Homeworld: Unbound 0.1 — it runs on the headset

The first build that is worth putting in someone else’s hands.

It is the 1999 engine, compiled for Android and rendered in tracked stereo through OpenXR. Nothing is streamed from a PC. There is no virtual monitor with the flat game on it. The battle is drawn around you at whatever scale you set, and you give orders by pointing at ships.

What that took

The desktop GL 1.x path compiles against gl4es on an ES 3.0 context, so the renderer did not have to be rewritten. The world is drawn once per eye with the headset pose composed onto the game camera, and the 2D managers are presented on OpenXR quad layers rather than being painted into the world.

The interaction is the part that could not be ported, only rebuilt. Homeworld’s mouse “pie plate” exists because a mouse has two degrees of freedom and space has three; a tracked controller has six, so the destination simply rides your aim ray at a depth you push in and out with the stick. There is no projection plane, and therefore no viewing angle at which placing an order degenerates.

Rough edges

Quest 3 only in practice. Two APKs, and picking the wrong one fails at startup — which is a wart that later releases removed.