Server Lockup
A server locked in an infinite loop while applying a texture in the designer.

Fixed texture function to prevent infinite loop.

Star Map
OpenGL star map causes Hazeron Commander to fail when run on a computer with low OpenGL capability, even if the star map is not displayed.

Hazeron Commander now uses the old star map widget, which is drawn using the paint system instead of OpenGL.

Sky Box
Sky box appearance degrades at higher resolution. The stars in the sky are lost. The milky way of the galaxy fades away.

Worked on the sky box. Adjusted textures. Fixed particle scaling factors. The appearance is more consistent between different resolution choices now.

Sky Box Gone
Sky box is not rendered at all when you are in an area of empty sectors.

Sky box now drawn even when there are no solar systems in the supersector, that being the 3x3x3 box of sectors centered at your location.

Citizen Birth Rate
Citizen birth rate is not affected by morale.

Adjusted the affect of morale on birth rate.

Avatar DNA
Someone requested the ability to try the generation 4 DNA editor without being on line or having to give up an avatar slot.

Added a DNA button to the dialog of options when entering the Designer and Primeval World. This replaced the skin and hair color buttons.

Command Station Works When Broken
The command station still works even when it is broken. I can switch to other stations.

Command station now must be operational to enable switch to other stations.

Barracks Inventory
Barracks do not import any inventory. This would be helpful for supplying troops.

Previously, only the HQ imported inventory for the base. Now the barracks will do so also. This adds to the pool of supplies available for outfitting troops.

Troop Equipment Upgrade
City troops never upgrade their equipment? I thought they did periodically.

Troops in cities will perodically (hourly) upgrade their equipment from the base's supplies.

Trade with Citizens
I wanted to trade with this citizen like an indigenous. He was holding a yummy looking bottle of wine.

Townspeople will now trade what they have for money and other items, on the Voice channel, just like indigenous.

Biodomes on Platforms
Biodomes don't work on flying platforms. i tried to place a building in one but it thought it was frigid conditions.

Fixed.

Demolish Biodome on Platform
I could not demolish a biodome from an aerial platform.

Fixed error that prevented destruction because it thought the aerial platform was inside the biodome.

Capitol and Police Buttons
there's not actually any feedback on not being able to build capitol or police station w/o flag

The buttons to build a Capitol and a Police Station no longer disappear when they are unavailable. Instead, they are disabled and a tool tip explains why.

Cannot Throw Stuff Away
When a building has a supply of stuff I don't want, there is no easy way to get rid of it. You have to demolish the building and make another one.

Added a Trash button to the Building window. If you are in the chain of command of the building, you can discard anything in its inventory.

Stations Report Contacts
Stations should report enemy contacts.

Stations that have no officer now report their event log to a city to be included in its city report. Stations look for the closest city in their empire in the solar system, to send the information.

When a station has an officer, the officer includes that information in his report. It is not sent to any city in that case.

Demolish on Platform
Cant easily demolish buildings on aerial platforms

Fixed building demolisher to find things on platforms better.

Crew Stuck in Hull
I have seen crew get stuck in the hull of the ship. When this happens, they look dark, I suppose because they are lit according to exterior lighting conditions.

Crew or troops who get stuck in the hull of their own ship will now teleport to their berth or station.

Fleet Communications
I hailed some fleet ships and tried interacting with them. There were problems getting them to answer hails and to report their status.

Fixed various problems with talking to fleet ships. This generally applies to company ships as well.

Sensor Spam
Sensor operator sometimes spams the same message repeatedly.

Fixed sensor operator to avoid repeating.

Exchange Spam
Have you checked spacecraft blueprint exchange? It is possible to spam it.

Blueprint exchange now requires designs from the same architect, that are in the same state, to have unique names. In other words, an architect may not publish more than one design or assembly into the exchange that has the same name, without removing the old one first.

Fly Into Sun
I destroyed the city, but it's still in my star map. My ship wants to fly into the sun when I tell it to orbit over the vanished city.

Change pilot behavior when they are ordered to orbit over a city but the city does not exist when they arrive.

Zero G Rooms
The up orientation in zero G rooms aligns to the exterior gravity affecting the ship. It would be better if it aligned to the ship or to the room's up vector. That would make life for NPCs a lot better in gravity wells of ships.

Fixed up vector orientation in zero G rooms.

System Names
Systems names do not show when I sit at the command station. There is a button but it does nothing.

Fixed system name visibility when at a station.

Silverwill
Silverwill is the bug tracker that I use. It needs some changes and minor bug fixes.

Spent about a day giving some attention to Silverwill. It's so much nicer now.

Hi all!
Here I am with some other not-so-important-but-nice ideas  :D

• Ship max size
  

• Simple animation
  

Trial Teleport
Nerfing the ability to teleport for noobs prevents them from getting together when they start.

Trial account avatars are now permitted to teleport.

