Shores of Hazeron - Latest Software Update

Latest Software Update

This page announces updates to the Shores of Hazeron game software. Go directly to the downloads page if you want to download the software. If you do not have a login account, you will need to create a login account before you can access the downloads page.

Server
Grid

5/17/2013

What's new in this update?

Server Crash

Fixed a bug that caused a lot of servers to crash last night.

5/16/2013

What's new in this update?

Orientation In Space Bug	Fixed a bug that caused your body to be rotated/oriented with feet toward the planet when EVA in orbit. This was confusing when exiting a spacecraft in orbit. Your body is not supposed to orient to anything when EVA.
Wormhole Travel	Fixed some errors with navigator AI when traveling to a system via wormholes. Navigator no longer wants to park the ship next to the sun when you emerge from the final wormhole.
Direct Travel	A related bug caused the navigator to continuously reposition the destination waypoint near the sun when traveling direct to a solar system.
Stairs Broken in Ship Tactical View	Top-down view aboard a ship was not displaying stairs correctly. They were appearing as a large icon instead. Fixed.
Road Bugs at 180 E/W Seam	Fixed bugs with roads wrapping around the globe in the wrong direction, particularly when the road segment straddled the 180 degree E/W seam. This error appeared on the map on the Locator window and it also appeared in the globe surface texture as seen from orbit.
Pirates Call Too Far Away	Pirates no longer call out until they are within sensor range or visual range (about 32km) of the target ship.
Mounted Troop Mounts Turret	Mounted a troop. Troop went to a turret and entered it. I was still mounted. Fixed. AI will no longer go to stations when mounted.
Load Building Design Takes a Long Time	Loading a building design from a file while in the on-line designer was reported to take a long time, 5 to 10 minutes. I made some changes to the way building and spacecraft designs are sent to the server. Try again after you get the client updates.
Cannot Change Building Material in Designer	Building material changes were not working in the on-line design studio. Fixed.
Building Collisions Incorrect When Material Changed in Designer	Fixed. Building path data now updates as a result of material changes in design studio.
Building Collisions Incorrect When Building Constructed	Fixed. Building path data now updates properly when a building story is completed.
Building Path Cache	Building path cache had a bug that caused it to select the wrong path data sometimes, resulting in collisions where no building stories were constructed, or conversely, no collisions where buildings stories had been constructed.
Server Startup Bug	Finally fixed a bug that caused a scene server to sometimes start up, check in with its manager server, then quietly shut down. I say finally because this elusive bit of behavior has been around for a long time; finally trapped it in a debugger.

5/10/2013

What's new in this update? There is not much in this update due to welcome, though unexpected, houseguests this week.

Crew Won't Land	Fixed a bug that caused crew to fail to land on a planet when given the "Land on Planet" order. The symptom was them simply circling in place in orbit, instead of heading down to the surface.
"Land on Planet" Lag	The "Land on Planet" order was causing considerable lag on certain worlds. That should not be a problem now.
Shore Buildings Under Water	Buildings on the shoreline were appearing just below the water level. This was fixed and all existing shore buildings were fixed to be slightly above sea level.

5/2/2013

What's new in this update?

