News
What is the best work the community has done?
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 by putting together a list of great improvements that covers 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".
The "list of things the community did better" is on our forums and open to all, so if you think there's something I missed just sign-up, log in and add your suggestion to the list. If the list makes you see something different that needs improving and gets you to release an improvement (such as mdcertainty's UI improvements, which most people wouldn't think of but which mdcertainty does a great job of), then even better!
Improved Dark Eldar taskbar
mdcertainty has released a second improved taskbar, this time for the Dark Eldar. His Dark Eldar Taskbar adds more blood, removes some parts of the interface for a more compact look, and adds other Dark Eldar details. mdcertainty has also included a fix for the "rend soul" icon in with the interface.
Thanks to mdcertainty for continuing to supply some great updates to the Dawn of War interface.
7z and team colour downloads fixed
While trawling the log files I noticed some downloads were consistently failing. No-one has complained about downloads failing, but seemingly files with the .7z and .teamcolour extensions weren't being handled correctly. This should now be fixed and all downloads should be okay.
New Texture Tool and IChunky Viewer
The Dawn of War Texture Tool and the IChunky Viewer have both received updates after Jaylo101 found some DXT3 compressed RSH files. After twenty-two and eighteen months respectively, we now have the Dawn of War Texture Tool v1.9 and IChunky Viewer v1.1.2.
Thanks to Jaylo101 for finding the unsupported textures, and thanks to everyone who is keeping on modding and skinning Dawn of War even though Dawn of War 2 is out soon (probably because Dawn of War 2 is not including custom badge/banner/texture support).
New version of Texture Tool coming soon
Jaylo101 has found a couple of files that the Texture Tool silently didn't extract. It turns out the files use a new DDS compression that no other file in Dawn of War has used before - DXT3.
A fix has been put in to the Texture Tool and should be available soon, after some testing. Thanks to Jaylo101 for finding the files and bringing up the issue.
Wych and Warpbeast Master fix from mdcertainty
Despite the imminent arrival of Dawn of War 2, people (including Skins@HWT) seem to still be working on the original Dawn of War.
mdcertainty has now released an Alternate Wych and Alternate Warpbeast Master texture that lighten the skin, improve the colouring, add blood and fix some minor issues with the texture.
Thanks to mdcertainty for continuing to improve the Dawn of War textures.
Skins@HWT unlikely to support DoW2
More detail is available in a forum thread for further discussion, but at the current time Skins@HWT is unlikely to provide content for Dawn of War 2.
While I was looking forwards to the improvements in Dawn of War 2, it has apparently been decreed that the game will not include the ability to add badges due to the fact that a tiny minority of DoW players used badges and banners that were offensive to another tiny minority of players - things such as pictures of genitals, swastikas and gesticulations.
There are hints that the community is already trying to include badges and colours (which are being sold as 'bonuses' with collectors editions of the game) but they will generally break online play.
So, I'm sorry to disappoint anyone looking forward to equally great things in Dawn of War 2, but for myself and the Skins@HWT site the foreseeable future is the original Dawn of War all the way. Please feel free to drop your comments in to our forum thread.
Team Colourable Commissar available
It has been a little while since we received new content, but CornCobMan has made a Team Colourable Commissar texture that is now available on the site. Thanks to CornCobMan for his contribution, and sorry for the slight delay in approving it.
More DoW2 theming from Whiteshield_001
Whiteshield_001 has released some more Dawn of War 2 theming for those who want a bit of the game before it is released. The new Dark Crusade loading screens use Dawn of War 2 imagery to replace the standard Dark Crusade images.
Dawn of War 2 theming hits Dawn of War
Whiteshield_001 has released his first download on Skins@HWT. It seems he can't wait until Dawn of War 2 has been released as he has put together some images to form a Dawn of War 2: Dark Crusade skin.
As mentioned on the download page, this doesn't actually change anything to make it like Dawn of War 2, it just adds some Dawn of War 2 imagery in to Dark Crusade or Soulstorm for those people who can't wait for the sequel to be released.
