HomeworldAccess

HomeworldAccess.net is one of my longest-running web projects: a resource and preservation site dedicated primarily to the Homeworld games, their communities and the material that has accumulated around them over more than two decades.

It actually started before HomeworldAccess

The story of HomeworldAccess begins in 2003, two years before the HomeworldAccess name appeared.

On 23 September 2003 I had a fairly simple idea: there were a great many Homeworld websites, communities, clans, modding sites and other resources scattered across the web, but surprisingly few good ways of finding them. So I started building the Homeworld Extensive Categorized Link Directory, or HECLiD.

HECLiD was launched a few days later and grew into a categorized directory of the Homeworld web: fan sites, forums, clans, armadas, map makers, modding resources and whatever else seemed worth finding again.

It was very much a product of its time. The site was built with tables, CSS, PHP and assorted JavaScript, while considerable effort went into making it behave in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Opera. Looking at it today is almost as much an exercise in web archaeology as Homeworld archaeology.

But the important idea was already there: collect useful Homeworld resources, organize them, and make them available to the community. As websites began disappearing and useful files became harder to find, simply linking to information was no longer enough.

By January 2005 the idea had become HomeworldAccess, when the original Homeworld, Homeworld: Cataclysm and Homeworld 2 communities were still very active. The idea was fairly simple: collect useful information about the games in one place and make technical information, tools and modding knowledge easier to find.

Over time that role changed. Forums disappeared, personal sites went offline, download links died and material that had once been scattered across a large community became increasingly difficult to find. HomeworldAccess gradually became as much an archive as an information site.

Keeping old Homeworld material alive

Today the site contains game information, patches, maps, modifications, modding tools, technical documentation, manuals, artwork and other material covering the classic Homeworld series.

It also preserves material from Homeworld websites that no longer exist. That includes archived community sites, old technical articles, modding resources and other fragments of the early Homeworld community that might otherwise have disappeared with the sites that originally hosted them.

Some of the material is very much of its time. That is part of the point. HomeworldAccess is not intended to rewrite twenty years of community history into something modern; where possible, it keeps useful historical material available and accessible.

Twenty years and counting

Keeping a site like this online for more than twenty years has meant several migrations, upgrades, broken components and occasional rescue operations. The technology behind it has changed considerably less gracefully than the reason for keeping it online.

HomeworldAccess still runs on PHP-Fusion, and maintaining an old, continuously upgraded community platform has become a project in itself. Modernisation is therefore deliberately conservative: preserving access to the content matters more than rebuilding the site simply for the sake of using newer technology.

What HomeworldAccess is — and isn't

The main focus remains the original Homeworld games and the ecosystem that grew around them. The site contains some later material, but it is not intended to be a comprehensive support site for the Gearbox releases of Homeworld Remastered or modifications based on the newer engines.

What it does provide is a surviving piece of the older Homeworld web: technical information, community-created material and files that people are still looking for many years after they were originally published.

Visit HomeworldAccess.net