Can't Place Items in Designer	U-turn stairs, light poles, and troop stations could not be placed in the on-line designer. Off-line designer worked fine. Fixed.
Design Grid Movement Constraint	Design grid is no longer constrained to the limits of the building or ship design. It will now go above and below the allowed deck limits. In building designs, the grid turns red when above or below the limits. Previously, the grid would not go outside the limits, which prevented removal of objects that found their way onto invalid decks.
Cargo Transfer Range Error	Fixed a bug when calculating transfer range between spacecraft. This prevented a ship from transferring cargo/officers to a station even though it was inside the trade range of the station. It was also failing to consider the transporter range of the target station. This could have affected an officer's ability to trade with cities while near a station.
Cargo Transfer Crash	A crash was reported when transferring an officer to a station. I could not reproduce the crash but I did harden the code against unexpected changes, like the officer departing the scene because the station was far away.
Building Model Cache Error	Building model caches were incorrect. They will regenerate themselves; you don't need to do anything. The symptom was seen as incorrect wall shapes for the building material in use.
Switch Mail With Character Switch	The switch character UI now has a checkbox to switch the current mail recipient also. Previously, switching characters did not change the current mail recipient.
Bad Polygons At Railings	Fixed a calculation error at one of the vertexes of railing posts in buidlings. This sometimes caused long spears of polygon to stick out of buildings.
Compass North Arrow Hard to Distinguish	The north arrow of the compass is now red to help distinguish it when the letters are too small to read.
Render Memory Corruption	Found some large OpenGL objects that were not being managed correctly. They would slowly consume more and more memory until something catastrophic happened, such as severe graphics corruption or program crash or even total desktop meltdown and system crash.
Animals Spawn Between Buildings	Animal encounters no longer occur in areas with significant buildings/roads. They will spawn where there are few buildings/roads, and where there are none at all.
Guard Tower Size	Guard Tower is now allowed to go up to 4 stories, instead of only 2. The building site for them is also a few meters larger. This won't make existing towers invalid even if they now overlap something. The terrain tessellation in the overlap area could be incorrect, however. If an overlapping guard tower causes a problem, just delete it and rebuild it.
No Antiflux In Rings	Fixed a resource bug that prevented antiflux from being harvested from rings or gas giants.
No Rings Around Any Planets	Fixed a but that prevented rings from being generated around planets. This was broken when the new type of planets was added. Because of this fix, current systems that contain the new type planets will not regenerate the same if they decay due to inactivity, even if they still don't have any rings after that. After a system has been regenerated with the current fix, they will regenerate consistently next time.
Church Windows	Church windows now have a stained-glass window texture.

4/26/2013

What's new in this update?

I can't believe a whole month has passed since the last update. This is actually a pretty big change. After a lot of long hard hours pounding at the keyboard, I wasn't quite ready to post it. The server crash this morning gave me the push to go ahead and do it anyway. Cross your fingers...

Spacecraft Interior Lighting	Fixed a bug with the lighting of spacecraft interior walls that caused them to not be illuminated by your personal light or the light of vehicles. This made spacecraft interiors frustratingly dark.
Stairs	Added stairs to spacecraft designs. There are still a number of problems with them that I will be working out in the coming days. AI will not use stairs at present. When placing stairs in a design, use arrow keys to rotate them. I recommend open-to-below on the deck above the actual steps and landing of the stairs. If you put stairs on the top floor, you will find that you can walk up them through the ceiling to the outside, but you can't go back down them that way. This is one of those remaining problems that I mentioned.
Copy Deck Command	Added a copy deck command to the design studio. It enables multiple copies. This command does not remove invalid objects when finished, to enable further deck copying without losing important hatches. Invalid objects will be removed at some point, at least before burning to a CD.
Building Designs	Buildings have received a lot of attention in the past few weeks. Here is a summary: Buildings are no longer generated randomly based on the DNA of the locals. Buildings now obstruct movement. Buildings are designed in the design studio like spacecraft. The Construction window has a combo box for selecting an appropriate building design. Building designs you possess on disk are listed. All building designs published in your empire are listed, you don't have to carry a disk of every one. Public building designs are listed. To get a current list of all published and public designs, you must push the button next to the design combo box. Otherwise it will only show designs you have on disk and designs already in your scene. This may take a long time. Buildings constructed with no design (blank combo box) will automatically select the first public design that becomes available. This includes all existing buildings built before this update. These buildings will appear as an empty slab until a design is ready. The building will appear in your scene if a design becomes available while you are on line. I am working on a "public" design of every type of building. Only a few are done, there's about seventy to go. As I publicize them, they will get used by existing buildings that lack a design. Building construction now shows a line from the center of the circle cursor to the edge. The line indicates the front facing of the building. The terrain under the end point of the line determines the altitude of the building. Rotate the building using left-right arrow keys. Shift+arrow keys to rotate in tiny increments. Ctrl+arrow keys to change the manufacturing process, which used to be the unshifted function of the left-right arrow keys. Certain buildings enable the design to go underground. Underground buildings probably won't let your dude actually move below the ground yet. This is an unfinished detail. Mines - 2 stories under ground for every level of mine that is built. Well - 1 story under ground when the 2nd level is built. Weapon/Shield Base - 5 stories under ground. Laser Tower and Missile Base replaced by Weapon System Base. You pick the weapon bay module. Base designs do not allow turrets. Guard Tower building type added. Enables placement of a turret. You pick the module. Weapon System Base now spawns six troops, instead of five. Base designs can include guard post positions so you can specify where the troops are to stand when on duty. Base designs specify the location of the flag pole. It must be outside on the ground. Buildings do not require the pieces to be connected, like a spacecraft design. You can make multiple buildings, whatever the site allows. Building designs require at least one room on the first floor. After that you can do what you want, even make disjoint floating sections if that's the look you are after. Building designs may have a system module associated with them. A building with a module may have only one. This means that a hospital may have only one type surgery unit, even though it may have many surgery units. Each type of building has its own constraints. The design analysis will tell you what is required. Here are some additional notes that may influence your designs: Defense bases must have a path from the outside to the weapon console or the AI will not be able to operate it once they start pathing properly. Guard towers do not spawn a troop. Instead, a troop will be dispatched from a base to man the tower, enabling the base to spawn another troop. So, the base and the guard tower need to have a path that will enable a troop to walk from one to the other to man the turret. This increases the total number of troops in town. Hospitals don't verify that the doctor's station is in the same room as a corresponding surgery unit. Building doors are not operational. They will probably stay this way. That's potentially a lot of state information to send to the GPU for little gain. Expect all building doors to be open all the time. What's not done? These things are still in progress, not forgotten. Consoles and turrets are not operational and will not appear in the model. Terrain tile worlds probably do not have buildings any more at all; I haven't tested them. These new building changes will not be extended to them. They are being phased out. Fences and walls are going to be added so I don't recommend designing buildings that simulate them. AI currently does not know how to path in/through/around these buildings. Buildings are not an obstruction to weapon sighting yet. Creature movement is blocked by buildings but they can/will attack you through the walls due to the unfinished sighting code. Some building designs are limited to the number of stories constructed when the model is generated. There are still some problems with pathing/obstructions on the roof and top story of buildings that are not built all the way to the top story of the underlying design. The transporter room in the airport terminal is not operational yet. This will not affect the TL requirement of the building so it will be available at TL1. Manual upgrade of building modules is not implemented yet. Buildings in the design studio have no gravity inside. Body rotation is incorrect when you grab a ladder. Should face the ladder. Food for discussion. Bases could require enemy units to be in the command center with the weapon/shield console to capture the flag. It's ok to use a one-story building model for a 32 story building. It will just appear as one story even though it is influencing the city as if it were 32 stories. Do you care? Spawn tie to a city could require a building with bunks. Then you would respawn in a bunk in a building, just like in a spacecraft. Buy/sell could require you to actually be IN the building, rather than just standing around outside. Design studio could require you to be IN the building to enter a studio instance.
City Troop Penalty	Morale penalty for bases was changed to morale penalty for total potential troop contingent, which is 6 per base plus 1 per guard tower.
Planets In A Row	Fixed an orbital positioning calculation that caused inferno worlds to line up in almost the same orbital position.

