Homeworld (1999) in room-scale VR, running natively on a Meta Quest 3.
Not streamed from a PC, and not the flat game on a virtual monitor — the engine renders the battle in tracked stereo around you, and you command the fleet by pointing at it.
Homeworld's own fiction was already describing this. You play Karan S'jet, a scientist who had herself surgically integrated into the Mothership's core and who perceives the fleet through a neural link rather than through a screen. Every one of the game's interface conventions is a compromise made for a mouse and a monitor. This port removes the compromise rather than adding a gimmick.
The name comes from the Bentusi, the trader race who gave up planets to live in the void — the Unbound. It cuts the other way too.
- Orders are placed in real 3D. Homeworld's mouse "pie plate" exists only because a mouse has two degrees of freedom; a tracked controller has six. The destination rides your aim ray at a cursor depth you push in and out with the stick, so there is no projection plane and therefore no viewing angle at which placement degenerates. A shadow ring, a vertical line and a tether back to the fleet keep the depth readable.
- Routes are drawn freehand, and flown as curves. Sweep the trigger during
a move preview and the stroke is smoothed into a centripetal Catmull-Rom
spline. It can climb and dive, because depth is live while you draw.
Homeworld has no waypoint order —
MoveCommandis one heading and one destination — so the curve is flown by sliding a single destination along it, far enough ahead of the fleet to be worth full throttle, and steering the existing move order rather than re-issuing it. Re-issuing runsInitShipsForAI, which zeroesaistateand drops every hull back into point-in-direction: a brake and a pivot at every waypoint. The route stays drawn while it is flown, dimming behind the fleet. - Attacks are painted. Hold B and the ray turns hostile; let go and it
attacks what you are pointing at. Pull the trigger during the hold and sweep,
and every hostile the brush crosses joins a list that goes out as one
clWrapAttackon release. - Ships are their real size. Homeworld inflates small craft in proportion to camera depth (N-LIPS) so they stay visible on a monitor. Nothing cancels that through a fixed headset projection, so it is off — a Scout is a speck beside a Destroyer, as it should be.
- The two hands have distinct jobs. Left is the commander's — wheel, undo, orbit, panel. Right is the pointer — select, order, zoom, navigate. No input carries more than two meanings.
- A command wheel carries the rest. Six buttons cannot hold Homeworld's twenty-odd verbs. Formations, tactics, hotkey groups, the Build/Launch/ Research managers, hyperspace, special abilities, undo and the game's own menu live on a radial at the left wrist. It mirrors the game's own context menu data, so entries the selection cannot perform dim out and the active formation and tactic are marked — and it calls the engine's menu callbacks rather than synthesizing keystrokes, which would break for any player who rebound a key.
- Sensors is a place, not a screen. The strategic map is where long-range moves and hyperspace happen, so it is navigable in stereo: orbit it, zoom it, band-box inside it. When a mission opens it to show you something, the beams and controller gizmos hide until it finishes rather than swaying over the briefing.
- The hologram is yours to arrange. The wheel's Closer and Further wedges scale the whole battle between a tabletop model you lean over and something you stand inside; a left stick click recentres it in front of you. Both are wedges you can hold, so it is one gesture rather than a two-handed one.
Left hand is the commander; right hand is the pointer.
| Left (commander) | Right (pointer) | |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | Hold: command wheel — stick picks, release runs | Select · sweep-select · order the thing you point at · paint targets or draw a route during a held order |
| Grip | Additive select (Shift) | Navigate: +stick X cycles fleet |
| Stick | Orbit camera | Y: zoom · order depth |
| Stick click | Focus selection + recentre hologram | Toggle Sensors |
| A / X | Undo | Hold: preview smart order, release to commit |
| B / Y | Cancel · close manager · wheel back · show/hide panel | Cancel · close manager · hold to attack |
The trigger both selects and issues the default order, told apart by what is under it, exactly as Homeworld's left mouse button does: your own ship selects, an enemy attacks, an asteroid harvests, a derelict salvages. Ray colour shows which, and a dim pulse means the order is not legal for that selection.
Two of those buttons are modal, and the trigger is what elaborates them:
- Hold A to aim an order before committing it. Over empty space that is a move, and sweeping the trigger during it draws the route. Over a target it is the smart order, and sweeping the trigger collects more of them.