Rare Resources Bug
Trace resources still do not produce a rock on a moon.

A little nudge was needed to get this working. A numeric comparison required a fuzzy test.

Dense Nebula
Nebula cloud effect is too dense. It sometimes becomes solid colored and completely blots out the sky.

Nebula cloud is more transparent now.

Static Display Lighting
Items on static display on the walls of my ship are often dark. They aren't lit according to the room they are in.

My design has room voids that do not reach the walls, to keep people from peeking through.

When the static item is placed on the actual visible wall polygon, it is outside the room void. That causes it to not be lit according to room lighting. Instead it is lit like a hull mesh. If I move my pictures away from the wall until they are lit, they look stupid hovering there.

This is fixed.

Items currently on display will need to be nudged to fix them. Select them one by one and do anything to them to trigger an update. I moved mine a bit then back or in some cases just moved them a millimeter.

Static Display Annoyance
When I display something on my wall, the object just falls to the floor at my feet if I am too far from the wall. Its on static display there so I have to jink around with it to pick it up again. This is very annoying.

When placing things on static display, nothing is placed if you are targetted on something that is too far away. Instead you will get a message saying the target is too far away.

You can still place items on display at your feet, if you are not targetted on anything when you place the item, or if you target the floor.

Limbo Rescue
Fifteen avatars and a ship are still in limbo because the limbo rescue fix in the previous update didn't work.

Fixed the fix. It worked when the servers were restarted this morning.

The ship turned out not to be in limbo at all. The limbo query produced an incorrect result; it needed updating due to recent changes.

Nobody is still in limbo.

Top Down Fog
Fog used to be disabled in top down view. In some environments, fog makes top down view useless.

Fog effects are now completely disabled in top down view.

Immunization
Antitoxin should have a lasting effect, like a bandage.

Antitoxin now has a lasting effect. It is effective for a number of hours equal to its quality. Its effectiveness goes down by one, each hour until it is gone.

You can apply an antitoxin at any time. The antitoxin is not accepted if the creature is already immunized at or above the Q level of the antitoxin. A message indicates this.

Your current immunization level is shown on the Biology page of the Bio(F8) window. Nothing is shown if you are not immunized at all.

Hide HUD
Sadly "Hide HUD" option still shows AI names

AI names are now hidden when screen elements are hidden.

Approach Lighting System
Fun fact, hide HUD doesn't remove the airport landing pad marker either

ALS now hidden when screen elements are hidden.

Server Crash
A number of servers have crashed recently, always in a function that processes the effect of collisions.

I think it will be ok now. Time will tell.

Site Overlap
Site overlap test should be applied to all buildings.

All buildings are now tested for site overlap. Buildings cannot be placed if their site overlaps the site of another building.

This mainly applies to regular buildings. There are exceptions, such as street lights.

Rare Resources
A world reports a very low percentage of a natural resource but it can never be found. For example, a moon might report 1% lumenite but a thorough search of the surface reveals no lumenite.

Fixed. If any world can be found that still exhibits this bug, I would be most interested in checking it out.

Worlds that previously had this problem will now have the missing rock(s). No resetting of anything is required, though you might not find it if a building has been constructed there.

Exotic Fire
Fires don't burn in an exotic atmosphere. Jake built a fire on Pandora.

Fixed.

Friend Code
Someone reported the friend code didn't work.

Friend code eliminated. The web site will be updated after the server update is posted.

All new accounts now start with one week (7 days) of activation time.

There are limitations during the free trial period.

• Avatars cannot be transferred to another account.
  
• Avatars cannot offer teleport to their location.
  
• Avatars cannot accept teleport invitations.
  

Server Crash
Server crashed when someone surrendered a city.

Fixed.

Mesh Lighting
Meshes in rooms of ships and buildings are not lit by the room lighting.

Fixed an error that was introduced when part groups were added.

Nothing needs to be done to existing designs. The error was in the client side rendering code.

Name Species
Gen4 sentient avatar cannot name his own species. Tells him its not his species to name.

Fixed two errors that caused this to work incorrectly with gen4 dna. One error caused most creatures created from a species to no longer be a part of that species. The other was a rounding error that caused an inconsistency when encoding and decoding a dna value.

EV Suit Cost
Now we just need cheaper EV suits... as they are still VERY expensive to craft and buy

All processes and patents for making EV suits were reviewed. Material costs were reduced in all of them, generally to only one of each of the commodities formerly required. EV helmets no longer require mechanical parts. A sewing needle was added as a required tool, due to the textile requirement.

Plastic Patents
Too many plastic patents

All plastic molding patents were eliminated.

Site Overlap
Prevent mines and wells from overlapping mines and wells. This allows multiple buildings to harvest the same resource.

Mines can no longer overlap mines when placed. This is also true of Farms, Orchards, Drilling Rigs and Wells. Each is prevented from overlapping the site of another industry of its type.

