Minimalist UI
TL;DR : This is a minimalist UI meant for 1080p displays that tries to emulate the original Homeworld’s flavour.
This mod was born out of my numerous frustrations with the remastered’s UI. The original Homeworld had a very minimalist interface. It kept out of the way most of the time and so created a great sense of immersion. The UI stepped back and let us see instead the space ballet and all the space opera spectacle we love Homeworld for.
I created this mod for myself in order to properly enjoy this remaster. Now that I feel it is good enough, I am sharing it in the hope that others who had the same frustrations will be able to dive into this otherwise beautiful remastered edition. Be warned that this mod is meant for the 1080p resolution and will probably horribly break otherwise.
In practice, the UI has been made smaller and kept to the original’s aesthetics where possible. Ships health bars have been made slimmer, the build/research/launch menus are more minimalistic and the text has been made smaller wherever possible. Subtitles have been changed to match the style of the original without taking up half the upper part of the screen. The original’s cursor and others smaller options have been added to the option menu, along with more small changes than I can remember.
The downside of playing with this mod is that since all of the UI is out of the way, it requires a good knowledge of the game’s keyboard shortcuts. Frankly, I have no illusion that this UI provides anything near the most efficient way to play. Instead, it attempts to harken back to what it felt like playing the original Homeworld as it prioritized showing the beauty of space and immersion.
In closing, I dearly love the original and have attempted where possible to restore its aesthetic. Where I have failed, others are more than welcome to take up the work. Feel free to reuse, modify and redistribute to your heart’s contents, I only ask for a small credit. If you can’t extract the source for some reason, I can provide you with my git. I will support this mod where possible but I created it for myself and I am pretty much done with it. If things I didn’t test are broken, feel free to report them. I find it to be good enough as I no longer feel annoyance at the UI, and more importantly it makes me feel some of the feelings of the original.
I’d like to extend my hearty thanks to Dwarfinator for all his support and advice with the UI. Without his help, this small mod wouldn’t exist. I’d also like to thank Cloaked not only for his work on the Player Patch but also specifically for finding out how to persist custom options in singleplayer, long after I’d forgotten even attempting it. Also, I feel I could never thank enough BBI, GBX and the ex-Relic people for keeping this dream of ours alive. Thank you for caring and still dreaming after all these years :).
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Special Notes :
– The tactical panel, stances and formations have been moved to a panel in the lower left corner that will appear on mouseover when ships are selected.
– The resource counter is now part of the Build panel.
– Among the additions, this mod contains HW1C’s cursors along with some others.
– Along with the Player Patch 2.3 merge, a camera rotation speed slider has been added.
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Personal wishlist :
I have a few things I really wanted to get done but couldn’t figure out how. If you know how to achieve any of the following, please get in touch :).
– Change the font and outline of the red range text indicator while in the move tool/disc.
– Ship mouseover text position to fixed screen coordinates.
– Ship mouseover text font (smalltext in fontmap) to another font size without crashing the whole game when using custom .rcf fonts. Good luck.
– Changing the map’s background polar coordinates .hod file to recreate HW1C’s.
– Finding a way to have consistent vertical spacing in stacked frame items. I have given up the right-click menu as a lost cause because of this.
– Restoring the old loading screens of yore.
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Support for the 2.3 Players Patch added. Just be careful to load this mod after it. Of course, options specific to this mod (difficulty for example) won’t work if you use this mod as stand-alone. It should still run fine from what I’ve tested.
Thank you and enjoy playing!
