Shores of Hazeron Development Resumed

[Haxus]

Believe it or not, it looks like the development of Shores of Hazeron will resume soon.

I have been working with Andar Aevaneur to set up the source code repository on GitHub. This was a bit of a challenge because I never used GitHub before. It is there now. I can pull the source and build every aspect of the project without errors, though a few warnings popped up since the last build. I don't like warnings and I don't usually tolerate very many.

Andar is heading up the project. He will be deciding who works on Shores of Hazeron and who gains access to the source code. At present he is getting things lined up to his satisfaction. Please be patient. Shores of Hazeron is not a small project.

I do not intend to resume working on Shores of Hazeron full time. However there are a few small things I plan to do.

• Yeet bug. I will backport the yeet bug fix from Hazeron Starship to SoH.
  
• Hazeron Starship received a year of development after SoH stopped. The .SoH ship design files are no longer compatible due to the addition of two more design elements. I plan to backport those changes so Shores of Hazeron will be able to load the spacecraft and buildings designed using Hazeron Starship.
  

Also I noticed the last multiplayer build of Shores of Hazeron still had patents. I completely removed them from Hazeron Starship because they were dull and boring. Do you want them completely removed from Shores of Hazeron?

I look forward to the day the Shores of Hazeron servers are back online. I hope to see you all there.

[Norway174]

Hey Haxus!
So glad to finally hear some updates.
I hope you've been well?

I also hope I'm not overstepping here, but I would like to implore you explore other options than letting Andar Aevaneur head up the project. He's already been creating a lot of friction within the community. Having an arbiter or gatekeeper who isn't a trusted a member of the community seems like a pretty bad idea. And from what Andar has been saying he's planning to do, just isn't feasible. You can't give someone just a small part of the code. A potential contributor would need the broader project, to be able to test and compile their changes. And that's just the icing on the cake. I'm sure others have more to add.

Personally, my hope would be that you'd consider open sourcing the project for everyone to participate. And let people create their own forks of the repo.
I understand you wish to protect the project from anyone else gaining monetary value from it, which is perfectly reasonably, there are plenty of licenses out there that disallow commercial usage, and that any forks created must follow the same license.

We have a lot of talented and willing people in the community who wants nothing but contribute to this game and it's longevity. As was the original goal of OpenShores.
But unfortunately, I'm not sure how many would be willing to work under Andar, and with his proposed rules/workflows.

If you do prefer to have a gatekeeper to keep access to the source restricted, I personally feel like Deantwo would be a better pick, as he's well known within the community. And has held trusted positions in the past.

Thank you!

[bielbi6]

Hi Haxus
I really loved this, finally you're going to fix the project, thank you creator of hazeron (;

[Tiffany]

It's been pretty exciting seeing the project moving forward again. I'm looking forward to getting to play multiplayer again after having done a couple playthroughs in Starship.

On patents, I would suggest making them a server-config option, instead of removing them entirely. But I don't think I've ever played a build that had patents, only the older TL disc system and the newer patentless system, so they might be more tedious to play with than I expect.

I imagine it's a lot of work to open up the project to new people and get it migrated onto GitHub. Thanks for doing it!

[expert700]

Hi Haxus,
First of all, we are very glad to be hearing from you again. I hope life has been treating you well!

Now, I would like to begin by saying that I respect you immensely and I have absolutely no desire to steal or profit off of your hard work. I have been playing the long game on asking for Shores of Hazeron to be open sourced:

Code:

