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GhotiFish
this game really was beautiful. More over, it was one of the last bastions of game sci-fi I had.

The only thing left that I can find that plays with the beauty and scale of the galaxy is eve online.

vanderZwan
I loved how this game made me feel tiny. And to think that in the original designs they were aiming for even bigger megastructures to really drive that point home!
arethuza
What kind of megastructures? I've had a very unhealthy fascination with Orbitals being blown up since reading Consider Phlebas at an impressionable age.
GhotiFish
Do you see the first example image in the story? The idea was you could have ships interacting with structures of that size.

My guess is the guys at relic realized they had to deal with fully three dimensional path finding and ran away screaming in terror.

arethuza
Ohh - it does indeed look like a small Orbital :-)
Argorak
A testament to how beautiful it was is that it is still beautiful. Relics designers have a real good eye for what matters.

The engine trails in Homeworld 1 are a really good example of design that is cheap (to compute), communicates something (speed, trajectory, size and amount of ships) and helps in identification (team color).

Company of Heroes and Dawn of War have similar things, like weapons that are not necessarily realistic, but show an immediate visual and audible "feel" of what they do.

hipsters_unite
This is great! I've been using HW2 screens as backgrounds for my computers since I was a teenager... still hasn't been bettered.
dlhavema
I have to agree, Homeworld and Homeworld 2 were Amazing, Gorgeous, Epic games. The only game that ever came close to having that kind of a visual effect on me was Half Life 2 and the crazy stuff they did with their engine...
laumars
The original Unreal used to wow me in terms of scale and beauty as well
wladimir
Using vertex colors with linear interpolation over triangles is an interesting way to compress low-frequency images such as backgrounds. I had no idea that they did this in HW2. It also looks surprisingly good.

The page is neigh-unreadable though, with all the moving stuff. Please add a pause button :)

windsurfer
Moving stuff? Do you mean the spinning skymap?
wladimir
Also the renderings that alternate from wireframe to solid fill. It just changes too quickly which is distracting when you try to read the text around it.
sbierwagen
It's an animated gif. Hit escape, and it'll stop all gif animation in Chrome and Firefox.
upthedale
How can I pull the backgrounds out into simple image files. I'd love to use the top 3 images in the blog post as desktop wallpaper (but they're too small - avoiding copyright issue perhaps?).

Or are they just in-game screenshots - small views of the larger textures (explaining their tiny size in the blog?)

sebnukem2
So there are images on the blog post? I don't see anything, just text, even from different browsers.
teamonkey
They're hosted on iminus.com which is blocked by my work proxy. Could be the same for you?
sebnukem2
Ah yes, it's very likely. Thanks.
PetrolMan
I started playing Homeworld again recently because I've yet to find another game really like it. I was impressed, considering the age of the game, with how good the ships actually look (until you zoom in too much) and how great the backgrounds still look. The art is minimalistic and has aged amazingly well. Most 3D games tend to have a very short period where they look good. The fact the Relic created something that still looks pretty damn good over a decade later is downright astounding to me.
jamesaguilar
What always blew me away as a kid when I played this game was that the turrets actually point in the direction they fire. That was a novelty at the time. It's a great game (although I must say I preferred 1 to 2).
ceejayoz
Man, I miss Homeworld. I used to help run the Relicnews forums/site (and Relic/Homeworld Universe prior) and it's remarkable how much the visuals have stood up to time.
dtjohnnymonkey
About every 6 months I do some Googling to see if I can get Homeworld to run on my Mac. I still have fond memories of playing it in my freshman dorm room 12 years ago.

This technique reminds of silhouette preservation techniques in computer graphics that I had done for my senior project. Anyone know if it's related?

aerique
I don't what kind of Mac you've got but I have been running Earth & Beyond (an MMO from 10 years ago) at high framerates in Virtualbox on my 2011 iMac. I did have to enable experimental D3D support.
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the_french
There are many wineskin / cider wrappers that exist for HW2. The only problem is that multiplayer won't work.
bni
Also, sadly, wine does not have "pbuffer" support, that is used by HW2 to render shadows. So it makes the game look a bit bland when comparing it to how it used to look back in the day. I also think running the game in Parallells or VMware has the same problem.

Im not even sure that current gfx cards and drivers support this under Windows 7 anymore.

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25495

L0j1k
The most beautiful games in history, hands down.
pippy
This technique was used on the PSX in the Spyro franchise. They used vertex based backgrounds it as texture memory was limited (only 1meg, half of which was used up by the double buffer). It created gorgeous backgrounds in the game.