System Map
Avatar position is not correct on the solar system map because orbital tilt is not represented. System map needs to tilt the orbits.

Solar system map now applies the appropriate tilt when drawing planets and rings.

The solar system map can now be rotated with the mouse, using right button click and drag. This is indicated on a tool tip. A button at the top left restores the scene to the original top down view.

Lunar orbits are now drawn on the system map, when scene magnification is high enough.

Ships Spawning Neutral
There is still a bug somewhere that permits spacecraft to be manufactured with no empire.

Fixed.

Airport Mesh
The default airport terminal blueprint 2005, has a rogue mesh that is off the site and in the air.

Fixed. Will republish after the servers restart.

The airport blueprints that are distributed as .SoH files were updated.

Crew Transfer Bug
Transfer of crew requires them to be in the scene to appear on the Cargo Transfer UI. This is a problem when transferring crew from a very large ship, where some of the crew are too far away to be in the scene.

Crew transfer no longer requires them to be in the scene. The information is acquired a different way.

Indigenous Enemy
Indigenous should have a different color than red/enemy.

There are political stance colors that are different for civilians vs military. They were only used in one place, when highlighting units in top down view. I expanded the use of those colors to more different places where political stance is indicated with color.

I also updated the wiki here http://hazeron.com/wiki/index.php/Diplomacy

Wiki Button
A better connection to the wiki would be helpful.

Many windows now have a wiki button on the title bar. The button opens an appropriate topic in the wiki, using your browser.

Noob Teleport Nerf
Noob teleport should be removed.

Noob teleport was removed.

Figured I pop in at some point.    :)

I haven't been around since Syndicate's last go-around (and the harvester shit) and thought about coming back after a long bout of EVE Online with ScottyB and his gang.   Hazeron still has a big soft spot in my heart because I've still yet to see anything like it.
I see a couple of familiar names off the bat.   I hope you guys are doing well with everything going on.  

So, is there a list of new stuff for older people like me or do I need to jump in and experience it myself?

With the new designer, new manufacturing processes and refitting. It would be nice if spacecraft subsystems could be set to "empty".

For example designing a spacecraft blueprint with a shield console, but leave it with no module type selected. Then we could refit swap the empty module with a shield module once we have acquired needed materials.

With the ideas Haxus mentioned wanting to implement allowing us to change module types when starting manufacturing of a spacecraft, we could even set subsystems we haven't researched yet to empty.
Volume used on those subsystems could just be tossed into framework, or just remain unused and useless until a module is installed.

I love the concept for this game, and it's awesome to see how far its come over the years.


And whilst I've spent many hours since I came back last Thursday in the designer creating a ship which I did enjoy (up until its quirks REALLY started to irk me), I've essentially been unable to play this game.


Over the last week, due to server crashes, limbo, or client crashes or whatever, I've only been able to play <50% of the time.

Last Friday evening my character went into limbo. That whole weekend I was unable to play the game until Tuesday afternoon.
Mere hours later my character returned to limbo on Wednesday morning (just after midnight).

Servers went back up on Thursday I believe but with a massive roll-back and any progress I'd made that week to date was completely gone and had to redo it (including a 14-hour tech research so I can go explore)

Managed to finally get it going again, and even setup an out-of-system colony today, but there was a scheduled reset (fair enough)...but since then everytime I try to even login to my account the entire client crashes.


All this while of course the asteroid is coming. I suspect it was also rolled back with the roll back the other day, but at the same time having to rebuild a colony in the same place with no new experience etc isn't enjoyable to me, its just a chore I need to do to get to the new stuff. Same with tech, idm waiting for the techs to happen, but having to do it twice because of a roll back is just a chore.


Course right now my client won't respond at all so I can't even progress my empire or setup defences against the asteroid to protect the city I spent hours trying to make kinda nice.



All these issues I just can't keep going. If the game was free that would be one thing, but this is now a paid service, and when you can't access a service for <50% of the time (to date) I honestly don't think its acceptable.


I'll leave a couple issues (with possible solutions) that I think need to be addressed before any steam release is considered, and even if thats not on the table anymore then going forward in general;


1. First and foremost I believe this whole "you can't play the game you are paying for because we have to wait for manual attention on a server that probably crashed" needs to be addressed ASAP.
  -- Any other paid MMO, a server going down for a few hours would be considered unaccptable. Let alone an entire weekend, and lets not mention the frequency this happens.
  -- As this is now a paid service, I feel there needs to be attention on the backend infrastructure. I understand the idea of "I want to find the cause and fix it to prevent it happening again", but surely there has to be a way to compromise so players aren't blocked from playing a game, but the crash-cause can still be investigated. Whether this is a daily server restart, auto-restart if issues are detected (with log dumps etc), or a more complex solution such as transferring all solar systems / players / assets to a working server until the broken one can be looked at.


