hi all,

i found this post on the Mac Inside Games site and thought it might help. here is the link to the orginal post: http://www.insidemacgames.com/forum/index.php?showforum=20 so here goes.

PoliSciGuy

So I spent some time over the weekend reading about different hw2 mods and how to get them working. I thought I would post what I found here so that if someone else is interested they could just read this thread instead of several different threads on several different forums. But first a brief disclaimer: this is just me compiling the work that others have done, I will try to link my sources when ever possible if I miss one I apologize.

I suppose a brief run through of what is known is a good place to start. Homeworld 2 mods come in two varieties. 1, ".big" files, these are self contained mods that have all the mod information prepackaged in them. 2, gobs of files in folders, you put these files in your hw2 data folder and activate a command line option to get them to work. You can have as many .big files as you want in your hw2 data folder, but only one of the other type of mod at a time.

To run the mods you need to use the Terminal (or use a script I will talk about in a second). First right-click/control-click on homeworld 2.app and select "Show Package Contents" this will open a new finder window. In that new window open the folder labeled "MacOS", inside will be something that has the same icon as homeworld 2.app. Now open a new terminal window and drag the file you found in "MacOS" into it. The prompt should look something like this:



After that you can add options by typing them into the that line. There are many options but only four that I have ever used. They are (in no particular order)

• "-luatrace" this is a debug option, you dont need it if everything is going fine
•"-nomovies" this disables the movies at startup, which is nice
•"-mod XXX.big" run mod file XXX.big, the "XXX.big" part is case sensitive
•"-overridebigfile" ignores the homeworld2.big file and runs with what ever files you have in the data directory

But all this is rendered unimportant by the work of SantaDuck and (Mighty)Slugman over at macologist.. Those two have put together an applescript that can be used to launch all the mods I am going to talk about. In the linked thread they have three things on interest, a script for running .big files, a script for running random data files, and a temporary download location for the HW2 EX mod. To run the scripts copy them into script editor (found in /Applications/Apple Script usually) and save as Application bundles. Make sure to edit the few things that need to be edited at the beginning of the file and know that for the script to work properly you must type in the file name of the .big file exactly as it appears and there must be a lower case b in .big (important for Warloards mod).

On to the mods!

I suppose I should mention a couple things that function differently then the PC version. First something strange happens when new ship icons are created for the user interface, namely the mac version crashes. I would say this is the single largest impediment to straight up using mods on the mac. A second and more minor (depending on how you look at it) issue is that resource injections do not seem to work. This is more of a gameplay issue in that you can still get mods to work with out this but it reduces the fun factor of some mods because it does not work.

First there is the warloards mod. This mod is a total conversion that brings the star wars universe to life using the homeworld 2 engine. It reminds me in a lot of ways of total annihilation, which is not surprising because the creator listed it as one of his inspirations for the mod. You can find a mac download in the IMG thread where the creator took the time to get his mod working on mac HW 2, here. The Download link from page 3 of the thread goes here.

Second as a I mentioned already the thread over at the macologist contains a link to the Homeworld 2 EX mod their download link is temporary. But hopefully they will find a more permanent solution soon. The EX mod adds the progenitor from the single player game as a playable race and few other minor tweaks. Of note is that the AI can not play the progenitor in a player vs. CPU game.

Last, but certainly not least, is the point defense system mod(PDS). This mod drastically rebalances the game towards a more realistic point of view. The crew that made PDS has added significant weaponry to all ships especially capital ships. No longer can a squad of bombers take out a battle cruiser. Also there are now weapons systems that take out incoming missiles and bullets. Battles have to be seen to be believed, the whole thing is awesome. This also means this mod puts a lot of stress on your system. If you are anywhere close to the minimum system requirements you best not even try. Examples of things this mod can do to your system, complete system lock up(had to hard restart) and it killed the in game sound. Also this mod takes some command line magic to get working so you have been warned.

This information is harvested from this forum thread

The first step is to go here and download the three files (PDS 5.0 Beta 4 Full Install, PDS Beta 5.0 Update and PDS 5.0 Beta 6.1 Update). Make sure they are not decompressed! Put them all together in a new folder. Open terminal.app and move to the folder that contains the three zip files. In the terminal type unzip -u -o -C PDSv50b4full.zip, repeat for the other two files.

This will open them on top of each other saving you a lot of headache. This should create a folder called "Data", inside that folder there is a folder called "Ship" inside that folder is an other folder called "icons". Remove that folder, it causes the mod to crash. Go back to the folder "Data", open the folder "leveldata" then "multiplayer". There is a file called deathmatch.lua, you have two options remove it or edit it. To edit the file open it in you favorite text editor(not MS Word!) and change the line that says:


to:


Either way things should now run smoothly. Make a backup copy of the "scripts" folder in your homeworld 2 data folder. Then copy all the files that are in the PDS data folder into your homeworld 2 data folder. Presto, it is installed.

To run the mod at the terminal put -overridebigfile at the end of the hw2 path. It should look something like this:



I hope everyone finds this information useful. If you think I missed something feel free to add on. Also a big thanks to those who took the time to figure this stuff out in the first place, all of your work is greatly appreciated.

Jas86 wrote:
You can also use Mod Runner.

Here's the link to v2 http://www.macupd...p/id/16877

I'll be damned if I can get version 2 to work, but I could send you version 1.8, which works just fine. Just PM or email, if ya need.