The current implementation of the asteroid in Hazeron Starship is weird and puts unneeded pressure on the player. For example, since it is a singleplayer game, I don't play much outside of the weekends currently.

I guess the stargazer can stay and serve as the first chapter of the story. But don't start the actual countdown here yet, let the player build their first city at their own pace.

Once the city has some level of advancement, start the second chapter with either the stargazer seeking out the player or maybe others with the same worries. This chapter should probably just advise the player to make an observatory if they haven't already, and then direct them to go to it.

Third chapter would start when you arrive at a finished observatory. Then start the countdown, but not as a week long thing that rely on real world time. Instead spawn the asteroid in the solar system and have it orbit around the solar system. Direct the player to make a spacecraft for either destroying it or evacuation.

Then once the asteroid either impact or is destroyed, have a final chapter of the story happen, probably two version depending on the outcome and location of the player and their ship.

The biggest issue I see is figuring out what state of city advancement would be good to trigger the second chapter at. Maybe when they have an airport on the moon? That way you know if the player has any chance of making a spacecraft.
I like the idea of splitting it into multiple chapters. Since anyone that has attempted to follow all of the Targoss story will know that one very long chapter gets weird and buggy. Also it is fun to think of that maybe it isn't just the stargazer that worry about this.

Thoughts? Ideas?

Web Site Moved to New Server
Today I finished moving the Hazeron web site to a new server. The final step is to move the e-mail server.

Please be patient with e-mail to/from me; it may be disrupted for a day or so.

Once these steps are completed, I will finish vacating the server cabinets at the computer center. Yes that means no more Shores of Hazeron MMO.

Then work resumes on the solo play version, dubbed Hazeron Starship. The current goal is to release that on Steam in three to six months.

We missed you. And thank you to Haxus for bringing this forum back to life. 

"We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when - but I know we'll meet again, some starry day!"



(collaborative artistic effort with Celarious)

I guess Shores of Hazeron is no more.

Hi Haxus,

some ideas formed in my mind, while playing SOH and using the designer recently. Hopefully these thoughts are appreciated and not annoying.


Building type diversity

It might be a nice idea, if there were at least one proper functional building blueprint per building type in the game. So cities would look more interesting. Or maybe give the new players access to the steam workshop, so they can publish and download design blueprints.
(Maybe it's the same for spaceships. At least there should be one for transporting commodities, one for passenger transport and one battleship.)


Designer: Simplyfication of room voids

I've noticed, that it is very tedious to make rooms, that you can walk in and especially to create functional doors.

Maybe there could be a mechanic, that automatically creates a room void, together with a room. The void would be a little smaller, than the room itself, to have some distance from the wall-faces.
Same for door-jigs. It should automatically create a void with it.
(An auto-group system for rooms and doors, and their voids, would be a helpful feature, too.)

Or add the option "Room Void" to the "Make" command of the designer (menu: Part). So it will be possible to copy the room, shrink it, change it into a room void and place it again, inside the existing room.


Vehicle auto damage (decay) reduction

For new players it might be convenient, that vehicles recieve auto-damage at a lower rate.

It would be nice, if there was a possibility to park vehicles in parking lots (or special service lots) and they will get reapaired there continously (like it worked with the road slabs in the old SOH version).


Thank you for all the effort and keeping this masterpiece of a game alive. There is still no other 1st person city managemant and space game, that has so much depth/possibilities and therfore is so much fun.


Greetings,
Falkenkopf

Resume on Unit Orders Window
Unit Orders window now has a right-click menu option to show a resume of information about a unit.

Tool tips on units on the Unit Orders window were shortened to show less information.

Story Functions
Some story functions were added to the script engine, to change the role of npcs and to access npcs at stations and posts.

Fixed a problem with sentient functions that caused them to not work on avatars.

Unified Npc Class
Consolidated all the different behaviors of npc's into a single C++ object class. That is: officers, crew, troops, passengers, workers, indigenous, and story characters. This makes them individually more versatile. For now, they should just keep acting like they did before; you should not be able to notice a difference.

It is now possible to change the role of an npc but there is no UI for doing so. Any suggestions? Should I just offer them a berth? Can an indigenous person accept a berth?

Basic Training
Officers, crew and troops are now created with basic training up to their second rank. The first rank will be applied to npc's who suddenly find themselves in the job with no prior training. They will perform poorly. There is currently only one way to create an untrained npc; that is by getting them out of a cryo berth.

Passengers Stopped Taking Orders
Fixed a problem with new npc class implementation.

Startup Buttons
Added a small amount of text to some of the buttons during game startup. These did not always appear to be buttons to first-time players.

Startup Layout
Made some minor changes to the layout of buttons during game startup, to help first-time players.

Solo Create Empire
Fixed a bug that broke creation of a new empire in the solo game.

Crash on Exit
Clients and servers started crashing during program shutdown.

Fixed a class destructor bug, introduced when atom managers were implemented into the solo game.

Animals as they are right now are just scary monsters that will appear out of nowhere and kill you before you can react.
Safe to say that the old Animal wiki article makes them sound a little more interesting than that.

So I got a number of suggestions to make them just a little more real and less instant killers. I know animals aren't always that important, especially after you got your first city established, but it is still the first couple of hours any player has with the game and its AI and combat. If anyone else got ideas, do share them here and lets discuss this a bit.

Animal Sounds and Behavior

Currently the sounds that animals make are few. They make sound when walking, and they might make a sound when they use some sort of puke attack on you. Subterranean animals makes sounds while walking under ground and are invisible to the player, which is really confusing most of the times.

