Open Letter to Haxus from French Empire

[OnePercent]

My deepest sympathies, Haxus.

I think a lot of modern games have raised my expectations of functionality in general even for young solo devs who can throw 80 hour weeks into game development.

I think it has also swayed the opinions of others, too, especially when they are not entirely aware that you lead a busy life ourside your passion. Reading your response now, suddenly I feel a deep sense of priviledge playing your game.

I also don't believe that this thread and OP is forsaking you either, Haxus, but I'm glad that you are a bit transparent.

[resonkinetic]

I appreciate what Hazeron is. There's literally no other game that matches its depth in starting from scratch as a customized species to developing a complete space empire from a first-person perspective. It's why I keep coming back.

And as cumbersome as the designer currently is (which has "potential" to be more usable), I literally stared at Spore and Elite Dangerous in my Steam inventory and thought about how much I wanted to make my own fighter and look at its interior as I fly to a colony of my own design (and that's what I intend to do over the course of the next week lol)

SoH just has the perfect blend of everything I want, and I know some day it will be easier to use.

[OriginalGangstaStaines]

Recently I took some time off to be with my daughter. She came to quarantine here after getting out of prison. Now that the corona-hoax is fading away, she has returned to her home and job. I value the time we spent together.

As someone who has been working on the front line of the coronavirus pandemic, don't treat it as a hoax.
The virus is highly transmissible and absolutely will kill the respiratory/immuno-compromised and old in large numbers if they are exposed.

It's not fading away at all, another 100,000 will be dead in the Anglosphere by the time August is finished.

The UK/US isn't lead by humans. Ultimate decision making comes from the market.
Those humans don't have absolute power to make decisions. They are simply the high priests of capital. All they can do is divine the will of the markets/capital and relay that to the public, and the market (which has no human conscience at that scale) has spoken. The public has simply recoiled in disgust from the inevitable decision that we have made collectively through the market to sacrifice thousands of people per day to maintain stock values and a veneer of normalcy. -- all because we didn't make the decision to contain the virus more robustly in the initial stages.

The high priests of the market say sacrifice the poor.
And we have decided to ignore that because it's horrific and unavoidable.


This is completely unlike countries in which politicians have supreme authority beyond the market, in which coronavirus was quickly immediately and solidly contained and eradicated... because humans decided to suspend economic activity temporarily in order to secure long term well-being of their countries.

[tophattingson]

The UK and the US have both engaged in extremely destructive lockdowns, which will lead to both the short term misery of the population through the eradication of their human rights under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and long term misery in the aftermath as the lockdown turns into economic catastrophe, and a general health catastrophe in areas as varied as obesity, cancer and mental health. You have decided to ignore these consequences, to sacrifice the mentally ill and to kill cancer patients who may otherwise be treated.

In contrast, Taiwan, Japan, and Sweden to name a few have not carried out a lockdown policy. None of these countries are "Anglosphere".

Your claim about the Anglosphere refusing to stringently oppose Coronavirus for economic reasons is false. It is not the Anglosphere that pursued this strategy, but rather countries such as Taiwan or Sweden. Anglosphere countries have been no less stringent than the norm. Your claim about the Anglosphere being the worst hit is also wrong - the worst hit non-microstate in deaths per capita terms is Belgium. Furthermore, there remains no evidence that lockdowns are associated with reducing deaths per capita from Coronavirus.

Your support for totalitarian measures, and your complaints about market processes, are remarkably revealing.

This is not to say that treating the existence of a virus itself as a hoax is valid: that is obviously wrong. However, the political defences of lockdown, in particular claims to be "just following the science", could be considered a hoax.

[Haxus]

Haxus doing Shores of Hazeron.

[Haxus]

It's not fading away at all, another 100,000 will be dead in the Anglosphere by the time August is finished.

In March, they were predicting 2M dead in the US by July.

I think actual deaths are 5% of that number. That was accompanied by a coincidental drop in seasonal flu and pneumonia deaths. So 5% could be overstated.

I'm not denying the existence of the virus. It just doesn't seem to be the killer that everybody made it out to be.

Perhaps there was a larger agenda behind killing the economy.

[Haxus]

My deepest sympathies...

Haha what for?

I was just rambling, to paint a more accurate picture of my development environment. Perhaps people have a picture in their minds of Haxus, with a team of programmers and artists, jamming away in an office park somewhere, eating Tums like candy because of deadlines and stress. That just isn't my world (any more).

I look forward to hiring an assistant some day, perhaps growing a team again, but income from the game would have to warrant it. So far it's all money down the drain since payments from players have never once covered the monthly server bill. It helps a lot, to offset the cost, but this project has never made money; au contraire.

I considered chunking a few hundred thousand into the project, to cover costs, but I guess I'm not that convinced that it will ever be a success. The user interface is pretty complicated to try to do on an iPad. PC sales have steadily declined year after year for something like twenty years now. SoH may have missed its window of opportunity by being too big, taking too long to develop.

[QuakeIV]

You should consider releasing the source code if you ever decide you are fed up. Not that I will ever figure out how to get it to build all the way (most complicated projects have very complicated build systems, the number of people who can get linux to build without something like yocto for instance is extremely few) but I personally would be rather interested in looking at it at least, given the chance.

[Haxus]

I personally would be rather interested in looking at it at least

Thank you. I appreciate that.

It is a lot of code and I think it is well written, for the most part. Some of the older parts were kind of embarrassing, to think about someone seeing them, but those are all gone now.

The build process is almost entirely automated. It's all handled by a make file on Linux and a .bat file on Windows. The knowledge to perform all the individual steps is embodied in the Makefile.

I would publish the source code today if I could figure out how people make money with open source. SoH has been a huge investment in time and materials. I'm not ready to just give that away. If I work on it until I die, it will probably go with me.

[Deantwo]

I would publish the source code today if I could figure out how people make money with open source. SoH has been a huge investment in time and materials. I'm not ready to just give that away. If I work on it until I die, it will probably go with me.

As far as I know there is no way to make money from open-source. If there was, everyone would do it and never keep anything secret ever again.

I am not sure what you personally would get out of making the game open-source, aside from having more eyes and manpower to help with the coding. I don't think I have ever heard of any open-source MMO games, since it would require a lot more of the game to be based on server-side logic to disallow versions of the client that are made to cheat.

A few others games have like a "developer tier" option, where you pay extra for the game in order to have access to the source code and be allowed to propose code changes. For example via a managed GitHub private project, were you (and others) can review and comment on any proposed code changes before you accept or deny them. But the one example I have with a company doing this is not a subscription/pay-to-play game, so I don't know how you would reliably do it with Hazeron. I also don't know what sort of licencing would be involved for people that have access to the source code.

You would probably still have the server center bills to pay, unless another solution for that is found. I know others have mentioned many alternatives to server hosting or cloud hosting, but I personally don't know anything about the subject and can't say anything about what is better or cheaper.

Personally I would love to see the code too. I might not be an expert at C++ programming, but I have found and fixed bugs in a number of open-source projects.