Expert700 ECIPLB, Chat, Close range, Fri Aug 14 19:10:59 2020 GMT, Hi Haxus. Haxus Q, Chat, Galaxy range, Fri Aug 14 19:11:07 2020 GMT, Hello Expert700 ECIPLB, Chat, Close range, Fri Aug 14 19:11:19 2020 GMT, Sorry to be so forward, but if you shut down Hazeron again will you release the source code this time around? Haxus Q, Chat, Galaxy range, Fri Aug 14 19:11:21 2020 GMT, 256.00 Gold Haxus Q, Chat, Galaxy range, Fri Aug 14 19:11:37 2020 GMT, No I won't do that. Expert700 ECIPLB, Chat, Close range, Fri Aug 14 19:11:53 2020 GMT, Why not? Haxus Q, Chat, Galaxy range, Fri Aug 14 19:12:24 2020 GMT, Because it is my property. It took a long time to build it. I don't feel like giving it away. Expert700 ECIPLB, Chat, Close range, Fri Aug 14 19:13:06 2020 GMT, It kind of sounded from what you were saying earlier that Hazeron might not be long for this world, and if you decide to stop development then open sourcing it would be the only way to provide a chance for it to live on, no? Haxus Q, Chat, Galaxy range, Fri Aug 14 19:13:57 2020 GMT, I can keep developing it here and playing with it by myself. Maybe I'll come up with an iPad client. All kinds of possibilities.

I do not know who this Andar Aevaneur character really is, but I believe him to be a grifter armed with the flowery words of ChatGPT. All of his accounts that we have seen were created within the last few weeks. His profiles and all of his initial communications were blatantly AI-generated. He told us his previous Shores of Hazeron avatar name in voice chat some days ago, but we combed through the Wayback Machine archives of your Avatars page and determined that we were given non-existent names.

That is to say, he is a total unknown to the community. When he joined the Discord server moderated by DeanTwo, which I know you are not fond of but does still exist and holds ~400 members of the Hazeron community, the response he got was resoundingly negative. He stopped engaging after the first couple days due to the overwhelming opposition to him, but in that brief time he got caught telling more lies and half-truths than I can count.

I understand that before this you were in contact with Celarious and Edin (known to us as Oninnaise) about possibly open sourcing Hazeron. Oninnaise was openly working with the community and sharing his progress on a sisyphean task, creating a reverse-engineered server for Shores of Hazeron. It seems to me that Andar has been trying to manipulate both you and the community to stop a real open source release from happening, and to get his own little Hazeron fiefdom going. We were aware that you were in contact with people about opening up the source of Shores of Hazeron, and the general hope of the community has been that it would end up free and open source. None of us want to profit off of your work. In fact, a license that allows modification + redistribution but prevents charging for or otherwise profiting off of your work would be an ideal solution.

I obviously cannot speak for everyone here. That, and the Hazeron community is notorious for never agreeing on anything! If the code is made fully open source, however, the existing community is more than capable of organizing continued development and server hosting. We have many members of the community who are both technically competent and itching to contribute to a revival.

Barring full open-sourcing of the code, I would just ask that you appoint someone(s) who is a well-known and well-respected member of the community, such as DeanTwo, in place of Andar Aevaneur.

[Deantwo]

Wonderful news. Good to see you posting something here too.

Looking forward to see what the community can do with the project!

[Sleepy]

Hi Haxus, 
Always good to hear from you, I hope you are doing well.

Very exciting to hear that multiplayer Hazeron is officially in the works again! I know it's something that a lot of us have been hoping for for a while, and I'm very excited to get back into playing. I have a few friends that have been waiting to be able to play together so that I can show them the ropes and we can build out an empire.

I will second some of Norway's concerns, though. With the work on OpenShores, the community has been pretty hyped up to have an open-source Hazeron server that anyone can contribute to, fork, and spin up themselves. It's a bit disheartening to hear that our ability to contribute may be limited, and it isn't clear whether the compiled server executables will be available for people to run themselves. Some clarification on what we should be expecting would definitely be appreciated.

Also, I do worry that a closed-source official server will take the steam out of any attempt at an open one. I believe that open source is the best possible option for keeping Hazeron alive into the future. We know how much work Hazeron represents, and preserving this game in its full MMO form into the future is important. I don't feel great about that preservation if it all rests on one Github repo owner staying active, or on a single "official" server staying online. I'd like to be able to keep showing people this game in 10, 20 years.