Wed Apr 10

An update will be posted in about a week. Here is a peek at one of the things that will be included.

Stairs - Straight
Stairs - Straight, several in a row.
Stairs - Turn
Stairs - U-Turn, for making stair wells.

3/25/2013

What's new in this update?

Hangars Broken	Spacecraft placed in hangars could not be retrieved from the hanger, didn't even show up as being there. Fixed. The ships are ok. If you didn't delete the building, you will be able to recover your ship now.
City Ambient Lighting	Cities are now illuminated at night by ambient lighting based on the presence of roads and buildings. Cities on the new worlds will not be as dark any more.
Snow Off Pavement	Roads and buildings now remove the snow. Previously they were difficult to see on snow-covered areas, especially roads under construction.
Moons on Nav Console	Moons were not showing up on the nav console. Fixed. Discovered/fixed a bug that prevented moons from being selected on the nav console when they did show up.
Moon Positioning Bug	Fixed a bug with the calculated position of moons and planets.
Farm/Orchard Plant Rows Bug	Farm and orchard plants were not using a consistent calculation for placement so they would change position when the foliage was regenerated. Fixed.
Animal Population Reduced	Reduced the population limit of animals that spawn in an area.
Ships in Orbit Visible	While on the ground, you can now see ships and stations in orbit.

3/22/2013

What's new in this update?

