2020-11-16 Steam Update, Primeval Nerf

[Haxus]

Steam Update
The solo playable Hazeron Starship is being tested now. All features are complete. There are some things that remain to be tested, to insure the story can be played through to the end.

The solo version uses a data file created by querying the Shores of Hazeron database. It stores some basic stuff that usually comes from the database, such as pirate empires. It also stores building and spacecraft blueprints published by me.

After the update today, I will post a new space station design, in G drive and rocket versions. It is a usable simple design that will be included in the solo play data file. It will appear in the exchange as Del Rey Station - GDrive and Del Rey Station - Rocket.

The release date on Steam is still somewhere around the first of December. I'm not quite ready to make the "coming soon" announcement. Time has been slipping away very quickly and it always feels like there are a million things to do, though my Silverwill list is pretty short.

Primeval Nerf
Primeval world is gone from Shores of Hazeron. It grew up and became Hazeron Starship.

Jurisdiction Indication
When placing buildings, the cursor now shows the name of the city jurisdiction, if any. This shows which city contains the building about to be placed.

Child Spotted
I spotted a child and their hit points were reported as 46/26. This bug was fixed.

Building Design Origin
Previously, the largest possible building site required that the origin be at the center. This was because design limits were defined as maximum absolute coordinate values, in each direction. This created an unfortunate constraint.

The origin of the design is the insertion point when it is placed on the terrain. It determines the altitude of placement. Because of that, it is often desirable to have the insertion point on the road edge of the site, so its altitude works when placed next to an existing road.

The designer was changed to allow the origin anywhere within the site's 3D extents. The maximum size of a site was not changed. This should not have a negative effect on any existing blueprints.

Building Patents
A bug was fixed that caused buildings to not post their patents to the empire under certain conditions. I noticed this when I built a second electronics factory and it had no patents to do anything, yet the first electronics factory had patents. It turned out those patents had not been recorded with the empire for everyone else to use.

Landing System Snafu
It is very frustrating to activate the landing system on your ship only to be told that there are no empty parking spaces.

Landing systems will now replace a parked vehicle with an incoming vehicle, when an empty parking spot cannot be found.

The parked vehicle is replaced at the moment the landing vehicle is recovered.

The replaced vehicle is lost.

A parked vehicle will not be replaced if there is anything or anyone in it.

Vehicle Transporter Snafu
Similar to the landing system snafu, vehicle transporters will sometimes be useless because all the vehicle parking spots are full.

The solution was not quite as straight forward as the landing system. In this case, the parked vehicle is removed at the moment the vehicle transporter is activated.

The replaced vehicle is lost, even if the caller does not enter the vehicle transporter portal.

Transport to Fence?
Fences are no longer listed on the list of transporter destinations. They were never supposed to be there. A bug allowed them to appear there.

Station Cargo
I am the emperor, aboard an empire space station. I am in its chain of command but I cannot see its cargo listed on the cargo manifest.

This was fixed.

Indigenous Species
The indigenous species of every unexplored planet is my own. That means that as long as I explore previously unexplored space, I will only encounter my own species. This has always been the rule in the multi player game. You knew when you crossed paths with another player.

Unfortunately, this does not work for the solo game. There are few other players to seed the galaxy with their species. A solo player can have up to six avatars, just like the multiplayer game. That is not enough.

There is a table of distribution for the pirate empires, used to determine where they live and in what proportion, throughout the game universe. Each pirate empire has a different sentient species.

From now on, when an indigenous encounter is triggered on a world with no established sentient species, there is a 20% chance the species will be that of a pirate empire, rather than your own. The pirate empire selected is based on that table of pirate empire distribution.

[Rockinsince87]

Thread Review (Newest First)
Steam Update
The solo playable Hazeron Starship is being tested now. All features are complete.

Excited! I wish you would tease us with the features a bit. Perhaps a roadmap of planned features too? 

Primeval Nerf

Primeval world is gone from Shores of Hazeron. It grew up and became Hazeron Starship.

Makes sense.

Building Design Origin
Previously, the largest possible building site required that the origin be at the center. This was because design limits were defined as maximum absolute coordinate values, in each direction. This created an unfortunate constraint.

The origin of the design is the insertion point when it is placed on the terrain. It determines the altitude of placement. Because of that, it is often desirable to have the insertion point on the road edge of the site, so its altitude works when placed next to an existing road.

Awesome! That sounds like it will go a long ways to better looking cities. 

Landing System Snafu

It is very frustrating to activate the landing system on your ship only to be told that there are no empty parking spaces.

Sounds good, although once you get transporters does anyone really land anymore?  :) . I suppose shuttlecraft from the mothership, so thank you!

Indigenous Species

The indigenous species of every unexplored planet is my own. 

From now on, when an indigenous encounter is triggered on a world with no established sentient species, there is a 20% chance the species will be that of a pirate empire, rather than your own. The pirate empire selected is based on that table of pirate empire distribution.

So...does this mean we can encounter friendly AI too? or AI that can become friendly via trade, jobs, etc?

[Antares]

Hooly crap, awesome! Looking forward to a footage of it. :D

[zephar]

Interesting, so are you thinking of offering the game at one price with solo mode and then an additional optional they can pay a monthly fee for the online?

