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[Shadowlord]

He could, at least, open donations to fund running costs by the players and leave it running. It might not work... but at least give the opportunity.

To be honest, I don't think Shores of Hazeron required a very big infrastructure... I might be wrong, of course.

Edit: By the way, speaking about the code. Do you know what engine did he use to make SoH?

It did. It used a ridiculous amount of resources server-side and rather than redesigning it to not be horrifyingly inefficient (after several rounds of attempting to optimize it, with minimal effect), Haxus bought some expensive servers to handle it (and yet moving to those didn't seem to make it run any better - it just made it bleed money faster).

[TheBronzePickle]

Frankly, from the sounds of it, the source code is probably worthless. The game would be far better off remade from scratch than trying to fix what is basically a game with a foundation of bad code.

[Retropunch]

Although I never really played it (although I remember a friend used too a long time back), that sucks for people who did. I really think it's unfair when developers shut down a game when there are people playing it. Sure, you're providing it for free and you made it and whatever, but there's a point where it stops being yours and starts being the community's.

I wouldnt call it unfair. It's their game, they have NO obligation to pay all the costs to maintain it.
It sucks that he didnt release the source, though.

Yeah, I was really meaning when developers ditch a game with no future way for the player base to keep playing at all - obviously they're not under any obligation to keep paying to keep it alive. 

[Akura]

Frankly, from the sounds of it, the source code is probably worthless. The game would be far better off remade from scratch than trying to fix what is basically a game with a foundation of bad code.

Yeah, I'd figure the design docs would be better than the source code. If Haxus even kept/created those.

[Gabeux]

The game shutting down was very sad. I was checking its devlog every month or so to check if the dev made it playable, and today I saw the homepage saying that its no more.

I have played and left Hazeron 4 or 5 times, in different times (and years) of my life, and at least its concept is one I always wanted to play. I remember thinking "finally someone made something like this. Let's hope they follow through!".
And I remember being in a battle with one Bay 12 empire against some evil empire, it was pretty awesome and something I won't forget it easily.

But you really could not expect Hazeron to be successfull. When one bug was fixed, ten others were made. When a gamebreaking bug was fixed, 3 server breaking bugs and 3 game breaking bugs were made. Constant designs and redesigns, bad implementations and refactors..that's what I felt/thought about the development process.
Plus the eternal lag of doom that never got attention while new bugged features were being implemented.

I do hope a game like this comes up. If someone have any recommendations, I'd like to hear it since Hazeron left a sad empty slot in my watchlist.

 

[Graknorke]

Even if in itself it wasn't too fantastically done (lag problems, little consideration of community feedback, somewhat clunky mechanics), it's a good proof of concept that things like this can happen and work.

[Gabeux]

Even if in itself it wasn't too fantastically done (lag problems, little consideration of community feedback, somewhat clunky mechanics), it's a good proof of concept that things like this can happen and work.

True. It's one of those games in which its obscurity, weirdness, mysterious atmosphere (in which you never know which bug will bite your ass), but great concept ends up turning it into a very personal experience.
Here's hoping from a properly designed, developed and funded Hazeron-like game. :')

[Idranel]

Frankly, from the sounds of it, the source code is probably worthless. The game would be far better off remade from scratch than trying to fix what is basically a game with a foundation of bad code.

The rendering engine being capable of dealing with sub meter precision over the scale of a solar system is pretty neat as are the nested frames of reference and sphere coordinate systems for planets. You'd have to jump through a few hoops modifying an off the shelf engine to achieve that but its been done before for example with KSP and Unity.

That and maybe the galactic position-based sky box rendering...

Everything else seemed highly inefficient.


IMHO The project shutting down before delivering an actual game (i.e. something that isnt likely to turn into a tedious second job) was inevitable.

Most of the meta game was about knowing how to exploit bugs...

[Shooer]

After a point they stop being bugs and become features.

Why did he have to nerf glue guns anyway?

[Shadowlord]

He also made it so you couldn't fly helicopters into space. Helicopters were better rockets than rockets. 

[Pwnzerfaust]

Whaaaat, Hazeron is gone? Are you shitting me?

[Idranel]

After a point they stop being bugs and become features.

Why did he have to nerf glue guns anyway?

Glue guns were fun but really obvious and well known.

I really enjoyed spamming fire control consoles so that as a group the npcs manning those could spam the fire button just like players would. Of course this relied on a timing offset so any restart of the server would require manual intervention.

Combined with power plant units having less mass than weapon bay units you'd get significantly more DPS per weight by having a relatively small weapon bay and large reactors with automatic spamming capabilities.

[Shadowlord]

The best thing was when I was looking through the controls, and noticed an alternate item use control, and bound it to a key so I could try it, and went around trying it with different items on different things until I discovered that it took components out of ship systems (including hull), and the component corresponded to the tool used (the same as for repairing) - and that you could use it anywhere on any ship, without being flagged as an enemy. This was completely undocumented and unknown (as far as I was aware) at the time, but the first thing I did was tell everyone else (in the IRC channel anyways) in HazCom* about it because it was just hugely useful. (It was possible to fly a ship to a planet to make a new station, and pull a grav coil out of your ship to build your space station, for example, then pull another out to repair your ship, because the repair logic was such that it allowed repairing as long as the city had one of each required item of sufficient TL)

It was also useful to sabotage gravity drives, dropping stations or ships onto planets or into a sun - until Haxus locked it down, anyways. But since you had to float outside someone's engines and click hundreds or thousands of times to get every single grav coil in most ships, it wasn't really practical for anything more than small ships or stations (stations were easy, very few grav coils). Plus anyone who didn't put their grav units in their engine walls wasn't vulnerable to sabotage from outside, but not doing it made your ship less space and mass efficient.

You could also easily sabotage life support by taking parts out until it hit 0% (there being only a few life support units on a ship, and you being able to pull components from all of them from any one, this took very little time as long as you didn't get killed by troops). Sabotaging life support kept people from respawning in or berthing to that ship...

* HazCom, the "Hazeron Commonwealth" was an alliance of all the major empires at the time, which basically united the galaxy in peace until most left in a mass exodus.

[Idranel]

* HazCom, the "Hazeron Commonwealth" was an alliance of all the major empires at the time, which basically united the galaxy in peace until most left in a mass exodus.

Where peace actually meant full cooperation to achieve the highest efficiency for trolling drama queens among the playerbase.

[Shadowlord]

Just so.