- Hold B to attack, whatever the ray happens to be over — no smart-order fallback, so pointing at a rock is a no-op rather than a harvest order. Sweep the trigger to build a target list. Y on the other hand throws either away.
Cancelling always takes priority: while anything is being composed, B and Y abandon it rather than doing their own job. The game's own Escape menu is a Menu wedge on the command wheel, since B is the attack button now.
A control reference rides beside the left wrist and a live fleet readout rides the right, so none of the above has to be memorised.
Full detail, including the multi-target attack grammar and the sweep brush, is
in android/README.md; the
reasoning behind the scheme is in
documentation/vr-interaction-design.md.
Playable and actively worked on. Stereo world at a locked 72 fps on Quest 3, with selection, orders, flight paths, all the managers, and the command wheel in place.
Rough edges worth knowing before you build it:
- Tested on Quest 3 only, though the manifest also lists Quest 2 and Pro.
- The world is still rendered three times a frame (mono pass plus two eyes) and the stereo passes render into the window rather than their own FBOs, which is what currently blocks MSAA. There is headroom; it has not been spent yet.
- Multiplayer is untouched by the VR work and unexercised in it.
The VR build is an OpenXR Android app: the engine's desktop GL 1.x path
compiles against gl4es on an ES 3.0 context, the world is drawn in tracked
stereo, and the 2D managers are presented on OpenXR quad layers
(see src/SDL/vr.c).
Step-by-step instructions — SDL2, gl4es and the OpenXR loader for arm64, the
meson cross build, and the gradle flavours — are in
android/README.md. In short:
One APK plays both campaigns, so the build produces both engines: HW_GAME_DEMO
picks the .big file, the music and speech filenames and the mission sequence
itself, the last of them as a compile-time array, so it cannot be a runtime
switch. Two build trees, two libraries, one package.
XC=android/aarch64-android.meson-cross-build-definition.txt
OPTS="--buildtype=release -Db_sanitize=none -Dvr=true -Dmovies=false"
meson setup --cross-file $XC $OPTS -Ddemo=false build.android-vr
meson setup --cross-file $XC $OPTS -Ddemo=true build.android-vr-demo
meson compile -C build.android-vr
meson compile -C build.android-vr-demo
JNI=android/project/app/src/vr/jniLibs/arm64-v8a
cp build.android-vr/libmain.so $JNI/libmain.so
cp build.android-vr-demo/libmain.so $JNI/libmainDemo.so
cd android/project && ./gradlew assembleVrDebug
adb install -r app/build/outputs/apk/vr/debug/app-vr-debug.apkinstall.py at the repository root does all of that, plus finding your game
data and copying it across. The same tree still builds the flat 2D Android app
(assembleFlatDebug) and the desktop game (Linux,
Mac).
No commercial game assets are distributed here. The freely redistributable
1.05 demo assets ride inside the VR APK and are unpacked on first run, so it is
playable as installed. For the full sixteen-mission campaign, put your own
Homeworld data files in
/sdcard/Android/data/org.homeworldunbound.game/files — the next launch
picks the full engine, and clears the demo files that would otherwise shadow
it. Settings, saves and screenshots are written to the same place.
This is a Quest VR fork of Gardens of Kadesh, which is itself the continuation of a long chain of work by other people:
- 1999 — Relic Entertainment releases Homeworld.
- 2003 — Relic releases the source code alongside Homeworld 2. A community effort ports it to SDL as "Homeworld SDL", reaching Mac, Linux and eventually browsers.
- 2012 — Homeworld SDL is saved to GitHub; by 2016 the effort has gone dark.
- 2019 — Volunteers pick it up from that export and rename it Gardens of Kadesh, after Mission 07.
- 2026 — This fork adds the OpenXR VR port and a control scheme designed for 3D rather than translated from a mouse.
The VR work is confined almost entirely to src/SDL/vr.c (OpenXR, layers,
input) and src/SDL/vrworld.c (the bridge to the game's own command layer),
so it stays mergeable with upstream. Engine-side changes are small and mostly
guarded by HW_ENABLE_VR.
This project is not open source. The 2003 source release came with
restrictions that are still in force — see the
license agreement
before doing anything with this code. Contribution guidance is in
CONTRIBUTING.md, and the full upstream documentation is at
documentation/.
Homeworld is a trademark of its respective owners. This is an unaffiliated fan project.