2. The designer. Its impressive, theres no denying that. However it is incredibly complex. I feel that removing the old designer with the new one in it's current state was far too premature. The current one needs additional tools created for it to help designers use it more easily
  -- I'd right away suggest re-adding the old one back for the time being. Being able to design your own stuff is a HUGE selling point of the game I thought. Heck its why I actually came back. But only a handful of players can use the new one from what I can tell (and some of them even struggle a lot of the time), so immediately a large amount of the playerbase has been gated out of a major selling point of the game. Add it back in so everyone can design what they want until the new designer is in a state more or less anyone can use.
  -- The new designer needs a lot of work, and tools! I suggested in discord the other day (during encountering a LOT of frustration) was more modes to separate out the commands. When you're designing the hull or rooms of a ship do you really need to be able to access stations, landscapes, pathing, details etc? Split it out into their own modes, it will reduce clutter and make the UI a lot less intimidating I feel.
  -- One mode I think is necessary, or maybe not a mode but a tool in particular, is an AI Mode/AI Debugging tool. And I don't mean a preview->preview people. I'm on about an out-of-previewer debugger tool. I suggested this in discord the other day also (I was becoming VERY frustrated with the AI). Basically the idea was to click the grid as the 'Origin'. Click the grid a second time as the 'Destination'. The designer will then cast down from those two points to the first ROOM floors it can find (if any). In designer it will then show you the full path the AI would normally take. If for whatever reason the AI doesn't think it can get to the destination, it will draw the path right up to the point it fails and colour code it amber for example (Valid Start/End points, but incomplete path). If the AI will NEVER be able to get to either point (IE one point is out in the void of space) it will colour code the invalid point red. If the AI can get to the destination it will colour the path green. I was facing this exact issue with my ship, still no idea why, but basically my AI weren't able to get to my bridge from down the hall, they would be able to walk around their room and after I told them to move somewhere inside the room first they'd then be able to get to the bridge, but it took me a while to narrow down the point of failure because I had to keep grabbing new AI to test that one room (and I've not even tested every room yet).   But I feel more debugging tools like these will help designing ships become a lot faster and less frustrating.
  -- The tutorial videos could do with some updating, or were slightly misleading (notably the AI again, I followed the tutorial video, and whilst I had a fairly simple to follow corridor to the bridge, and the bridge was near identical to the tutorial ship, the AI wouldn't work until I added path nodes EVERYWHERE, contrary to waht the video said about only needing them at doors)





Thank you everyone for the help you provided me in discord etc when I asked. And sorry again for getting rather grumpy in there that one time. But I won't be playing anymore. If I cba when I can get back into my account I might publish the few designs for global edit if anyone wants to fiddle around with them (The US Capitol building, A Washington Monument, and my 4-5Deck ship design I posted in the Pictures thread)

I would suggest using Mass Media towers to negate the negative impact of having a "invading" species on planets already inhabited by especially with NPCs.

So from what I can tell / read, the reason theres no automated process to resolve limbo (in the case of server crashes etc) is it gives a chance to isolate / trace the issues which I fully respect and understand.

However I've recently been victim to limbo twice in the last 3-4 days. The first was on Saturday, and that wasn't resolved until Monday, and the second was yesterday and it is still unresolved.
Thats about 2.5-3 days I've been unable to play the game.


Would it not be possible to leave the crashed server...well...down to allow for tracing etc, but transfer the associated resources (Systems, characters etc) over to a backup server until the 'real' server is restored? That way it reduces the impact of limbo and allows people to continue playing the game, whilst the causes can be traced.


Because I've been back in the game about 5-6 days now, and about 50% of that time I've been unable to play the game because of limbo. To me it seems quite a serious and frequent issue that needs to be addressed.

Especially over weekends when it may not be addressed until Mondays, where I'd propose biting the bullet and if a crash etc happens on a weekend, just reboot the server automatically (and try to do a output dump or something with as much information as possible) to reduce the impact on players unless there is someone available to immediately look into these issues and address them.


TLDR;

- Limbo seems a very frequent and serious issue (it blocks players from playing the game entirely, and in my experience has happened about 50% of the time I've been back 'playing' this game)
- I suggest a way to reduce the impact of server crashes / limbo by autoamting some sort of process to transfer resources from the crashed / locked server to a temporary backup server until the cause can be traced to reduce the game-time impact of these crashes etc
- Over weekends I suggest that the server automatically reboot (either a daily event, or when it detects a lock / crash / whatever else could cause limbo) since the issue will not be addressed until Monday. Auto-reboot will reduce the impact of limbo on gametime and allow players to continue playing over the weekend (typically, I'd imagine, when most people have freetime)

The formula for output is currently: [ (10 x Shops) + (1 x NumOfBonuses x Shops ^ 2) ] x 2

The expected formula is: [ (10 x Shops) + (1 x NumOfBonuses x Shops) ] x 2


This means with one bonus: 
100 shops will produce at 10x the expected linear output.
1000 shops produce at 92x the expected linear output.
30000 shops produce at 2,728x the expected linear output.


This also causes materials to multiply with smaller and smaller inputs, creating stuff from nothing.

Some examples from Vooker, but I have verified the formula with other processes and additional bonuses:

Sensor targets are pretty oblivious. It would be nice to have a name like "Empire - Capitol" or "Empire - ShipName"  to the left of the rangefinder so that player Helmsmen and other crew can be fed more information from the sensordude instead of the captain having to switch between them.



I realize the firing station already includes some of this information, but it would be nice for all participating crew to see.

I was chatting with lajret and realised that players who can leave their computers on overnight to run long exploration missions are unfairly advantaged. Perhaps allowing accounts to designate an avatar as 'online' for the purpose of exploration would act as a compromise? Since the restriction of exploration to online avatars is fairly agreeable in-context and banning AFK exploration seems both unenforceable and impractical. The additional benefits would be user energy and server bandwidth savings, and cons being that it encourages AFK exploration.

Sometimes you can get solar systems with companion stars in tight orbits such that the wormholes are very close or even inside of the companion star! This can be a massive hazard to ships, despite the fact that such danger is inferable from the observatory report and strictly obvious after exploration. Therefore, it should be possible for empires to set travel restrictions such that AI will avoid moving through select systems when on longer journeys. This has the added benefit of allowing empires to avoid other hazards, such as perhaps a system with an enemy base.