Salutations!

I couldn't help but notice the forum had quieted substantially and I seem to have recalled words wiser than ones I would come up with on my own: "be the change you wanna see." Some of you know might remember me as Senok on the Discord (I'm one of the French ones; it seems we lots have a thing for open letters, after all).

First of all, hi Haxus, I wanted to preface this by saying I hope all's going well on your end and this year has been a good one. It has obviously been a while (a year, give or take), and I figured one does not invite contact with silence, so I chose to instead write a little something. A bit of a personal recap regarding my personal sentiments and opinions on the game's state and the project's evolution thus far, that anyone reading is free to agree or disagree with.

In a general sense, however, I believe I can speak for quite a few of us when I say we're very curious to know of the progress there might have been since the last update you made. Hazeron Starship has undergone a level of fixing and polishing that's probably unprecedented for a while, until last year's summer, and I personally wish to inquire if your silence was due to you focusing onto the more challenging aspects of it (I seem to remember AI empires were a bit of a challenging prospect?), or if the hard work over the previous months has left you needing a break?



As far as my personal views on Hazeron's state are concerned, I'd have to break that down in a couple of parts, and I'd be curious to read what everyone else thinks on the matter.

As always, this is meant to be constructive, so I couldn't in good conscience only stick to the positive aspects. But positive aspects there are. Clearly Hazeron is a game that's hooked quite a few of us to its uniqueness from the get-go. Personally, I remember finding the graphics hard to move past, at first, when I first tried the game in 2011. But let me tell you, as soon as I delved deeper and started experiencing its more distinctive features such as city building and (relatively) seamless space travel in fully-custom ships, I was SOLD. I knew I was in for a ride, and what a ride. I think everyone's heard it time and again, how no other game has ever emulated the same gameplay values Hazeron pushes. I mean... I'm literally still here writing about it. It's gotta mean something, right?

Where I grieve, however, is precisely in that the game is amazing but has become so much harder to truly appreciate with the lack of an online feature. Simply put, and once again I'd love to hear everyone else's take on that, but I feel the community lacks the means to create proper engagement within the game, through the means of proper multiplayer, beyond Discord discussions, design sharing and, in rarer cases, turn-based multiplayer with one shared save which is probably the most exciting prospect currently, but that just doesn't hit the same and severely limits the amount of interaction and freedom you get when playing like that. Multiplayer in the MMO version, brought along a variety of concerns: resources, ship types, colonisation, diplomacy, war, and so on. It drove, in a way, the growth of empires who wanted to survive and thrive. The galaxy was completely and purely wilderness with the exception of the mysterious, abandoned Ringworlds, and players got to carve its known History from those interactions. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but it brought a layer which I believe to be an essential difference. Solo play has the experience somewhat... eroded. It is amazing that we got to keep this hidden gem of a game as an offline mode after the servers' end, but it does feel like it lacks something that made such a massive part of the experience to me. No one will ever find what you made, whether someone from your empire traveling from place to place, a neutral explorer, or a hostile-minded player vying for your riches. Not even the safe encounters you'd get in the neutral galaxy, are made possible here. This, I believe, is such a shame, because there is so much agency in what you can build out there for someone else to discover.

Haxus, I remember you saying back in December 2022, that LAN or peer-to-peer multiplayer would be an easy feature to add!
( https://hazeron.com/mybb/showthread.php?tid=2825 )
And I couldn't advocate more in favour of it being added as soon as time and schedule permits, should you still be working on the game. That is merely my two cents, I guess, but I firmly believe it to be the better way to sustain the game's life and community, until proper AI a la Spore may be added for proper PvE (if that project is still on the table). Because even though I would absolutely love to be able to play online and build an empire with the boys against AI empires in a PvE-oriented fashion, I would, personally, absolutely prefer the immense and endless possibilities which online play brings, over an implementation of AI on it own with no multiplayer capabilities. I do think NPC empires, have immense merit to what it can bring to the game, especially if they're procedurally spawned in a Spore fashion, but I cannot see anything beat how infinitely superior the potential of once again allowing several players to play together, is.

Hence it would be a feature that, once added, would pretty much let the community play itself and, hopefully, require little to no additional input, as the hosted servers would be entirely player-dependent. The whole thing would give to us the ability to team up to build our empires collectively (and perhaps against one another, depending on whom you ask), which I cannot stress how much it changes the way one plays the game, and what they play the game for.



With that being said, allow me to renew my well-wishes to you. I don't know if you're still working on the game by that point but I do hope you're doing OK, considering how long we haven't heard from you. I also want to invite engagement from any and all still browsing around the forums. I'm genuinely curious to see how active the place turns out to be still, and I'd love to see what was quite a hot topic back in 2022, be debated once again here.

Have a good one,
Targoss guides.

Ioplasma recipe doesn't show up on a refinery built on a gas giant.

- The gas giant does have Ioplasma
- The refinery is built on top of an aerial platform
- It is able to retreive other uncommon gas like Borexino Precipitate







I can send the save file if needed.

A space station was ordered to fill two continuous shipments. It filled both simultaneously, but one of them never seemed to enter transit, or arrive. I attempted to delete the defective shipment and recreate it.

Upon pressing delete, the game said: "No record of the shipment was found. How odd." 

Odd indeed!

Sometimes, I order my ship to make a long journey, or perform a complicated mission. I leave the computer for a while. Lieutenant Sundiver valiantly completes nine tenths of the mission, then the desire to sunbathe overcomes him, or the game crashes, costing hours of progress.

I know he is only an NPC, but it would be nice if, after completing a long voyage, the officer could take a moment to save my game before continuing...A mission order to that effect would be welcome!

When traveling between one system to another, the system map screen does not refresh, you will simply continue to see the system map you left instead.  It doesn't happen all the time, but most of the time in my tests.  

Could have something to do with warp drive as that is where I see it occur most often.  Only way to get it to refresh is by restarting the game.

I exported a save, formatted pc completely and now after importing said save, the images that said "Park" and "Zoo" are replaced by an image of the character creator/character selection screen.

I guess I would have to subscribe to my own designs again to fix this, but that would create double designs. So I would then have to go to every hazardous environment city to replace every zoo and park with the new version. Then finally I would have to remove the old designs from the library.

Not a big deal, but just thought I should report it.

The SSL certificate has expired again, causing browsers to do this:

When you load a design that has a roomvoid with hold access that is associated with an open state of a door (to simulate a locker), in the final design the roomvoid will not have hold access unless the association is done again before finalising. So it seems the hold access of the associated void is either not saved properly by the "save as" function or not loaded properly.

How to make the textures go change with the materials used in game ?
Ex : a house in stone looking like built stone walls, the same using metal, vulcanite, magmium looking like built with walls in metal, magmium, vulcanite.
Do i need to create ALL the iterations in design studio for each asset or they will change procedurally ingame when construction is set with the correct material ?
The old Shores of Hazeron worked like this, it seems HS don't .
Why ?
And will it be updated to implement this ?
As i miss this feature , it looked so cool, and realistic.
Vulcanite houses just can't look like stone built .^^

Make the Steam Workship visible to people who don't own Hazeron starships and therefore are potential buyers.

Having them see what is possible in terms of ships and buildings (and interiors) might attract more buyers.

Other games show the workshop even if you don't own the game.

People reading in the reviews about the workshop, but not being able to see it, might be confusing.