Crew have a particular problem with navigating ships at the moment. In particular, they often go too fast and walk straight past the place they are meant to go. They then get stuck in an endless loop of turning back on themselves and overshooting in first one direction, then the other.

To my layman's eye, they need to judge more leniently whether they have arrived or not. Then, if the same order is given again (i.e., they are ordered twice to go to the same coordinates) their tolerance needs to get progressively stricter. Perhaps their movement speed should also slow with repeated identical orders. This would mean that they overshoot less often, while the ability to very precisely position them would not be lost.

(CURRENT WORKAROUND: Give them a "stop" order (Ctrl + S) when they are roughly where you want them to be.

EDIT: This could be related to the current extreme prevalence of overshooting waypoints when AI is controlling a ship, too - maybe a more general AI problem?

Say I have a small source of high quality metal, together lots of low quality metal. I want to make sure the small, high quality source is used for important things like shipbuilding and weapons, while bullion, plantpots, picture frames and so on can use any old junk. 

It would be a practical and easy quality-of-life improvement to forbid certain processes to fetch input resources above a certain Q.

As far as we know, decay is a necessary evil to prevent server resources from going to waste on cities that aren't being used. But since the change to the Land claim system, decay of cities has felt really confusing.
I think we would all love it if decay didn't have to be a thing at all, since exploring and encountering other civilizations is one of the awesome things in this game. So without the full understanding about the reasons for decay, lets discuss alternatives.

If the number of cities is what is actually costing the most server issues, then I really don't know what can be done, aside from upgrading the server hardware. But storing information shouldn't be as big an issue if it isn't actually being used.

Assuming that it is the amount of computation it takes to handle the large amount of cities and units in them, maybe it would be possible to make the cities go dormant when their founder/owner/claimer hasn't been online for 7-30 days.

All manufacturing could either stop completely, slow down a lot, or be more selective; such as only working essential jobs.

Something similar to the old neglect mechanic could make the military units despawn and otherwise leave the military bases nonfunctional. And leaving the worlds defenseless against attacks in the process.

See also: (Idea thread) Automatically Add To Land

With Gen IV avatars, the "draw headless body" or "draw no body" options in the scene menu result in the whole body still being drawn, or the hair only still being drawn, respectively.

A brief description: If you produce vulc or mag on another planet in the system, you cannot upgrade hull using those materials on another planet unless you produce the material from a smelter.

I had a world that had vulc, but didn't produce it there and the option to upgrade hull wasn't there until I placed a smelter and had it make vulc.

Steam Update

I've been working pretty hard to make Shores of Hazeron totally solo playable, in preparation for a Steam release. A huge amount of work was needed to stitch everything together.

This was one of those great house keeping opportunities, from a coding perspective. It was a chance to unify some code under a common interface, code that was getting duplicated on the client side and on the server side. That work flushed out a couple of bugs.

The first wave of changes is complete. All game functions are ready for solo use. A fair bit of testing is needed.

I started building my first solo city. With a little agent-level help along the way, the city could be launching spacecraft by the end of today.

The bug I am currently chasing causes a new avatar to sometimes start in orbit, suffocating to death. It happens a lot in the solo play version. I ended the day on Friday with the bug in hand. The cause of the bug was a surprise, not at all what I expected. The bug will be fixed before I continue building my city.

I am tentatively planning for a Dec 1 release date of the Steam version. That seems very achievable, at this point.

Server Crash

The master server crashed during the weekend, which broke the server grid. It is back up again.

Server software was not updated. Changes have been made that require a coordinated release of a new client with the server. I am not quite ready for that yet.

I didn't have these problems before but since a week or so, ships constantly blow up when approaching a planet or when landing at an airport. I give a mission order to the AI captain, like "orbit over city" and when we get close to the planet it's KABOOM! Ship destroyed. Also happens a lot when landing at an airport. It's always with an AI at the helm. Maybe they approach too fast or something.

The ships we fly cost a lot of resources. It's frustrating to say the least. I would be very grateful if this was fixed. Otherwise I may as well just stop playing cause it's a real game killer.

I love the core feeling of Shores of Hazeron.


I just love that feeling of being on a moon, with my custom-made space ship hovering in the distance, looking at the beautiful planets slowly roll in the sky, and knowing that each little bright dot I see is a complete system with its own wonders, and all within my grasp - and who knows what I'll find there?


Unfortunately, that feeling comes at a high cost.


For years now, new updates have brought time and again more complexity to the game - very often creating more barriers for new players to overcome, new players which are critical to the financial survival of this game, particularly as it will soon go on Steam.


I tried to get some friends into the game throughout the years. Many didn't mind the poor graphics - but the fact that it was absolutely unintuitive and full of lag or bugs with overly-complex gameplay made them all run away. Myself included, only coming back every now and then for nostalgia's sake - like many here, it seems.


And yet I don't think that having hundreds, if not thousands of dedicated players for this game would be so hard. I can see SoH's population easily increasing a hundred fold, and it's revenue even more.


It's just a matter of designing the game for its audience.


But for that, the mindset for the development of this game needs to switch to "What does the game's audience want? What needs to be done to attract, retain and monetize more users?"



Designing a game is just like any other business - you've got the understand some core concepts and have a specific frame of mind to be successful. This is roughly broken down into:



-Understanding the customer's needs (what do my users want?)

-Creating a product that meets those needs (in this case, a sandbox space MMO)

-Communicating to the customer that the product meets those needs


I believe the core reason behind SoH's poor performance over the years is due to the development team being unaware of these concepts.



As a well-known example, we've seen a completely new overhaul of the ship and building designer. While the idea behind it makes sense (allowing for greater creative freedom and customization), it has, in my opinion, created a barrier to the majority of potential users, who would be disengage with the game as they see this new feature too complex and doesn't meet their needs (effort to entertainment ratio). This has been widely expressed since its implementation.



On the other end, we have had some great improvements to increase usability and entertainment - for instance, having "under construction" airports automatically fetch the required resources to allow its construction, hence greatly reducing the tedious micro-management required to build colonies - which I personally love and has single-handedly rekindled my interest in the game.



In fact, were it not for this, I would not be here, and would be playing another game as I write this.



My suggestion is to strategize profoundly on what Shores of Hazeron is about - its purpose and identity.



An online game's purpose is most often to provide entertainment to a niche of players. How does SoH aim to do so? What features does it need to have to create that entertainment?


We've all made loads of suggestions about how we'd want the game to be improved - the features we think would be good to implement. But unless the mentality towards the development of the game changes, then none of this will work in the long-term.


The launch to Steam is coming soon, and Haxus has expressed that it's either going to work or the project will be abandoned. Like many other players, I often rage about SoH's complexity and features. But I always come back for a reason. It's one of the games with the most potential to bring me lots of pleasure. I'd hate to see that potential unrealized.

Last few days everything my crews were doing was often VERY laggy. Not laggy on my side, but their. Examples:
- Crewman can't stop at path nodes - they simply walk further for one-two seconds, then turns back, and then again walks back one-two seconds longer after he reaches node. Result: they simply can't move around ship, walks into walls, can't get to their stations.
- Crewmen stops ships with delay after reaching waypoints. Today I've observed ship landing. It nosedived into ground, and continued for few seconds with engines on, before realizing it's too far, then leveled, ascended, tried to land with very delayed reactions, which was both funny and sad to watch.
No idea how they are handled by engine, but it looks like due to some bug there's some (way too big) delay between checks for their waypoints maybe?

Starships blowing up as soon as they get close to/land on a planet (AI crew-manned) . Doesn't happen every time, but often enough to be very bothersome.