Under the Neutral Zone Empire Standings, Weltreich counts as having 0 worlds despite having over-overlordship of an empire that has 45 worlds.

Don't think we can declare Weltreich as the true victors of the Universe yet until both banners on the frontpage fly their colours.

A very simple idea.

Add in a way by which a race's creator may decide the names his people will take.
Instead of having just a random hodgepodge of names for all races this will let the species feel more unique and cultural.

Two ways this could be done. A simple list of male, female, an neutral names; and a list of surnames (if desired for your species).
Another way is to instead allow the user to create list of name parts to use. I.e. A list of prefixes, interfixes, and postfixes to be randomly combined into names. With potential separate lists for male, female, neutral, ect.
Having other options to say that your race makes use of surnames or middles names or other such additional naming stuff would also allow for more interesting naming.

A proposal has been made to declare Weltreich the undisputed conquerer of the Universe. Then, restart the database.

In the next Universe, the sixth, old style spacecraft will not exist. I also have a short list of changes that must wait until a reset; those would get done.

Does anyone have any strong opposition to restarting?

What things do you think must be fixed at the next restart? I don't mean every bug you know about. I mean what must be fixed before a restart.

Are there any exploits that will allow someone to max out their empire in the first week, like last time?

With this heads up, it would be a good idea for everyone to store their building and spacecraft designs in local .SoH files. You should already be doing this.

I must be a certified self flagellating masochist to post these kinds of things on a Friday afternoon. The servers were struggling and needed to be rebooted. So I scraped things together as best I could and posted an update. I've been working toward that goal for the past couple weeks; let's hope things are really ready.

The servers have been struggling for some time now. I mostly ignored them while I worked on the new creatures. They cannot be ignored any longer. If no major problems develop before Monday, the heavy server load will be my primary mission next week.

Gen4 Avatars
Generation four avatars are now ready for use, barely. Use them at your own risk.

I tried to put sensible limits on gen4 avatar DNA. This resulted in a lot of controls getting disabled or limited in options. You should be able to make useable humanoid avatars with the options available. As I complete more of the gen4 animals, more options will become available in the DNA editor.

There is no option to upgrade gen3 avatars to gen4 in this update. A little trial period of new avatars using gen4 DNA would help to root out any disastrous bugs, before letting people nuke their existing avatars. The option to upgrade gen3 avatars to gen4 will probably be in the next update. The functionality is already there; I have used it myself.

Poses still need some work. Running looks girly. Crouch creeping and belly crawling are not animated at all. These are minor things.

Fence Materials
I built a small farm of stone. It required 14 stone and 36 logs, for the fencing!

I observed this bug some time ago. It finally drove me crazy. The calculation for adding fence material to a construction process was modified to ignore most small bits of fence.

The farm now requires no logs to construct, only the 14 stone.

Crew Garb
Crew look funny sitting around in their space suits all the time.

Officers and crew will now appear in clothing, without their suits and helmets, when the air is breathable and the ship condition is green. If the ship condition is yellow, they will wear their suits but not their helmets. If the condition is red or the air is not breathable, they will wear their suits and helmets. The visor of their helmet will be closed if the air is not breathable.

Troops wear their helmet when the air is not breathable or the ship condition is red. They always wear their suit, regardless of conditions. The visor of their helmet will be closed if the air is not breathable.

Passengers wear their helmet and suit only when the air is not breathable.

This is only for appearance. They always have the benefit of the armor they are wearing. It just helps them to look better, knowing they could don their armor at any moment.

What do you guys think about a new ship component?

It would have 11 states of animation indexed -5 to 5, and select one of it's 11 states based on an input value from the ship controls.

This could be used to animate control surfaces, air brakes, thruster angles, engine pod rotation, etc.

The object would allow you to select a control axis as input, full nagative value being -5 state, and full positive state being 5.

Is this possible in the existing engine?  It could provide much more dynamic decorations for ships if so.

Hi !

When you hail on trade / fleet etc channels, all the answers are listed on a confusing list. Same when you ask an item to a broker or a ship's status.

What if instead of listing all on the channel, saying "X spacecrafts answered" or "see the list of our offers for the object XXXXX" etc. Then you click on it and it open a menu, with the content depending of the action (more or less informations).

This way if you hail for a trade on a ringworld with many stations / brokers / airports etc, it won't open a dozen useless channels. You would just have to open the list and select the one you want.

Server Crash
A manager server crash on Sunday caused a total collapse of the server grid. Unfortunately, this happened while I was out of town.

Yesterday was spent getting things running again. I was in the middle of changes on Friday that had to be finished before I could restart the servers so they were down most of the day. I added two days to all active accounts to make up for the down time.

