War Stories: How Homeworld brought the third dimension to real-time strategy

We’ve gone in-depth on the complexity of real-time strategy with a past War Stories episode—one featuring Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun and focusing on the complexity of pathfinding—but classic space strategy title Homeworld is a bird of another color entirely. Its creation in the late ’90s was a drawn-out process that required years of crunch time and repeated requests for additional funding from the publisher—but as any gamer who lived through its release can tell you, the results were spectacular.

Homeworld is one of the most famous examples of the genre, not necessarily because it was the first RTS to move the battleground into space—though it did indeed do that, and well—but because the game’s implementation of unit-level combat in a 3D playing field was so well done that the UX and game mechanics fade into the background. Zooming in and out of the game’s sensor manager map is a slick experience that manages to pull back your view without pulling you out of the game, and even if wrangling your little spaceships did eventually get awkward late in the game, the interface itself feels like the right kind of interface.

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So when we sat down with Relic co-founder and Homeworld designer Rob Cunningham, it was a bit surprising to learn that from his perspective the Homeworld we got in 1999 was less a refined and polished set of ideas and more like a minimum-viable proof-of-concept—what Rob describes as a series of sketches rather than full paintings. The small team, buoyed by Sierra’s publishing dollars, pulled together an iconic game and invented new gameplay systems more or less by the seat of their pants, finalizing working concepts without really having the chance to iterate and refine them. Even during a development cycle that took three times as long as originally planned, there just wasn’t time to do anything more.

The problem of how to translate the core concepts of a unit-based real-time strategy game from a flat playing field into a three-dimensional playing field ate up a lot of time—in fact, it’s the thing we focus on in the above video. As with many of our previous War Stories, there wasn’t a single solution to the problem. Rather, the designers had to take a step back and develop a string of fixes that adapted to the new challenges of strategic command in 3D. Playing in space had its advantages, of course—with no terrain to render, the developers could plow their entire polygon and texture budgets into the units themselves, allowing them to have sharply detailed spaceships with multiple levels of detail depending on distance. On the other hand, with no ground for orientation, helping the player not become disoriented and lost within the map (and even how to draw the map in the first place!) was a major issue.

What’s next?

We hope you all are enjoying the latest batch of War Stories—we’ve got more in the pipe after this, too! The next set of videos we’re focused on delivering will be the extended cut of this Homeworld interview with Rob, along with extended cuts of our talks with Dead Space‘s Glen Schofield and Star Control creators Fred Ford and Paul Reiche.

So stay tuned for more episodes of War Stories soon. We’ve got a ton of new eps cooking—stuff I’m really proud of. You could almost say that we‘re on fire!

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1666318