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Homeworld 2 Demo Released 35

Thanks to Blue's News for the info that a PC demo of Homeworld 2 is now available, offering "a sample of Relic's now-gold space-based RTS sequel... [including] a tutorial, two solo missions and a pair of multiplayer maps." Mirrors of the 141mb demo include Gamer's Hell, IGN Downloads, Worthplaying, and a BitTorrent links via FileRush and GameTab.
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Homeworld 2 Demo Released

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  • by gmhowell ( 26755 ) <gmhowell@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @11:06PM (#6865656) Homepage Journal
    Hope you like the dev team and their PR hacks [slashdot.org]. FWIW, if I didn't buy products and services from severe assholes, I'd probably wear a loin cloth and live in a cave. Sadly, assholes frequently turn out good product. Time to start downloading.
    • So he lost it. Big deal. I don't think it's that important, or even severe - let's face it, I'm sure he deletes tons of "YOU SUCK BIATCH" messages every day from his email and PMs on whatever forum he may happen to read.

      Hardcore fans are incredibly annoying and it's amazing how they fail to realize this.
    • Yeah, and I heard one of the boom mike operators on the Lord of the Rings movie yells at his kids, so I won't watch it.

      Seriously, I fail to see what bearing it has. Either the game is good or it isn't. Personality doesn't really factor into it.
    • Did you look though the types of threads he had to deal with on a consistent basis? That entire forum would be rated -1 Troll under /. moderation.
    • To be fair, Marweas is from Sierra, not Relic. I think the Relic people are pretty good about community relations. Do they operate the Relic Developers Network or does someone else?

      Meanwhile, I think this game hasn't had the chance to show its quality. They've streamlined tactics a great deal, and it makes me wonder if they are going to present actual strategic challenges instead.

      Ravi

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @11:09PM (#6865681)
    More like... Homeworld 1.02.

    Comprehensive list of new features follows:

    • Re:Homeworld 2? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by saden1 ( 581102 ) on Thursday September 04, 2003 @01:52AM (#6866282)
      I just tried the demo and aside from user interface changes, there is nothing new. I'm still waiting for the day when i can fly one of the damn ships myself on a mission and have one commander play the role of playing the game in RTS format.

      p.s. I am waiting to be formally impressed.
      • You mean something like this [natural-selection.org]? Not quite Homeworld starships, but close... well, at least sci-fi.

        As a Natural Selection junkie and Homeworld lover, I have to say that your idea does have me salivating.

  • by IpsissimusMarr ( 672940 ) * on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @11:14PM (#6865711) Journal
    Another BitTorrent from GameTab. GameTab seems to download faster than the Torrent in the story.
    Torrent Link [gametab.com]
    • The torrent in the story is working well for me now. Must be the flip side of the normal slashdot effect.

      I have problems connecting to GameTab though, 15 hops then a timeout. Must remember to complain to my ISP.
  • by chriso11 ( 254041 ) on Thursday September 04, 2003 @05:37AM (#6866971) Journal
    I was playing homeworld, and enjoying it. The 3D representation and interaction was awesome. There were some maps that were harder, and some easier.

    But one map so killed my enjoyment of the game I had to quit. If you aren't familar with the game, a decent part of it is acquiring raw materials from asteriods. The resources carry forward from one map to the next, which is nice. Anyway, on one map, you pass through an asteroid field, and you have to protect your ships from getting damaged from the asteriods. Nevermind that in reality, Asteroid fields are not very dense. Ok, I can handle that. BUT, you can't gather resources from the swarms of asteroids hurtling at your ships! These was a completely BS thing to do in the game. Probably an overreaction on my part, but it represented a artificial situation.

    • No the true bitch of a level was the, 'cosmic radiation' roasts all your ships if they're not in a dust belt, level.

      Jainith
      • Apparently you never discovered the use of the reload/rearm/repair friggate did you? Send in a pair of these for every 10 other capital ships. Tell each SUPPORT FRIGGATE to repair the entire fleet (including the other support friggates) and proceede to ignore them and ignore the damage you'd otherwise take from the radiation. Yeah..so..strike craft couldn't operate for more than 2 minutes in that level, but you did have capital ships right?
    • Oh, come on! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Derkec ( 463377 )
      One of the things you'll here the guys from relic talk about is the challenges of making a game in space that is fun. Space itself is a pretty boring place. Not much there. If you want any variation from the challenges of blowing up the bad guys, you need to introduce some form of terrain, even if that's not perfectly realistic. Cut them some slack.