Star Map Avatar Position
The + shaped avatar position indicator on the star map is in the wrong place.

Fixed aspect ratio bug when painting the avatar position indicator on the star map.

Limbo Rescue
There are fifteen avatars in limbo but the limbo rescue process fails to recover them.

Fixed limbo rescue to send avatars with no empire to a new empty home world.

Those people got stuck in limbo when the old style space ships were deleted. I ran a limbo rescue then but did not realize it failed for some people.

Clicking through loads of submenus gets very tiring, some way to convert them into a window would help a lot with designer workflow.

I threw together a quick paint edit to demonstrate what I mean.

Attached Files

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When ships are destroyed, they kinda just go "poof" leaving nothing behind. Kinda boring eh? I've got a suggestion to make that more interesting, and add some depth while we are at it.



When a ship is destroyed, it spawns a 'wreck' object. This can just be a bunch of metal bits or something, it really doesn't need to be unique model to the specific design (as cool as that would be). This wreck object would act as a container and spawns in with some percentage of the construction materials / modules inside it. This represents the 'scrap' that's left over and salvageable from the wreck. This should also include some percentage of what is in the ship's cargo hold as well. Additionally items dropped by NPCs during their death from the ship destruction have a chance of appearing inside as well. The officer log should have a higher chance, but probably not 100% since it does contain potentially sensitive information. It would be neat if the wreck object could inherit the velocity/orbit of the ship as well. So if the ship that was destroyed was orbiting a planet, the wreck will orbit the planet. If the ship that was destroyed was headed for the star at 10,000m/s, the wreck will continue in that direction and likely collide with the star and get destroyed. Wrecks should naturally despawn after some amount of time to reduce server load, perhaps a week or two.



Why? It means salvaging from ship/fleet battles is actually possible! This adds a whole new activity for players to partake in! Big fleet battle in some system? The scavengers can roll into the system right after and try to collect some loot. Just finished pirate hunting? Salvage and loot the ships you destroyed. See a tasty freighter, but the ships captain won't stand down and let you take their cargo? Blow them up, and take whatever remains. Imagine arriving in a system and seeing some wrecks, it tells a story about the history of the system, even if that story is only a week old!

Example picture of how a basic 'one size fits all' wreck model could look:

Recruitment - Free
Log in and you have access to a recruitment channel on comms.
You are held in limbo and exist only as an avatar name if your other subscriptions expire, or never had one in the first place.
You can return to your last location if you are still in an empire and resume your subscription.
See if anyone is willing to recruit you to active service in their empire by sending you a token, or if you need to buy your own way in.

Adventurer - $2.50/m
City construction and empire management interfaces disabled.
Can only join existing empires, access to comms from the selection screen to seek recruitment.
Anti-grief measures, emperor can immediately dismiss you from the faction, returning you to the empire selection screen.
Some details of and interactions with the empire you join are initially hidden/disabled, pending permissions to see them.

Governor - $5/m
Same as the above.
Emperor can assign you to manage select worlds/systems/sectors, or allow you to found and build new ones.

Emperor - $20/m
Granted 2 governor tokens and 4 Adventurer tokens per day.
Give tokens to friends and recruits so they can join you and play for free. 1 token = day.
Tokens are automatically consumed by your subjects daily at the expiry point, if you kick them out for misbehaving, unused tokens are returned to you.
Start your own empire and create a species of your design, you have total control of it as the founder.
Basically the game as it is currently for all existing subscribers.


The idea here is to encourage players to join existing empires, and make it pain-free to have your friends join you in yours, even if only briefly.
If you receive a token, your personally paid subscription is paused.
There's a lot of particulars that need to be worked out and discussed here.

With the Steam release off in the horizon, and the disposition some of the established players have, I have some serious concerns about new players being stamped out before they have a chance to learn the game and see it for what it can be. If the graphics don't put them off, getting annihilated overnight will certainly shoo off a big chunk of the rest.
This game is niche, it's not going to draw a lot of players to begin with, and even fewer will stick around for a long time.

So, assuming there's an empire that's dead set on crushing every new empire that pops up, what can these new players do? How can they be helped?
What measures can they take to defend themselves, fight back, or hide, in the face of empires with limitless resources, advanced technology, and sprawling infrastructure?

I haven't played SOH in years and I just hope some bad apples don't ruin the steam release, I really hope for the best on this project. It's going to be bad enough with the negative reviews.

Star Map
Star map draws slowly.

Recreated the star map display widget using OpenGL.

Removed star map density control.

Fixed various minor bugs with the star map.

Increased size of explored sprite in empty sectors, so they stand out a bit better.

Seamless Sky Box
The corners and edges of the sky box are distracting. Sometimes they are very visible.

The sky box is now seamless. The fix resulted from changes to the way the cloudy background of the galaxy is rendered.