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.
  

On the spacecraft manufacturing cost, transporter pads adds Io Tubes to the construction cost. I believe this to be an error as it should be Transporter modules instead.
The transporter station console does seem to add one transporter module to the cost.

See also: (Bug report) Spacecraft require non-Spare Parts

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.

I left the page after registration and logged back in, and now it says that I am no longer eligible for the $5 15 day trial nor using a friend code.

Also wondering how the subscription works, does your game time only count down while you're logged into the game? It said it doesn't work like a regular subscription and accommodates people who cannot play often, so I'm just assuming it's based on play time, which I'm happy to pay in that case.

It's been a few years and I mostly just wanted to drop in and see the changes, chat a bit, maybe tag along on some adventure, not really feeling up to sim city in space though.

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.

Currently it seems that too much crit damage can roll a system over to around 4.2 billion HP.  The system is then nonfunctional until disconnected and reconnected in the power distribution panel.

Rolled over systems cannot be repaired by hand, until said work around is performed.