Locator Default Width	Default width of Locator window is much wider so people might notice the starmap. The previous default width was narrow and a lot of people didn't even know a starmap was there because the splitter got smashed all the way to the left.
Sensors Too Loud	Sound level of sensors reduced.
Delete Town Square	Town square can now be deleted like any other building as long as it is the last development in a city. This only applies to new worlds. Old terrain tile worlds still cannot delete a town square; it must decay on its own.
City Decay	Cities are eligible for decay 7 days after established. This is not a change but the documentation may be wrong. I've heard players say 72 hours, which was the decay eligibility time a long time ago. This note is here as a reminder because I refer to this page when updating the documentation.
nan% Humidity	Fixed a bug on very hot worlds where a numeric overflow when calculating vapor pressure would produce a nan (not a number) result. The relative humidity will not be quite right there.
Transfer Officer To Station	The cargo transfer interface now lets you transfer officers/crew/cargo between your ship and a subsidized station if you are in the chain-of-command of the station. Previously, no transfer with subsidized stations was permitted.
Lantern Too Loud	Sound level of lantern and torch reduced.
Breathing Too Loud	Sound level of breathing sounds reduced.
Warp Speed	Adjusted the warp speed calculation because the change in the last update left the low warp factors too slow. The new formula is exponential: speed = sqrt(warpFactor) * 10 * SpeedOfLight The old forumla was linear: speed = warpFactor * 10 * SpeedOfLight Under the old formula, warp 9 was 90x the speed of light. Under the new formula warp 9 is 30x the speed of light.
City On Map	Cities now show up on the planet map on the new world type. They provide more information than the old maps. You can actually tell where buildings and roads are. Certain points of interest are highlighted in color: town square, bases, airport terminals. The map cursor also identifies the specific development under the cursor.
Top Down View Flags Too Big	In top-down view, the new world type shows the actual empire flag next to each flag point icon, which is colored to show political stance. The size of that empire flag was reduced. It seemed too big.
Flag Blinks	Flag blinks in high wind. Fixed. Also eliminated wind when flag should be inside an environment shell, standing flag straight out like on old style terrain tile worlds.
Flag Vertices Distorted	Fixed an error calculating vertices of the flag vertex array object. The previous result distorted the outer vertices and stretched the end of the flag wierdly.
City From Space	Cities are now visible from space on the new worlds.
Spawn Station Over City	The first station to spawn on a new world type will now spawn directly above the town square of the city that builds it, or close by if that spot is blocked. Since orbit is geosyncronous on those worlds, it should stay there. Previously, the station was placed somewhere around the equator of the world. Placement of the second station follows the old logic. That is, the second station gets placed opposite the globe from the first station. Additional stations just look for an unblocked location.
Farm/Orchard Plants	Farms and orchards now have appropriate plants on the new worlds.
Spacecraft Factory Won't Spawn	Spacecraft factory and vehicle factory now look more thoroughly for a bit of pavement nearby. There were situations where they were failing to locate adjacent pavement.
Scan Report Sort Order	Fixed the order that suns, planets, and moons are listed on the system scan report. Now suns are listed in alpha, beta, gamma order. Each sun is followed by its planets in closest to farthest order. Each planet is further followed by its moons in closest to farthest order.
Mission Orders Sort Order	Sorted lists of worlds and suns in the mission orders UI the same as the scan report.
Empire Join Password Box	The box to enter the password to join an existing empire now hides the characters you type into the box.
Mission Orders Unexplored Wormholes	Mission orders UI now considers the routing through unexplored wormholes that are in explored systems when showing wormhole destinations.
Construction Cursor Bug	Fixed a bug that caused the construction cursor to not highlight blocking developments until a valid placement location was found.
Agent Quick Teleport	Added a teleport button to the players online list on the agent UI.

3/20/2013

What's new in this update?

Cities Not Decaying	Fixed. Cities will now decay properly. This bug also caused cities to show buildings on their city report that did not exist due to decay.
Delete Road Crash	Deleting a road section from a new world with multiple cities crashed the server.
City Storage Error	City storage limits were incorrect after deleting buildings.
Warp 1/2 Speed Ahead	Warp speed is now 5x the speed of light per warp factor. Previously each warp factor was 10x the speed of light, which was arbitrarily chosen and seemed a bit too fast.

3/19/2013 (Later)

What's new in this update?

Broken Assignable Sectors Cache	Sorry for the server restart so soon. This bug had to be fixed ASAP. A value was incorrect in a cache critical to assignment of sectors to managers.
Broken System GenSeed	The system generation seed was broken for some (about 92k) solar systems that were created in January. A symptom of this bug was all the planets in a row and not orbiting the sun. Another symptom was all such systems had identical planets and resources. They will be regenerated and fixed when no player or city is in the system.

3/19/2013

What's new in this update?

