjust the angle of the camera you hold down you just hold down the right mouse button and move the mouse in whatever direction. To zoom in and out you just hold down both mouse buttons and drag the mouse backwards (zoom out) or forwards (zoom in). Like the 3D movement this can be disorientating at first but you'll soon find yourself flying around to get the best view of the battle. I was planing to put more info up today but ran out of time so make sure you come back tommorow.

Beta screenies
I'll add them to the screen shots section later, for now here are the best:

Interface shots:

The Sensors Manager, used  for long range movement and for spotting those nasty red  dots (enemies).	The Research Manager, I think the name says it all.
Build Manager.	Launch Manager
The 'Rightclick' menu, for  setting formations, tactics and more.

In game shots:

Some Ion Cannon frigates going into hyperspace.	A Kushan Carrier (foreground) and a Kushan Mothership (background).
Two (well one if you don't count fiery ball) Taiidan Minelayer corvettes.	An attack on a Kushan  Mothership.
A Kushan Mothership coming out of hyperspace.	An attack on a Taiidan  Mothership.

I'll try to post some more shots tomorrow and some info (if you have any beta questions e-mail me and I'll try to answer them).

The beta is here
My copy of the beta arrived today. Because of this there maybe a lack of posts over the next few days but when I do post it will be full of loads of beta info :)

Vortex needs YOU!
I'm looking for two webmasters to help me run things here at Vortex, one from the UK and another from the US. You need to be a Homeworld addict and know a lot about games in general. Previous webmaster experience is preferable but not necessary. I'll need to see a sample of your work, be it a web page, an article written about Homeworld or whatever. If you are in the beta it's a plus but you don't need to be. The most important thing you'll need is dedication. If you think you've got what it takes e-mail me.

New ship at Homeworld.net
Homeworld.net has got its weekly update, the ship is the Taiidan Defense Field Frigate. You can download it here or over at Homeworld.net. I've also updated the 'Ship of the Week', again its a shot from Homeworld.net but until you start sending me screen shots I can't post em.

Beta info
Last night at the weekly meeting of the Dark Stars (the UK only armada I run) we extracted quite a bit of info from a members who is in the beta, Karnage. I've cut out all the junk and left in the stuff I think you will be interested in.

[19:39] <TDS_RA|Karnage> I was looking back at my fleet as the fighter swung across the nose of an assault frigate
[19:40] <TDS_RA|Karnage> I saw a turret lock on to the fighter, track it, and then watched the tracer home in on the fighter until it exploded in a fireball
[19:40] <TDS_RA|Karnage> I went "wow"
[19:40] <TDS_JoeBayley> OH MY GOD !!!! WOW !!
[19:40] <TDS_AF-Skinjob> I NEED THIS GAME
[19:40] <TDS_JoeBayley> ME TOO !!
[19:40] <TDS_RA|Karnage> It's good, no doubt about it.

You can read the rest here. On the topic of the Dark Stars (here comes the plug) we only have six places left so hurry if you want  to join.

Game Dive archive
The Game Dive interview has been archived, you can listen to it here. For those of you that didn't make it to the real thing its probably worth a listen if you have the time.

All the ships
I've been sent the stats of all the ships in the beta by Karnage. The ship pages have been updated and I've removed the graphs section because the ships on both sides are identical (apart from 2 unique ships each). If your not in the beta go and have a look.

Second beta patch
I saw over on Relic News that the second beta patch is out, its 2.2 meg. Here is a list of the improvements:

Maps:
- Larger asteroids added to Scattered

Ship Tuning:
- Light Corvette, Heavy Corvette, Multi-Gun Corvette gunrange increased
- Proximity Sensor range increased
- Gravity Well Generator range decreased
- Gravity Well Generator on time decreased
- Defense Fighter laser power increased
- Bug with Kushan Heavy Cruiser turret rotation fixed
- Taiidan Destroyer Ion Cannon gunangles tweaked to equalize with Kushan
- Salvage Corvette health increased

General:
- Starting resources (small, medium, large) increased
- Bug fixed in tech tree: Cloak Generator and GravWell Generator become available for research after Capital Ship Drive
- Research times for early technologies lowered
- Unit caps for Fighters and Corvettes changed to a class-based cap

UI:
- Mouse wheel zoom rate tuned; has more granularity
- Viewing area (renderlist) enlarged

Code changes, from graphics programmer Keith Hentschel:

- Made the Savage 3 & 4 work in software correctly
- Disabled 3dfx OpenGL as an option (because it's an unsupported feature). People will definitely have to read the troubleshooting page (http://www.sierrastudios.com/games/homeworld/noflash/c-support.html) to figure out what to do with their VooDoo's if they want to run in GL, but the new scheme guarantees that no-one will continue to have problems running 3dfx OpenGL with the wrong 3dfx card.
- Related note: Voodoo Banshee does not function correctly w/ OpenGL even in this version, but has been fixed in our own current version; I couldn't easily integrate my changes into the beta codebase. The Banshee, with current drivers, does function in Direct3D though.