That to me would be a unique and great way to go about it. I think only wurm has done something similar. Myself I love SOH but just don't have enough time for the MMO version. Some sort of SOLO mode with ways to join a couple friends to your solo game would really be ideal for myself, but even a solo only game id pay for.

[Haxus]

Here is some information about what is happening with Shores of Hazeron.

Shores of Hazeron will return to being a monthly fee via PayPal. It's not a top priority at the moment. I don't mind the game being free for a few months, to smooth over the indecisiveness of changing gears, switching to Patreon and back.

There were aspects of Patreon that I really liked. However, in the long run, it is not a practical business strategy to fund expensive servers using donations.

The "ton of work" needed for the Steam release is finished. It has been submitted to Steamworks for their review.

I am approaching Steam with a bit of caution. I'll wait until they are satisfied with the software before posting the two week 'coming soon' announcement. More than anything, that will decide the actual release date on Steam. I'm not in a hurry; would rather fix bugs.

Steam creates a valuable cushion between players who want to try the game and players who like it enough to play on line. Steam could easily produce more players than the servers can handle. Starting out solo, the servers don't have to handle that wave at all.

The servers only have to handle the fraction of the solo players who choose to play on line. By then, income from solo players could pay for an upgrade to the servers.

There are now two game programs:

• Shores of Hazeron is the online MMO game, available exclusively at Hazeron.com. "The MMO Sandbox Universe"
  
• Hazeron Starship is the solo play game, available exclusively on Steam. "The Sandbox Universe"
  

Both products are sold entirely separately. Buying one does not buy any amount of the other. Plainly put, buying Hazeron Starship on Steam does not entitle the purchaser to any on line time in Shores of Hazeron. Purchases of Hazeron Starship are subject to agreements with Steam, including their commission; purchases of Shores of Hazeron are not.

Hazeron Starship is strictly solo. There is no option to play limited multiplayer with anybody else.

Both programs are built from the same source code. They are exactly identical in every way, except for identifying graphics, and features strictly related to solo play vs on line play. Most project code is in sub projects that build libraries and DLLs. By sharing those objects, the projects to build the final EXEs are quite small, only a few files. That saves a lot of build time.

Each program starts with a page for selecting/creating up to six avatars. In solo play, those six avatars all exist in the same persistent universe. You can switch between them, just like the on line game, even breed them to make highborns and demiavatars.

The universe is generated in exactly the same way as the on line game. It is no smaller in the solo game. All galaxies are present in all dimensions. Details of solar systems and resources are not the same as the on line game, because the seed value for the universe is based on the time of its creation.

The story engine functions in solo just like on line. Targoss will greet your new avatar to show you the ropes. Gagarin will teach you to fly a space rocket. The Relic story starts on cue, though I haven't tested it to the end yet.

It's all there in solo. It looks and feels just like the on line game, except the on screen widget never shows any network activity (the pink and blue thing in the top right corner). I don't know how much you can build before your computer begins to bog down. A little (very little) more work is needed to implement atom manager threads, so that work would be distributed across multiple CPUs.

Hazeron Starship is fully integrated into the build process now; it is part of the family. From now on, Hazeron Starship will evolve and grow and get updates right along with Shores of Hazeron.

Work now is focused on bug fixes and minor improvements that affect all versions, more or less equally. I'd like the Hazeron Starship release to be as bug free as possible; it will get first priority, at least until it is actually released on Steam.

[Vectorus]

The more I think about it, the more I realise this was a brilliant solution. I hope it works out as well as we're all hoping it will.

Would it make sense to dial down some of the research and shipbuilding times for the Solo game? There's no chance of getting help from more advanced players, as well as less to do and see while you wait for timers to tick down.

[Haxus]

dial down some of the research and shipbuilding times for the Solo game?

I considered that, especially for warp drive technology. I'll probably do it.

[Haxus]

On indigenous species, it just means you could encounter species that are the same as pirates in that area of the galaxy. They will still be tent-dwelling indigenous tribes.

Pirates do build bases and you can encounter them. Unfortunately they are unfinished. Only the two lowest level (easiest) pirate empires are complete so they are the only ones you encounter atm; they build small bases. To finish the other pirate empires, I need to design their ships and buildings. It's a time consuming process.

[Vectorus]

Interesting. So how are you handling offline time for the solo game? Obviously, a huge part of SoH is waiting for processes to tick down, resources to tick up and spaceships and buildings to be built. Cities will probably need to keep producing and shipyards need to keep churning even when the player shuts down his computer, otherwise it creates an unreasonable demand...on his electricity bill, for a start! 

But a simple system where the process delivers its results on the target date, whether the game is loaded or not, is probably not enough, as processes need to repeat as well as just finish, populations need to grow etc. You probably have a solution implemented already, I'm just curious what it might be!

[Haxus]

You probably have a solution implemented already

Time stops when the game stops.

Manufacturing processes, including spacecraft processes, are based on a scheduled completion time. If you start a process to build a ship that takes an hour, then close the game for an hour, the ship will be completed when you next run the game.

As far as churning out resources, you'd have to leave the computer running to get that.