Homeworld: Unbound 0.11 — the map stopped being a screen

The one screen that was never a screen

Every one of Homeworld’s panels went onto the wrist in this port, and for most of them that is right. Build and Research are lists of ships and costs. A flat panel is exactly where a list belongs.

The Sensors Manager is not a list. It is a 3D scene with its own camera — the place the game expects you to move fleets across distances the normal view cannot reach, and where hyperspace jumps are aimed. Putting it on the panel was the cautious choice, and it was the one place caution cost anything: a scene was being flattened to fit a treatment chosen for lists.

It comes into the room now. The navigation disc lies out in front of you with its bearing ticks, at the scale of the whole engagement. Sensor coverage is drawn the way the manual always described it and the screen never quite showed — as spheres, which you can look across or lean into. Your ships are points inside them, carrying their class glyphs, coloured the way the map’s own legend says: green yours, yellow an ally’s, red an enemy’s.

You never have to leave it

Point at a blob and it lights up. Select ships, open the command wheel, set a formation, order an attack, draw a flight path — all of it from inside the view. That was never true of the map on a PC either, where the strategic view was somewhere you went to look and then left in order to act.

Push the right stick and you come down on whatever you have selected rather than on the middle of the map. Press it again to leave, and you arrive at whatever you were looking at.

It sounds like the Sensors Manager, too: the effects duck away, the intro plays as it pulls back, and the sound of space returns when your fleet does.

A drag that never moved

Press and drag anywhere on the wrist panel — a selection box, the map’s own Pan control, the ship view — and the pointer stopped dead where you first pressed and stayed there until you let go. Nothing you dragged across was ever selected, because as far as the game was concerned the pointer had not moved at all.

The reason is a switch in what the engine asks for. Homeworld stops asking the mouse where it is and starts asking how far it has moved, the moment a drag begins — and a headset has no mouse to ask. It had been that way in every build so far.

Known

The sensor view shifts slightly while ships are moving: the regions it draws are recomputed from where the fleet is, so they jump rather than slide as a ship crosses between them. It is being worked on.

Ships also still move in steps rather than gliding in multiplayer, for the reason 0.10 gives — the simulation only advances as network updates arrive.