Homeworld: Unbound 0.9 — the smoothing comes off, and a save error that blamed your disk

The ships were being smoothed into mush

Homeworld’s surface textures are tiny. The Mothership’s are 32x32 and 64x64, one per surface region, and they were drawn to be read at 1999 resolutions.

Filtering them was filtering pixel art. There is no detail in a 64x64 texture for smoothing to recover, so all it can do is smear the detail already there. On a monitor that is a small cost. A headset magnifies those textures far past anything their author had in mind, and at that size the blur was not a finish on the ships — it was most of what you were looking at.

It is off by default now, under Options → Video → Custom Effects → “Surface Filtering”. It is still a setting and it is still saved in your config, so this changes what a fresh install looks like and nothing else. If you preferred it smoothed, turn it back on and it stays on.

Only magnification changed. Distant ships are still mipmapped, which matters more in stereo than it ever did flat — shimmer that crawls differently in each eye while your head moves is unpleasant rather than merely ugly.

A save error that named the wrong thing

If you have ever put a SavedGames folder onto the headset yourself — with adb push, SideQuest’s file browser, or by restoring a backup — saving a new game failed, every time, with:

error writing to file, check disk space

The disk was fine. A folder copied on that way belongs to whoever copied it rather than to the game, and the game was left able to read it but not to add to it. Reading a directory and creating a file inside it are separate permissions, and only the second one was missing.

That is a nasty shape for a bug. Everything that would have made you suspect permissions worked: the save screen listed every save you had, and loading any of them was perfect. The only blocked operation was creating a new file, and the message it produced pointed at the one explanation that was not true.

install.py now sets those folders so the game can write to them. Re-running the installer fixes it, and your existing saves are kept. A normal install, where the game made the folder itself, was never affected.

Multiplayer

Unchanged from 0.8: the host forwards TCP 10500 and UDP 10600 and nobody else configures anything, two players across the internet is tested, more than two is unblocked rather than tried, and you still cannot both be on the same home network range.