For what it's worth, I'll also back up Norway and Expert in saying that Andar is a complete unknown to the community that has been putting in a lot of the work so far, however you want to take that. From our point of view, he appeared out of nowhere and made a pretty bad first impression.

(New account because I couldn't recover my old one - used to be "Kiwi")

[Tipper]

I'm extremely excited to see that Hazeron multiplayer development has resumed, me and my friend have longed for another chance to play Hazeron together for YEEAAARRSS 

---

It's especially exciting with the opprotunity to allow community contribution through the use of GitHub. Like many others in the thread, I think this is a step in the right direction. 

And a handful of talented players have shown great promise and effective skills at tweaking, upgrading, and fixing systems within the game. I also know that your work on this truly unique game has inspired a handful of other talented players to start looking into creating games inspired by yours. To both of these groups of people, they would immensely benefit from being able to see "under the hood" of the game - either to be a second pair of eyes to resolve issues or to be inspired in their own pursuits.

I personally have been inspired in other ways (your game ignited my passion for space in my teens before college, ultimately leading me to help humans return to the moon by working on the Orion spacecraft), but it's important to understand the depth of impacts your game has made, despite how few have actually seen it. In that sense, I think that allowing others to be more directly inspired by your game by having the ability to view the code at their liesure and take nuggets or truckloads of knowledge from your work is something that would benefit everyone and potentially allow the game to effect even more people.

---

Also I noticed the last multiplayer build of Shores of Hazeron still had patents. I completely removed them from Hazeron Starship because they were dull and boring. Do you want them completely removed from Shores of Hazeron?

As for the patents system, I didn't particularly like the implementation of it. That said, I do think there should be some kind of forcing function to drive you to explore to find the Q250+ of every different type of resource for your empire though. It's awesome to have a whole world dedicated to farming Q255 animal carcases so your citizens can have literally the universe's best meat and leather.

[Zensras]

Hey Haxus, Glad to see you are well and doing okay! It's good to hear from you once more.
I am so happy to see the shores possibly make a return, as it is nostalgic for me, and I met some of my best friends there that I still speak to this day.


I'm going to second what both Kiwi and Norway have said.  Andar is a very unknown person.  He joined the Discord community under a brand-new account and gave the community stories that seem to imply that he was under Toucans or associated with some of the people in Toucan, but people I have spoken to can't vouch for or verify him for the name he gave us. This includes people like Jack Katogh and "THE FORCE" (I forget his hazeron name, but he was with us towards the beginning). He also spoke about granting DeanTwo a similar role to his when he spoke to the community after questions were raised. He has not been seen in Discord since. My question is why hide?

There are many people who wish to help with development.  I wish I could help myself, but I'm not good with programming. Most of my knowledge is Lua-based and C++ from working on stuff for other games and helping troubleshoot. Game-wise, I have personally been working with a publisher called Apogee Entertainment, which is a reboot (with the original owner involved) of the original Apogee that designed games like Duke Nukem and so forth, as QA.  I have been involved with several projects, several being shipped on Steam.

Please forgive me if I have overstepped here. I wish nothing more than for Shores to live again, and in a way that would be future-proof and with your approval.

[keyofdoor]

Always good to hear from you Haxus!

It's extremely exciting to think about being able to see another update, doubly so with the prospect of experiencing them online again. On patents, I think it's better that they aren't in the game; whether that be in single player or multiplayer. 

On the topic of the repository. To echo some of the sentiments written by others, Andar's introduction last week, and the subsequent discussions, were rough to say the least. Based on what I know, he isn't trustworthy and if anyone, besides you, should be in charge of the repository it's DeanTwo or Oni. It's likely that any confusion in the community will be resolved in the coming days and weeks regardless. 

I remember some mention that you (rightfully) want a stake in any future project that uses the Hazeron code. I think the community is unanimous in thinking that any revenue generated by any such work should go to you, as well as giving proper credit and things like a free account. I agree with Sleepy that some clarification here would be appreciated, what are your wishes and concerns with such projects? If you don't mind sharing. 

Thank you for taking the time to post here, I hope everything is well.