Hourly Lag Spike	Fixed the huge lag spike that struck on the hour, every hour.
Spacecraft Spawn Bug	Spacecraft were spawning multiples on top of each other on the ground next to a spacecraft factory. Fixed, for real this time. :P
Agent Control Manufacturing	Agents should now be able to change the settings at any manufacturing process or construction process when agent powers are enabled.
Planet Name Sequence Bug	Name sequence was broken in unnamed solar systems. This was not a recently introduced bug. Surprising it was not a problem sooner. Those names should be fixed when the servers load them.
Change Manufacturing In Occupied City	Manufacturing processes can no longer be changed in a city that is occupied.
Limbo While Warping Bug	Thank you Losruoc for helping to trap this bug; it has been a plague for a long time. The problem occurred when warping through unexplored sectors of space with large numbers of stars in them. Time/testing will show if the problem is truly solved. Somebody go travel around at warp 9 for a while, before I cut warp speed in half.
Deep Limbo Rescue	Added a utility to rescue ships and players who got stuck in a way that the usual limbo rescue tool could not rescue, particularly the ones stuck in limbo due to warping. Now they can be rescued easily; let's hope it is not needed. Those units were lost in an extra deep form of limbo, not restored by restarting the server. Tal'Dor aboard XLP Riga GF will finally be rescued from deep limbo after the servers are up. It looks like he's been in there since Saturday. There is also a ship call AK NH SC W2 that has been there since December 18th; nobody is aboard.

3/16/2013

What's new in this update?

Spacecraft Spawn Bug	Spacecraft were spawning multiples on top of each other on the ground next to a spacecraft factory. Fixed.
Wormhole Routing	Navigator will now plot courses through unexplored wormholes as long as the solar system at either end of that wormhole has been explored by their empire. Previously, they would not go through any wormhole that was not explored, preventing them from executing your order to travel to a neighboring unexplored system via wormholes.
Crew Lands at Wrong Airport	On planets with more than one city, crew was landing at the wrong city, not always the one in the mission order. Fixed.
Land at City Bug	Crew was not looking for any undeveloped terrain near new world cities when they could not find a place in the city to land. Fixed. They only check a few places; they don't scour the planet looking for a place to land near a city.
Analyze City Connections	Improved the way city connections are managed to reduce server load.
Hourly Lag Spike	The huge lag spike that strikes on the hour is the reason for this update. I have installed some hooks to help locate the cause of the lag spike.

3/15/2013

What's new in this update?

Light Pole In Wrong Place	Light poles at houses and mines are not at the edge of the flat area where they are supposed to be. Fixed.
Win64 Crashes On New Worlds	Win64 build was crashing when creating 3D models of terrain on the new world type. This crash was ultimately induced by the compiler optimizer. Luckily the code that optimized incorrectly was in fact a coding error, resulting in incorrect light pole positioning. Fixing the light poles also fixed the crash problem.
Nav Console Restore Bug	Fixed bugs in the way consoles restore their settings.
Trees In Town Square	Trees are now removed from the town square, farms, and orchards. Farms and orchards will add their own plants and trees when finished; they are not done yet. This will affect terrain tile worlds also. They previously did not remove these trees because they pushed them to the corners of the tile instead, to retain some of the natural character of the plant life. Now they will be bare.
Shrubs at Farms and Orchards	Shrubs were removed from farms and orchards in preparation for their own plants and trees; they are not done yet.
Officers Don't Respawn On New Worlds	Fixed. Worlds where the officer has already died may take up to a day to spawn a new officer.
OpenGL Text	Improved text display. Eliminated jaggies at the edges. Implemented word wrap and justifications. Used new text display method in all places where text is displayed in OpenGL, with minor exceptions such as the HUD.
Forage Broken	Forage from terrain tile worlds was broken. It is fixed.
Terrain Frequency	Reduced terrain frequency which will make less steep mountains. This does not affect existing worlds. Try primeval worlds to see samples.
Spacecraft Texture Corruption	A spacecraft texture got corrupted after solar system transition or when starting a new design in the design studio. Fixed.
Sensor Scan Data	Sensor scan data sent to players seated at a sensor station, fire control station, or transporter station was streamlined. Network bandwidth was reduced considerably.

3/13/2013

What's new in this update?