Avatar Inventory Crash
The personal inventory of one person's avatar is broken and causing a server crash.

That avatar has no inventory of any items atm. I sent him a private message.

The broken inventory data is safely preserved. I plan to examine it this morning to see if it can be saved. I am sure that some of it can be saved, just not sure about all of it.

My biggest concern is finding out what happened. It may have been caused by a crate storing a gen4 avatar head, but that is just a guess at this moment.

Primeval World
Indigenous people in primeval world are now fully clothed and they will not mate with the player. A clever person could trade them something for their clothing but that nakedness would not enable mating.

Body Pose Bugs
Some bugs related to body poses were fixed.

Hello there Haxus.
I LOVE the work you have put into this game, and I adore the amount of freedom I have without having to follow a pointless storyline! Keep up the amazing work!!

My bug is strange, I looked through the first 4 pages of the Forum's but couldn't find anyone else reporting the same issue? 

Issue:
Yesterday and today, my friend and I have been trying to play together. First my friend tried (from Japan) to create an account - didn't work.
<---//
New Accounts Unavailable

Due to technical difficulties, a new Shores of Hazeron account cannot be created at this time.
We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again later.

//--->

I thought the problem was with his location, so I tried aswell - from Canada. Still no luck. Same error as above.
Did I miss an important notice somewhere? Or is account creation disabled due to "spam" account creators. (Saw mention of this on the forums, "updates" page(?? I think) when I was doing my, "skimming" xP

I mean, it's completely understandable either way (if yes or no) - just curious about when account creation will be back up :) so my friend and I can play this glorious game once more!

All the best,
Sincerely,
HUGE FAN

Ps. I am also a game designer by trade. All I have to say is simply WOW to the amount of work you have been able to get done over the years.

Pps. I have posted a screenshot of the error from my phone, but it is the same error on pc browser.

Ppps. I feel like this is honestly just you trying to replace Captcha with Captcha V2 - if so, my apologies for making a useless bug post xD

Animal Poses
Posing of the bodies of the new animals is nearly complete. It took longer than expected. This can only be seen in primeval world, at the moment.

A few small items remain before players can start using gen4 animals as avatars. That would likely be ready by this time next week.

17+ Warning
Some may have noticed a new 17+ warning. The animals of SoH are completely computer generated, not at all derived from real 3D models of humans, no more detailed than a puppet or a raunchy cartoon. However, those who question why the 17+ warning is necessary may want to view the following link.

17+ Warning. Pornographic. Do not open this link if you do not want to see it.
http://hazeron.com/Playlists/Scenes%20of...rgazer.mp4

After you finish deciding that Haxus has lost his blinking mind, consider the possibilities. Instead of catering to a potentially child audience, story lines in SoH can take on dramatically adult themes. Don't worry, I have no intention of making porn with SoH. It is just one of the many situations that can develop in the Hazeron universe.

This is a defining moment for SoH, at least in terms of who the audience is expected to be. Now I can stop cringing when my grandson wants to play. Instead, I can hold up the 17+ warning as a shield.

Asteroid Warning
Stations and cities with sensors will now report asteroids in the event log, if they are detected within sensor range. Observatories now report asteroids in the event log, starting at extreme range in the solar system. Asteroids known to be on a collision course with a world will cause an event log alert, which makes the icon look different in the city report tree.

Bugs were fixed. Lots of little details related to posing and animating gen4 bodies were finished. I'm late for a meeting and I can't really think of anything else right now. I'll update this post if I think of anything.

Animals
After a marathon of code writing, gen4 animals are now fully integrated throughout the SoH code, with one exception. Biosphere data at worlds continues to use gen3 animals because gen4 animals are not complete enough to replace them.

Avatars in primeval world now use gen4 bodies. This can provide an illustration of variations within a species. The villagers are all created using the same species, not the exact same DNA. By contrast, in gen3 creatures, each DNA combination is a species so every villager and town person is exactly alike.

Body poses are not finished; that is the topic of the week. Gen4 bodies in the update today will only pose standing, walking or running. Any other pose will not work, including dead/dying and head only poses. Those should be done in the next update, possibly later this week.

From here onwards, work on the new animals will be focused on the animals themselves. As soon as a few more pieces are finished, they will be ready to make avatars, at least within the capability currently available. That capability will expand as I finish various aspects of these new animals.

Stargazer
The indigenous village now has a new member, the Stargazer. All new avatars created after this update are strongly advised to speak to the Stargazer, to learn a bit of information critical to your survival. The Stargazer will be found at the outskirts of the village.