Server Crashes
A bug is causing servers to crash, about two per day.

This bug has been difficult to track. The crash is the side effect of an error that is introduced by code that does not crash. The errant code drops a little land mine in the data and some time later the server goes in face first.

This update has some slight changes that may eliminate the problem. It also has some additional error messages that may help me to find the problem, if those slight changes aren't effective.

Emojis
Someone asked for emojis.

At first I resisted this idea because I don't have time to paint thousands of emoji images and there isn't a library of free ones. That is what I thought, anyway.

It turns out that emojis are defined as part of the unicode character set. With a little searching, I found a file that categorized them nicely and I wrote some code to import the information.

They are painted using a font so they are the font color, instead of full color little pictures. This also causes some of them to be represented as sequences of multiple unicode characters, like when a face is selected that has a skin color.

I tried to paste an example here but it translated the combination into the appropriate full color emoji. That also happens when emojis appear in the galactic chat on the Hazeron.com main page.

Not all of them have representations on my computer, running Xubuntu 18. Some appear as an empty box.

I haven't seen these on Windows. It is likely they will appear a little differently from what I get on my screen.

The communications channel now has an emoji button next to the box where you type messages. The user interface is primitive but functional.

Hello Astronauts,

is there any Way to scale the font size in the windows in the game?

I've found the settings for the size of text, that appears in my sigth, while i'm in first or third person view or in overhead view.

I've even found the settings to scale the size of the menu icons.

If there are no settings inside the game, can I change the font size in one of the game files in the program folder?

Turn down my screen resolution helps a bit. But that is not a real good fix for this issue.

I've returned to this game after years and immeadeately fell in love again. Best game ever, though some inconveniences. :-)

Greetings from Europe,

Falkenkopf

In old-style cities you used to be able to request a beamup on the trade channel and all airports in range with open a transporter portal to your location.

New-style cities have had some changes to how buildings listen to communication channels. Airport and broker are the only two building types that actively listen on the trade channel, but they ONLY reply when you are on board a spacecraft. This means that you can't request a beamup to an airport while you are on foot in the wilderness outside the city.

While contemplating the design of an 'ecumenopolis construction kit', I realized it would be convenient if buildings included transporters. This is because the kit would intentionally makes cities very expansive and stylistically conflict with traditional road vehicles (unless there's some way to dynamically connect regular buildings like fences to support elevated roads). As a step towards that convenience, I realized more traditional cities could use 'transporter booths' and went to the design studio to implement one. Unfortunately, only airports and capitols permit transporters, which makes things very awkward.

Looking at everything else that was restricted, I could think of interesting RP reasons why an empire would permit them more expansively. Turrets and shields? Consider a more militaristic empire where the line between civilian and soldier is blurred, and buildings are expected to be able to hold their own - it would also make city shield coverage simpler. Surgery modules? Consider a cyberpunk setting where modification booths are as common as ATMs. Launch tubes? VTOL spacecraft were considered plain fantasy for the longest time and most hypothetical space launch systems from surface were variations on launch tubes.

This could be seen as a step towards a module system where buildings no longer have a singular 'type', allowing for multi-purposed mega-buildings or simply entirely new categories of building (similarly, I would like to make a 'parking space/lot' building whose most natural categories 'shed' and 'park' both ban ground vehicle parking spaces). Of course, this would necessarily erode the building code system, but IMO the building code system should be a list of 'must-do's and leave most everything else up for grabs (which is almost the case now, to be fair).

For FoV settings above the default, snow and rain are rendered in a circle that fills ~70% of the user's field of view. Flakes vanish into a wall.

I took a poor quality recording, but at the start focus on flakes along the edges of the screen. It is most visible in fullscreen, flakes vanish well within the field of view.



The FoV setting here is 78 degrees, but in reality that translates closer to 90 degrees in my ~2:1 resolution. 

The rest of my graphics settings, if they make a difference, are as follows:
 

Vehicle Transporter Broken
The vehicle transporter is broken. You flash to your destination for a moment then get returned to where you started.

Fixed.

Vehicle Transporter Needs Preons
Vehicle transporter now requires type G preons to make.

Fixed a typo in the database, introduced when changing the requirement from magmium heat sinks to cryo heat sinks.

Starmap Names
Also, there is a bug with the new starmap that is making everyone able to see the names of systems from far O_O

Fixed.

Ships Won't Load Vehicles
Ships still wont load vehicles at space stations

Fixed.

Avatar Orientation
Everytime I travel long distances by foot my camera is getting some tilt. Though, its only on client side, I cant fall if it gets 90 degrees tilted

Fixed.

Agent Teleport Bug
Yeah, and if i tried to teleport to a crashed server, it has that failover after 3 minutes or whatever... it always placed me in the middle of a planet for some reason...

Fixed placement upon teleport arrival, to put you on land somewhere.

Mission Orders Crash
Having trouble building a harvest mission ..I can do the travel direct order but it crashes when I try to add an orbit order

Fixed crash caused by deletion of a pointer that is now managed by the ether.

Agent Disease
By the way, disease should probably be removed when you are invincible... including Targoss... i can even spread it while i am invisible, so i killed all of someone's crew at one point.

Agent no longer spreads disease when invisible or agent power is enabled; either setting prevents contagion.

Hovering Vehicles
Motorbikes at my airport start out hovering in the air.

Fixed vehicle placement bug.

Account Creation
Account creation broken.

Updated web cgi programs to the latest version. Problem is fixed.

Every time I try to add an 'orbit planet' or 'orbit over city' command to the mission queue it crashes my game and the order does not get added to the ship's mission queue.

Happens every time. I have to wait until the ship arrives at the destination system, then queue the orbit order by itself. Very annoying.

It seems officers cannot be ordered to use open stargates, which is surprising. It's been suggested that this is intentional as stargates are already OP, but wouldn't a better solution be to require an avatar aboard for them to use it - same as for unexplored wormholes? I, personally, would really like an order as manually piloting is tedious and time consuming. Attempting to use 'orbit at coordinate' orders is risky as the orbit can be dangerously close to the star (I've already lost a ship to this :c). I must admit there is some minor potential for abuse: it makes bertha-porting to move a fleet easier, allowing slightly larger fleets to be moved.

EDIT: to be absolutely clear, the idea is to create an order for traversing an already open wormhole created by a ringworld, treating it always as an unexplored wormhole in order to prevent abuse. Remote activation of the stargate to open a wormhole is a completely different suggestion, one that I can only see reasonably done by allowing beaming of cargo to coordinates as if someone dropped it there. That would have the added benefit of allowing more realistic colony construction (just beam down building materials instead of bothering with the trade channel or using magic airports), but would have issues with lag and inventory management. However, such a feature is completely unnecessary and so debate over it should be reserved for a future time.

EDIT2: A low-effort compromise would be to allow the hover/hover-at-coordinates order for stars. Then all one would need to do is just use the engineer station manually.

Good Evening,

Since the universe restarted, I have been unable to use the Star Map > System Search feature. Each time I click on it, the game crashes. 

Anyone else run into this issue?

It doesn't make sense to allow it if airports can't be built inside either. Besides, I'm unsure how one is suppose to actually pilot a ship larger than a fighter out of a biodome. I only built one in order to get a station over a planet with an insidious atmosphere, since I was having trouble with towing (I'll ask around about that on discord before making judgements).