The best improvements to Dawn of War?

[IBBoard]

Now that Dawn of War 2 is about to come out, I thought it'd be good to look back at the improvements that the community had made to Dawn of War and put together a list of great improvements that cover as much of the game as possible. I won't call it a "must have" list, since people's tastes differ, but it'll be a "list of things the community did better". If you've got your own favourites, throw them in

User Interface

Often ignored, so it'll get first mention here. mdcertainty rules in this area. I've had ideas for what could be done to the interface, but never done them. mdcertainty has actually put the effort in and made some great little improvements, though.

Icons: Chaos, Dark Eldar, Eldar, Necrons, Sisters of Battle and Space Marines, plus Hero icons, mdcertainty replaced the original icons with better quality in-game shots

HUD: Dark Eldar and Imperial Guard, mdcertainty made some well-themed changes to both interfaces

Badges and banners

The undisputed champions have to be Hangar-8 and Joril. Hangar-8 showed what great quality we could get out of a comparatively small image, and the community followed.

In the best of the rest, I've always been quite pleased with the detail I managed in my Crimson Fists, Mentor Legion and Dark Angels packs. Ariesatyre's Complete Tau set eclipses my attempts at a full set of Tau badges. Finally, Sgt.Roadkill did a useful job with his Generic Guard badges to increase the choice for Guard Commanders.

Utilities

Where would we be without the useful utilities? Even though he gave instructions on making your own, Hangar-8's wrinkle sheet must have been used by loads of banner makers since it was released.

In other areas, Hangar-8's simple Shoulder upgrade removal tool was a saving grace to remove the horrible "glowing skulls of doom" that appeared on Space Marine shoulders after the Bionics upgrade, making them look completely ridiculous.

This section also inevitably has a good bit of self-promotion, so I'll keep it short: Dawn of War Texture Tool for modifying any texture, and the various different UberPainter versions for checking the textures in the Army Painter. The SGA Explorer and IChunky Viewer could also have been very useful, but never seem to have found their niche.

Textures and patterns

This is going to be a big list, so I'll leave it until later!

[wereturnip]

Humility, I'm sure prevented you from giving your tools the proper amount of respect. Without them, none of the skinning would even be possible. As far as the ichunky goes I use it a great deal.

Also I believe Jaguar lord is working on a reskinning of alot of the overlooked environment objects, I think once it's done it will bring alot of the sceneary alive on the maps being played.

[IBBoard]

I'm glad at least someone uses the IChunky Viewer. I did have plans to add a lot more functionality and detail to it (things like viewing texture images or more complete details about known chunk types instead of raw bytes as well as more validation of files) but I gave up on it because no-one seemed to interested in low-level hacking of files.

Jaguar Lord's work sounds interesting and would definitely be something I'd host. There are various things that don't get the attention they deserve, and even if larger textures can slow down the game because it isn't optimised for them then we're getting to the point where many computers may be fast enough to handle it anyway Buildings and races other than Space Marines are the other ones who suffer!

[stfas]

yeah the computers are getting faster and better as time goes, in some years this game will be played lag-free at highest detail...

[IBBoard]

It's not a good thing to rely on (that's just sloppy programming) but year, in general they're getting faster and better. How long it'll go on for is another matter - there's the new i7 processors from Intel, but there's also a lot more interest in the lower end with Netbook processors.

I'm sure that with a bit of work the community could probably make something that, to all intents and purposes at a standard zoom level, looks about as good as Dawn of War 2 from Dawn of War 1 and new textures

[wereturnip]

I would definatly look forward to that. I really don't care much on Relic's no modding of DOW2, so I refused to buy it (my boycotting rebellion lol) I've seen some of the promo shots though, I must admit, they are pretty spectacular.

If, you ever decide to do anything else with the i chunky, let me know, I know a few others who use it quite often as well.

[IBBoard]

Getting a bit off-topic here, but are any of them software developers? I've open sourced various libraries now and I've considered open sourcing my Dawn of War tools (coding warts and all!) but didn't know if it was worth it when they hadn't seemed so popular.

[wereturnip]

Unfortunatly no they're not. However, if you'd like someone to give it a try, we'd be more than willing.. and yes we're getting off topic. I apologise.