Crash Bug	Fixed crash when a mutex got unlocked improperly. Happened rarely.
Zalgo Text	Fixed the bug that caused text on the display to become scrambled over time. This was actually a serious problem of memory corruption induced by QGLWidget::renderText. That code is out of my control so I had to develop a different way of displaying text. (OpenGL has no native text support.) This new method uses textures and can be crusty at the edges, especially with small text. Larger font sizes work better. I will see if I can improve the edge quality of the text.
Crash On Exit	Fixed a crash when exiting the program due to the background mail thread failing to get notified that the world was shutting down.

3/11/2013

What's new in this update?

Server Lockup Bug	Fixed a server lockup bug caused when an AI pilot tried to find a place to land.
Server Lag	Fixed two server-side issues that were contributing to lag.
Occupied City Construction	City has occupied base and I can still build and bulldoze stuff. Fixed.
Base Flag Capture	Flags at bases on the new worlds did not change texture when captured. They just appeared to go back up with the original flag still on them instead of changing to your flag. Fixed.
APC Takes 5 Sec To Make	Fixed the base labor cost of manufacturing vehicles. It did not change recently, just went unnoticed for a long time.

3/9/2013

What's new in this update?

Server Crash	Fixed crash that killed a lot of servers over the last 48hrs. This error could/would have afflicted client programs also.
Spacecraft View Range	Fixed spacecraft view range. Was set to 2000m. Now 32km (20mi).
Vehicle View Range	Fixed vehicle view range. Was set to 1500m. Now 16km (10mi).
Render Settings	Added a bunch of render settings to turn down (or up) the amount of stuff on the screen. This helps reduce the load on slower GPUs and lets you increase the load on those really fast GPUs.
Login Takes Forever/Scene Takes Forever to Develop	Fixed a cache that was being filled with a LOT of data at an unfortunate time.
Building Takes Forever	This was caused by the same bug as the login taking forever.

3/8/2013

What's new in this update? The client portion of today's update will be posted as soon as it finished building.

Speed Optimizations

Optimized new world type for faster location of developments at a given location. This takes a heavy load off of a lot of things. The most noticeable difference will be the speed that patches of terrain are tessellated on world with large cities.

Lighting Errors

Fixed lighting errors that were afflicting some GPUs, I think only ATI. All GLSL shaders that calculated lighting from suns and point light sources did not work. This was just about everything in the scene that was part of the new world type.

While working on this, I ran into a bug that has been reported before. I did not have time to fix it today but it is worth passing on the information. The rain and snow effects reduce the frame rate on my ATI GPU considerably. There is a setting to turn off rain and snow effects.

3/7/2013

What's new in this update?

Buildings Overhang Terrain	Buildings on new world type sometimes overhang dropping terrain near roads. Fixed.
Build Menu Changes With Mouse-Over	Build menu changes information when moving mouse over build buttons after a build command has been selected. Only happens when building on new world type. Fixed.
Cities Not Using Power For Lighting	Cities on new world type were not using power to operate lighting.
Citizens Don't Build Roads	Citizens don't build roads on the new world type. Fixed.
Crash When Changing Systems	Fixed improper destruction of a GL vertex array object used by new world type.
Design Studio Broken	Fixed design studio entry on new world type. Also discovered/fixed critical problem with design studio entry on old world types that nobody triggered.
Detect Cities in Unexplored Systems	Star map now shows a yellow glow around unexplored solar systems from which city emissions have been detected. Solar systems emit a signal based on the hourly consumption of power by all cities in the system. The strength of this signal determines the maximum distance at which the system can be detected. Cities with sensors detect the signal emitted by solar systems. Detection range of cities is 10pc per sensor tech level. City sensor tech level is the highest tech level of the airport terminal and any bases. Detected solar systems are remembered for up to 48 hours after the last signal is detected from that system. This information accumulates as the servers run. It may take an hour or two after the servers start before you start detecting city emissions. This will always be the case as this information is not stored.
Crew Do Not Fire Bay Weapons Aboard Ships	Bay weapons currently cannot fire when a ship is aboard another ship. Now the crew is aware of that and they do not attempt to fire the bay weapon when their ship is aboard another ship.
Land At Coords Default Broken	Mission orders such as Land at Coords did not show your current longitude/latitude coords as the default when at a new world type. Fixed.
Land At Planet Fails	Fixed piloting errors around new world type.
Land At Airport and Land At City Fail	Fixed errors finding a landing location in a city on a new world type.
Sensor Lock Blip Position Error	Sensor lock blip positioned wrong on cities. Was slightly wrong on old world types. Was way wrong on new world type. Fixed.
Shield Effect In Atmosphere Turns Sky Black	Fixed a render order error introduced in the past couple of months. Could have been observed on all spherical planet types.
Terrain Texture Precedence	Fixed precedence order of textures on new world type, e.g. pavement takes precedence over undeveloped ground.
Spot Terrain Does Not See Buildings	Spot terrain with ` or ~ fails to identify buildings on new world type. Fixed.
Transporter Beam Doesn't Render	Transporter beams did not render on new world type. Fixed.
Transporter Console Map	Transporter console map display did not work on new world type. Fixed.