Their behaviors seems mostly random to the player. Some times they attack you when you get too close or they run away. Either they run away from you after being attacked, or they attack you back. There is no indication that it will attack you if you get close, or a warning that it is about to kill you.

I suggest that animals get some basic roars and growls. Territorial animals would start to growl when you get too close, if you don't leave before some time limit or get even closer, they attack you. Big animals might make some display of power and roar before actively attacking, giving the player a moment to run away. This will give the player warnings about imminent attacks.
The only one I don't have a good idea about would be the flying animals, since they dive attack you or shoot you with ranged attacks, maybe they can have some loud hawk screech before beginning to attack.

Subterranean animals sound probably stop making sounds while they are underground and inviable. They should make a roar or something when they emerge from the ground, and maybe they should be stuck during some 2 second animation as dirt and dust blow up around them. That way they don't just appear out of no where and kill the player after making loud sounds from nowhere.
A small side note, subterranean animals show up on the helmet's radar as if they were there like normal animals. Maybe a new icon for subterranean entities would be useful.

Animal Territories and Nests

Currently as far as I know, all animal encounters are technically just scripted events that happen when an avatar is in the wilderness of a world with wildlife. But they always seem to just be randomly walking around and hunting the avatar that triggered it.

I would love to see some form of actual animal nests and dens appear on worlds. Such as a wolf den that will cause wolves to appear in the surrounding area and attack other animals and avatars that come near. maybe they could even affect cities that are in their area, giving the game some minor pest control to deal with. Then you could go destroy the wolf den, or even get missions from a city to do it. (Same could be done with bandit camps I guess.)

On the smaller scale of things, just adding a small nest to some animal encounters would make it more interesting and show where animals might be territorial. Just some eggs on the ground with animals around it would be the most basic neat I can think of.

Animal Repellents

Currently animals will chase you forever, or ignore you when you are near a campfire or tent. This has caused some players to make long roads of campfires while scouting.

I have always liked the idea of making smaller animals leave you alone if you have a lit torch selected. Bigger animals might not care unless you attack them with the torch. Loud sounds, like the sound of gunfire or a laser rifle could also scare away animals.

One of the main complains that I've seen with the turn back to subscription was the amount of claims an avatar can have is a bit low and encourages people to have multiple accounts for a decent-sized empires.  I'm not asking for too much major of a change but for a bump in the number of claims an avatar can have or have it expand to an certain limit somehow.

Here is a general update on plans for the near future of Hazeron.

We are working to get Hazeron Starship ready for release on Steam. It is fully integrated into our build processes so updates to the software propagate to all versions: the Hazeron Starship solo game and the Shores of Hazeron MMO clients and servers. My first priority is on the Steam release but changes often apply to the mmo client and/or servers as well.

Shores of Hazeron - The MMO Game
The mmo Shores of Hazeron will continue to be free online until Hazeron Starship is released on Steam. Then it will return to being $10 per month using PayPal, as before.

No changes are planned or pending that would force a reset of the database. There is no current plan to reset the database at any point along the way.

There is some hope that the solo game will drive players to try the mmo. The servers are being kept online until after the Steam release, to see how that plays out.

To be honest, it will take a miraculous surge in interest in the online game to keep the servers alive. They are expensive to maintain and they are not needed at all for the Steam version, which is solo playable only. 

In my opinion, I predict the servers are taken off line a few months after the Steam release.

The web site will remain up to support the wiki and the forum, mainly for bug reporting.

Hazeron Starship - The Solo Game
The solo Hazeron Starship is currently getting a surge of attention, to get ready for release on Steam.

The current plan is to work hard for the next three months to get ready, with the possibility of going six months, if that is needed.

Steamworks has fully approved Hazeron Starship for release on Steam. I just need to push the button and Hazeron Starship will be announced as "Coming Soon". It will remain in that state for two weeks before it is actually available in the Steam app store.

Rather than rush into that, I decided the game needed more solo play content. I wanted to give the player more value for their money. I also wanted to improve the story.

What I would really like to see is a continuing story that rambles along but never really ends, like a soap opera or comic book, like episodes of Star Trek or The Mandalorian. Updates to the software would include additions to the story as they become available.

To that end, it is beneficial to start with a substantial amount of story for players to play through. That way it takes them a while to catch up to the leading edge, where the author is now in the story. As the story grows longer, each new player after that has an even longer story to play, before they catch up.

I hired a professional novelist and playwright to take command of the story telling in the game. It is a long time Shores of Hazeron player who is passionate about the game. I do not yet know if they want their identity known to the players so that will remain unsaid for now.

They have the latitude to rewrite the story from scratch. No bit of the existing story need be saved.

This will lead to useful improvements in the story script engine.

Eventually, it might be possible to make the script engine available to the public. Then players could write and share stories between themselves. Some games have done this successfully. It doesn't really work for the mmo, unless someone at this end reviews and approves each script. Otherwise it's, "Oh look, is that a patent for warp 9 lying on the ground? Whoa Q255 even!"

Steam assigned an Adult rating to Hazeron Starship. It makes sense for a game where players can get naked, have sex, and bear children.

One benefit to that adult rating is that children won't be playing the game. It is detailed and complicated. It really isn't a game for children.

Another benefit to that is the author can write for an adult audience. Steam is a mature platform, with a lot of mature players. I think adults want to be spoken to like adults, not like children. Knowing the audience is comprised of adults, the author can develop an engaging story that might not be interesting to children. I don't mean pornography or crudeness, but complexity and subtlety, with adult themes and innuendo.

Steamworks currently shows 94 million active monthly users. An unknown number of them are adults. An unknown number of those adults might be interested in a complicated space game.

The square city building blocks were better and easier to use, as was the old ship designer.