      That, and the level just wasn't that hard once you figured out that you weren't go to mine the high speed asteriods, you were going to blow them up.

      The previou
      • I have been on the homeworld forum and it seems a lot of people use the tactics of using salvage frigate to capture the ions frigates while avoiding triggering the cut scenes or something. Some people seem to enjoy the fact that they spend hours to capture all or most of ion frigates, don't quite understand it myself. I completed the said mission differently, bearly in mind this maybe common knowledge to everyone else and just make me sounds ignorant but here it goes: I built half a dozens or of intercept
        • That's pretty clever. My initial attempt had a mix of capturing and lure into limited fights. My problem was the final mission where I simply didn't have enough ships for my talent to win the map. So I went back, did the salvage captures and had enough ships to the final mission.
          • True, the cloaked destroyers can be a complete bastard, I suppose you just have make sure you are at the peak of your fleet's strength before you take them on and manually adjust target as each destroyer blinks in and out of visibility. For the final mission, if I remembered correctly you had to survive 3 attacks (or was it 2) before reinforcement arrives. I had half a dozens of minelayer corvette laying hundreds of mine in around the mothership (depends on where the attacks is coming from), they tends to
    • One thing was to collect resources from practically stationary asteroids, etc. Another is collect resources from asteroids hurling at great speed towards your colony. You are asking too much of the poor guys in the collector ships man!
      • Ignoring HW for a second, there's no reason why you couldn't do it - just set up your ship on the same velocity vector as the rock but a safe distance away and you can do what you like. As long as you don't hit anything and nothign hits the rock, you'll both carry on at the same velocity side by side.

        Of course, this only works when you're using anything remotely like newtonian physics, which HW doesn't...
  • This is great news! I loved the original. Cataclysm wasn't as good, but it enhanced the UI just enough to make it annoying to try to control the original again. I'm glad I'll be able to try the Homeworld 2 before shelling out for the full game. (Ah, who am I kidding? It'd take some pretty major suckage to keep me from buying it anyway.)

    Hope it hits the stores before Saturday. It's my birthday, so it's the one day a year my wife can't really complain about me going and buying a game.

    I wish more 3D p

  • Homeworld 2 looks great and I am excited for the release. I like how they made the demo multiplayer capable so I can try it online. Everything seems better, and they have a new rock/paper/scissors design so that Homeworld 1 strategies are gone. This is a new game with new strategies, UI, and graphics. Relic fixed the original game with this release, and hopefully they will continue to balance it as online strategies are discovered.

    I find it funny how some people criticize that there is "nothing new."
  • by lynx8625 ( 567833 ) on Thursday September 04, 2003 @12:30PM (#6870005)
    I noticed that the demo was running rather sluggishly on my Athlon XP 2000+ with a GeForce 4 Ti 4600. You may have noted that the demo warns you about your video card being in PCI mode-- well, here's how to tell, and what to do.

    Right-click the desktop; select 'Properties', then the 'Settings' tab, then the 'Advanced' button. Go to the tab that has your video card name on it, i.e. GeForce 4 Ti 4600. It should have a line on it that indicates what bus mode your card is using. For mine, it showed 'AGP (PCI mode)'.

    In this case, what you'll need to do is to download a new AGP driver for your motherboard. For mine, an Asus A7V266-E, I needed the Via 4-in-1 driver, which included the AGP driver among other updates.

    Once I updated that, the demo ran smooth as glass! I promptly re-clicked all the expensive shading options and bumped up the resolution, of course.

  • Does anyone feel anything strange about the new user interface? For some reason it feels much more cluttered then it needs to be. Like before you would right click a ship to see it's own menu but now, we have one giant menu that everything uses, so when a unit you're using can't do one of those things another can, you have a greyed out button wasting space, and you have to click through the menus to see the abilitys for each unit. And is it just me or are interceptors not buildable in singles? I swear order

E = MC ** 2 +- 3db

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