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[Moogie]

There was an extremely laggy indie MMORPG where you started on a planet (randomly generated, I think?) and had to build up a colony with factories producing materials so that you could design and build your own spaceship and then go visit other planets to set up trading routes between them. Full PVP, from what I remember, and the planets had randomly generated creatures wandering around.

I can't for the life of me remember its name. Anyone remember what I'm referring to? It was crusty, low-budget 3D graphics, and the servers had horrendous lag that took them years to fix, if they ever did.

[JWNoctis]

Shores of Hazeron.

Good memories. Their spaceship customization system was neat, to me.

Made me wish more games had something like that.

EDIT: Was actually going to say Havens of Hazeron. Memory goes faulty in mysterious ways.

[Moogie]

That's the one! Sad to see it was shut down, but apparently they're making it singleplayer now? Is that still happening? Hard to tell what info is current.

[Shooer]

The Dev went off the deep end again and took everything down.  Doubt it will come back this time.

[None]

Remember, remember, the Starborne Dominion, eh?

[JWNoctis]

The Dev went off the deep end again and took everything down.  Doubt it will come back this time.

Actually had no idea of that, but given the kind of stuff that indie devs tend to face these days, it's probably good to let go.

But yes, migrate it to a modern engine, cut a few kitchen-sink features, add a Elite-like economics module, and it might do well.

[Paul]

Remember, remember, the Starborne Dominion, eh?

Haha, that was the empire I made. Surprised people still remember it.

This was one of those crazy ambitious games that never really got over the hurdles that held it down. The later updates made some weird design choices too. I never did get into the newer ship designer, but I'm not sure if I actually saw the latest iteration of it or if I just happened to come back when it was a buggy mess. The old designer was a lot of fun, though - I spent hours designing ships.

[Akura]

Damn. I'm probably one of the only people who actually learned how to use the designer. Last thing I made was a small vertical farm that provided two farm processes(required 2km² land area for each iirc) yet still used small enough land area that it didn't trigger overpop penalties on one of those tiny planetoids(in which 4km² caused a massive penalty). Since said planetoid had >200ql wheat.


Seriously, though, if I had the skills(I don't), I'd probably try to remake this game myself. Certainly have some ideas on how it would work, but no way to translate those ideas in to programming stuff.

[Sensei]

Man, just dropping in to say shores of hazeron was the shit. I think it was often fun... in spite of what the developer wanted, though. And it was always groaning under its own weight, from a technical perspective. It was never going to work well without a ground-up rebuild and for all the (20?) years it took to make in the first place, that wasn't going to happen. There's definitely more people with the know-how to pull off something like Shores effectively now compared to back when it started, but I still don't know if anyone's going to show up wanting to make a project of this scale. It probably wouldn't be free, that's for sure.

Not unlike our own Dwarf Fortress, Shores of Hazeron was only able to be made because its sole developer Haxus was at least a little crazy. It's a one in a million thing for a project like this to be made and it might never be replicated.

[se5a]

The roads used to drive me absolutely nuts.

[xaritscin]

we will have to wait and see how Hazeron Starship pans out on steam. but in honest, Hazeron's biggest development issue was that Haxus wanted to work on his game alone instead of leveraging some of it to capable people, he probably has quite the programming knowledge but for a game like Hazeron to modernize it required having an actual development team who could tackle that 20 years mess he created.

-The old designer could have been easily replaced with a Voxel Style one like in Avorion, which would have given enough space for players to design unique hulls and buildings without having to learn a
complete modelling program workings for it

-With a  proper programming and graphics team they could have come up with an alien designer that could at least match the old SPORE creature desginer to a degree

-Could have hired some people to properly port the servers into a much better database system or whatever is required to simulate the galaxy without going on limbo all the time

just those 3 along would have been enough of a kickstart for pulling some more users into the game.

[Chiefwaffles]

Hazeron being fun despite Haxus’ intentions really is the best way to put it. He had a very specific game in mind and the Shores of Hazeron that we knew and played was pretty much just a coincidence that a stepping stone towards Haxus’ Ultimate Game was fun for players.

God, the designer stuff though… I spent way too much energy on its forum arguing in favor of the old designer. That was around when I stopped playing for good. A fairly intuitive if clunky ship designer is leagues better than what’s effectively custom 3D modeling CAD software.

And this is hearsay but didn’t Haxus turn out to be fairly… opinionated regarding COVID?

[Shooer]

And this is hearsay but didn’t Haxus turn out to be fairly… opinionated regarding COVID?

Yeah, he did.  It was those opinions that he reasoned to shut down hazeron the latest time.

He just had the weirdest obsession with things; like his distrust of FIAT currencies is why he reasoned that in the future game world with "effectively infinite resources" (his words) that people would want a
physical commodity backed currency.  Not even a currency backed by something limited like say time or energy, no in the future we go back to gold.

Just ignore all the technological options we could have to control/monitor/make/set the value of a currency as a government in the far future were a single mine could produce enough metal to make several space ships a day.

Or the better for a game option of; Ignore making money, money just exists, we don't need extra steps to make it exist, why are we in charge of making it.

[Sirus]

Man, I miss Hazeron. For a short time it was one of my favorite games despite its obvious jank.

Then it started going off the deep end and I bailed. Still, there hasn't really been anything else that scratched that colony-building ship-designing dying-to-horrific-procedural-monsters itch.

[Paul]

Hahaha. Oh man, the guy really went off the deep end after I quit the game. I just browsed the forum for a few minutes out of curiosity and saw the thread about sex. He added nudity and sex to the game right before working toward a steam release, giving his steam listing an adult rating stating that it contains sex.

That's just special.