Homeworld Remastered Collection

Homeworld Remastered Collection

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[Temporarily Broken] Taiidan Campaign With Cutscenes
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623.600 MB
27 Dec, 2020 @ 11:29am
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[Temporarily Broken] Taiidan Campaign With Cutscenes

Description
[2023-12-21] There are currently some issues with this mod, which I will look into fixing next year after homeworld 3 comes out.

In the original Homeworld, you could choose at the campaign start whether you wanted to play as the Kushan or the Taiidan. The plot was exactly the same, only the ship models, a couple technologies, and a few voiceovers were swapped. This mod allows you to play in this manner in HWRM.

I know this is not the only Taiidan campaign mod, but the special thing about this one it has the original race-specific cutscenes exported from the Homeworld 1 classic Taiidan campaign, so no more ugly ship clipping while Agnus Dei is playing or weird ambassador behavior in missions where the ambassador appears.

Important notes:
- Remember to enable the Homeworld 1 campaign when loading the mod.
- The race-specific cutscenes may take a while to load in missions that have them, especially when there are many ships flying around. This may make it look like the game has abruptly frozen -- just wait patiently, and it'll load. I tried to strike a balance between smooth animation and reasonable loading times.

Unfortunately, I did have to hack the mod together in a way that has a few caveats:
- I STRONGLY recommend creating a new profile for this mod so you don't break your main one. Never use this profile for anything but this mod.
- You can't play vs. CPU, tutorial missions, or multiplayer with this mod enabled. Stuff breaks. This is a singleplayer-only mod.
- Due to differences in how the HW1 and HW2 NIS functionalities work, the cutscenes are not as smooth as other cutscenes in HWRM and the camera movements have a different character to them. I tried to at least make them look good, even if I couldn't make them look identical.
- HW1 had a few custom voiceover lines for playing as the Taiidan that mentioned the "Kushan Empire", these are not in this mod, unfortunately. Maybe I'll try to dig them out of the HW1 files someday.
- This mod keeps the default gray/white coloration for the player race (now the Taiidan) and the yellow/red coloration for the enemy race (now the Kushan). I like it this way, I think the Kushan ships look awesome in "Taiidan colors", and the gray-and-white utilitarianism of the ships from Kharak seems to make sense lore-wise (as a default, of course you can change it if you want).
- This mod unfortunately is not compatible with my Engagements mod, because I was really stupid when I modified the ships and did them all based on vanilla ships instead of Engagements ships. If you really want to play engagements single player as the taiidan, bother me a lot and maybe I'll get around to redoing it in a couple years.

The history of the Kushan/Taiidan choice being included in the original game is, to the best of my knowledge, unknown, but there's been a theory floating around as long as I can remember that the Taiidan ship designs were actually the original intended designs for the exiles on Kharak, and were switched at some point during development. I have a whole conspiracy-theory-hat rant about it, but in short, I've always liked this theory, and enjoyed the ability to play as Taiidan in the HW1 campaign, even if it's non-canon and not reflected in HW2. So, the lack of the Kushan/Taiidan choice in HWRM always bugged me and I always intended to take the time to make a mod to add it back.

As it turned out, this was much harder than it sounded, and I can see why Gearbox chose not to retain the choice; the HW2/HWRM engine is just not set up to easily switch single-player races the way the HW1 engine was. Interestingly, you can still see vestiges of the race option buried in the HWRM code, exported from the HW1 files, but all hardcoded to the Kushan variant. By far the hardest part of making this mod was getting the cutscenes right, which required me to reverse-engineer both the HW1 and HW2 NIS formats by hand and then figure out how to translate between them, which involved some complicated math, not all of which I was able to figure out. They're still not completely right, but they're close, and better than the Kushan cutscenes in terms of ship locations and movements. If by some chance you're a mathematician who understands hermite splines, specifically kochanek-bartels splines, get in touch with me, because I'd love to export these tangents properly rather than completely re-inventing (and half-assing) the animation timing and curves like I did.
46 Comments
Atomniy 27 Dec, 2023 @ 7:12am 
U can say NO to anybody. Cause U dnt have time and desire to do. In any moment U feel so. It does not metter 1 or 2. Even if U done some adaptations of other modes before, U can say NO to Me, just cause U have reasons.

Ok. It would be longer and hareder, but - where I can get knowladge to make that mod myself? What I need to know and how to get started?
DeinonychusCowboy  [author] 25 Dec, 2023 @ 2:20pm 
Nah, it's just a flat rule. Because of the way homeworld mods work (mods often overwrite the same files, so stacking multiple mods does not work out of the box), a lot of people want combinations of their favorite mods with every other mod. If I say yes to one, I'll have to start saying yes to all of them, to be fair. Making one adaptation isn't hard, but making a ton is hard and would clutter up both my copy of hw and my steam workshop page.

I really hope the modding situation in hw3 is better, hwrm implemented the tools necessary to allow mods to cleanly override each other, but never integrated those tools into the base game, it's a shame that that and some late version number breaking changes kind of killed the hwrm modding scene a year or two after the game came out.
Atomniy 23 Dec, 2023 @ 4:51pm 
is it realy hard to make CAPTURE ALL adaptation for Your mod?
DeinonychusCowboy  [author] 23 Dec, 2023 @ 12:38pm 
Aaaah yeah, sorry about that, this mod modifies all the ships in the two main races so mods that modify any of those would break things.
Atomniy 22 Dec, 2023 @ 10:52am 
@DeinonychusCowboy - it apperaed that all the glitches I found was due to incompability with CAPTURE ALL mod, that allows to capture Turanic raider carriers. When launched only TAIIDAN CAMPAIGN WITH CUTSCENES - I was able to build corvetts, lab and frigates.
DeinonychusCowboy  [author] 21 Dec, 2023 @ 9:48am 
Sorry guys, I don't make alternate/combination versions of mods.

I haven't worked on homeworld mods in quite a while and this one needed some more complex fixes (Mission 14 cutscene is very broken, negating the entire point of the mod which was to have correct taiidan versions of the cutscenes exported from HW1). I will probably get back into HW modding after HW3 comes out, but for now I'm going to just mark this mod as broken and come back to it later. I appreciate @Atomniy you testing the mod and finding additional issues.
Nightscales 20 Dec, 2023 @ 4:37am 
Hopefully, fixes will come soon.
@DeinonychusCowboy Any chance you could make a tweaked copy of this mod, allowing to play the campaign as Taiidani, but also have them as the enemy with their standard coloring?
Atomniy 18 Dec, 2023 @ 6:59am 
Is it possible to make a "Capture All" mod variant for Taiidan campaign with cutscenes?

I am realy eager to capture Turanic raider carriers... while playing a Taiidan
Atomniy 18 Dec, 2023 @ 5:26am 
NY 2024 try - I found important glithces:
1) instead of Taiidan, Mothership produces Kushab research lab
2) it is impossible to enter research pannel with Kushan lab
3) if load save from original game with lab already constructed - it would be Taiidan
4) it is impossible to build any corvette class ship after all the research
5) in mission 3 all captured Kushan frigates are lost and do not exit mothership
6) instead of taiidan frigates, mothership builds Kushan frigates
DeinonychusCowboy  [author] 10 Sep, 2023 @ 7:45pm 
@Keeper6669 Unfortunately that would be a lot harder -- HW1 was balanced with the idea that the taiidan and kushan basically had the same ships, with just cosmetic differences. HW2 wasn't, the vaygr and hiigarans have different fleet members and mechanics and it'd be a lot harder to swap them.