There's a hole in my heart from the MMO, and I want to fill it by making some models with Hazeron assets (Which would also give me a jump on Hazeron Starship.) Can someone cue me in on the file path to the default texture library, as well as their format and any converting I'd need to do? Bonus points for sound effects - especially the sounds that the old Sensor modules used to make. So soothing.

I believe that "Shores of Hazeron" is a name with a ring to it, as well as a history. A name that would stir the emotions even if you didn't know what it referred to. Where are these shores? What is the strange sea that laps against them? What alien gulls cry in the waves there at twilight? 

It also doesn't contain the words, "star", "space" or "ship". It tells the potential player that someone has thought about the content of this game - specific lore, perhaps interesting stories - and not just made a simulator with an excuse for a setting. This sets it apart from the annoyingly narrow repertoire of space game names currently on offer ("Star Citizen", "Starmade", "Space Engineers", "Starship Evo", "Starbound"...).

The MMO is gone for good. There is no danger of confusion. Returning players looking for Shores of Hazeron would be able to find its replacement. Why not replace "Hazeron Starship", which always hits me as a "secondary" name, like "Coke Zero", with the flagship name we all know and love, and make sound like, instead of a vestigial holdout, a true successor?

(Or Shores of Hazeron: Strike-Team Thunder-Kill Alpha: Hard Target: The Reckoning starring Sandra Bullock.)

Decided I would upload the designs I had published so folks who are going to use Starship/singleplayer can use them should they wish, especially now that the MMO is dead. These were all models/textures taken from Cities Skylines. I edited them in Blender to fix some texture/mesh issues and make them more Hazeron ready by doing stuff like taking all the windows and making them their own mesh(s). Then in the Hazeron editor I made the window mesh(s) into windows, added lights, etc. Some of them have fences, stuff like that. There is pretty good coverage on buildings, but I don't think the list is fully complete. Feel free to modify them, but don't claim them as your original work. They aren't even my original work, given they are from Cities Skylines!

Link to the dropbox download for the designs, as I wasn't able to add it as an attachment.

If there is desire I can also upload the raw 3ds and texture files. They aren't the originals straight from Cities, they are post my modification.

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.