 

Slight color change
You've probably noticed that I've made a slight change to the color scheme of the site, I hope you like it.

WON.net
I've just revived a reply to the e-mail I sent to WON.net a few days ago asking about UK WON.net servers, here it is:

Homeworld is a peer-to-peer game by nature, which means that there are no game servers to be run.

However, there are a couple other servers involved with Homeworld. Authentication, Routing and Firewall detection servers are used for the in-game lobby. These are all located in North America. Sometime later this year we hope to get some of the lobby servers (e.g. routing servers for chat functionality) running in Asia and Europe. Not sure of timing on this though.

If a Homeworld network game includes a player who is behind a firewall then the game packets go through a simple routing server (message reflection). The routing server has no game logic, it just facilitates message transmission. At this time all routing servers (for game data) are in North America. We hope to get some of these overseas this year too.

If a Homeworld game has no players behind a firewall then direct connections are established and the packets can stay close to the users (e.g. in the UK).

Stuart Seelye
Lead Engineer
WON.net

If you have any questions about Homeworld e-mail me and I'll try to get them answered.

Now we're getting somewhere
Today I've got the Screen Shots, Unit Viewer, About and Links sections up. The links section is a little empty at the moment so if you don't see your Homeworld site in there mail me.

Oops
I've been informed by Cynic that The Game Dive show is actually on at 3:00 am Thursday morning (UK time), so instead of paying large phone bills now you just have to stay up all night :)

Relic on Internet based games show
I just received an e-mail from the producer of an Internet based gaming show 'The Game Dive'. Here's the e-mail:

The designers behind HOMEWORLD will be on the Internet computer gaming show THE GAME DIVE Wednesday July 14th at 7pm PDT for an interactive show that will rock your- world.

THE GAME DIVE is the only interactive Internet computer gaming show worth it's weight in rice! Live audio, live chat, live images, live people. Hosted by industry insiders Robert and Paul, THE GAME DIVE proves on a daily basis that "Computers are only good for playing games."

To login during showtime, or to find out more about the show, click the link below:
http://www.talkspot.com

I've been told that PDT is -8 hours from GMT. So in the UK it will be at 11am (which means that it had better be a short show or your gonna need a deep pocket). I'm sure the rest of you can work it out from that.

The beta comes to the UK
I've just been informed by a reliable source that the Beta has come to the UK. Don't forget, if you've got you're beta send me in any good screen shots you get.

First beta patch
I saw over on Relic News that the first beta patch is already out. Its only 1.5 meg so you lucky beta testers won't have to wait to long after getting your CD before you're commanding your fleet.

A few questions
I e-mailed the sierra webmaster with a few questions, here they are along with the answers (to most at least)

Is the release date of September 1st world wide?
Yes, Sept 1st is the world wide release date.

Is this the final Homeworld box? 

I don't know if that's the final box (probably not exactly). 

Will there be a/is there UK WON.net server?
I'm not sure about the UK Won servers, you'd need to contact someone at WON.net with regards to that.

The e-mail to WON.net is already on its way.

Violence in computer games
Rising Sun Network, a Tibarian Sun site, has a very interesting article up about violence in computer games entitled Enough is Enough. Unless you want to see the ships in Homeworld 2 shooting soft spongy things at each other I would advise you to go and read it.

Story section done
I've finished work on the story section, I had hoped to get more done today but I'm not feeling to good (got bad cold or something) so things are going a bit slower than I wanted. Once I'm back up and running (or at least walking) updates should come thick and fast.

Homeworld.net updated
Homeworld.net has had its weekly update, the 'Taidan Sajuuk Cor Ion Beam Frigate' has been released for the Unit Viewer and three VERY cool shots have been posted :) I'll update the ships page soon.

New Button
To go with the new design I've done a new button, here it is for your viewing pleasure:

(Another) New logo
I know what your thinking, your thinking 'Didn't this mad man do a new logo just yesterday?' and the answer is: yes, I did, but I wasn't happy with it so I've done a new one. If you don't like it mail me, if I get loads of people saying they don't like it I'll setup a poll to find out which one most of you like best.

Big 1000
Some time last night the counter pasted the 1000 mark. Once again I want  to thank everyone who comes here for their support. For those of you who haven't found the counter since the layout change its way down there at the bottom of the sidebar.

Poll
I've setup a poll to find out whether or not you like the new layout. Because I couldn't find anywhere else to put it I'll just dump it here in the news section.

The links work!!
All the links on the side bar now go somewhere, even if it is just a page saying "Coming soon" for most of them. If you do find any broken links, please e-mail me.