3/5/2013

What's new in this update?

Server Crash	Fixed a server crash resulting from spacecraft manufacture processes on the new world type.
Mother Ship Exploit	Spacecraft that are aboard other spacecraft will no longer fire their bay weapons.

3/4/2013

What's new in this update?

Respawn Bug/Exploit	Fixed a respawn bug that could have been severely exploited. A character with no berth who was in an empire with no cities would respawn right where they were standing. The correct behavior would be to respawn on a new empty world. This bug caused failure when a player started a new empire and then recalled home. Instead of being taken to a new world to start building their empire, they simply respawned in place.
Server Crashes	Fixed a few server crash bugs over the weekend, mostly ships, officers and crew interacting with the new world type.
Vehicle Spawn Error	Improved the algorithm for finding a spawn location near a factory on the new world type.
Boats on Boats	New worlds spawn boats on top of boats, ad infinitum. Fixed.
Rocket Spawn Rotation	Rocket was spawning on its side on the new world type, until someone got into it.
Rocket Training	Gagarin spawned in undeveloped terrain near the rocket so he was not 'in a city' and did not have any clothes or a space suit. Fixed story processor to look for a spot in the same city as a vehicle when spawning a story character at a vehicle.
Multiple Conditions	Prevented characters from having more than one condition of the same type, for certain types of conditions, namely: disease, poison, paralysis, and acid. You can now only have one of each of these kinds of conditions at the same time. Previously, it was possible to have multiple instances of each of these conditions.

3/1/2013 (Later, Again)

What's new in this update?

Terrain Tamed Down	Some of the extreme bumpiness of the terrain should be toned down a bit. This affects new worlds created but does not change any existing worlds.
Cannot Change Manufacturing Process	Fixed a client-side bug that prevented the manufacturing processes from being changed at buildings. Client updates are being built. May not be ready before I post this; just wait for the update.
Sell To City Crash	Fixed a couple of bugs that caused the server to crash when selling stuff to a city on a new world.
Mine Resource Inconsistency	Server and client were not in agreement with the resources you were seeing on the terrain. This is fixed. You will now see the proper resources. Client update is needed; it's on the way.
Crew Land At Coords Bug	Crew landing at coordinates on a new world were reversing the N/S of the latitude.
Lights Brighter	Personal lights, vehicle lights, and space ship lights are a LOT brighter.
Top-Down View Night Lighting	Top-down view now increases the ambient lighting on the terrain so you can see to build at night.
Wharf/Ship Yard Terrain	Client and servers will now be in sync with the terrain at wharfs and ship yards.
Shrub Quantity	The amount of shrubs is now controlled by the ground cover setting on the Settings window. Unlike grass, shrubs don't go completely to zero if you turn off the grass, you still keep about 10%.

3/1/2013 (Later)

What's new in this update? This update information is posted early so those encountering the Lava.v shader error know that a fix is on the way. It takes a while to get through the build process to post the software. The update will be available as soon as the build process is complete. Your launcher will grab the update when it is available.

Lava.v Compile Fails	Some various flavors of ATI GPUs failed to compile the Lava.v shader. This is fixed, hopefully for all of them. Sorry for this critical error. I am thankful that I had a computer in house that could reproduce the shader compiler error. It also spat out a few warnings that I cleaned up as well.
Mine/Well Building	Building is no longer present at mines and wells until at least one level of construction is completed.
Wharf/Ship Yard Port Deformation	The terrain deformation for wharfs and ship yards was changed slightly so the center of the development, where the light pole stands, will not be under water. This will conflict with the server until the server is updated. Until then, you will fall into the water in wharfs and ship yards sooner that it appears that you should based on the terrain.
Ground Cover Quantity	The grass density on the new planets now responds to the slider control on the Settings window. You don't have to restart the game if you change the setting, just move far enough and the grass will regen.
Launcher Update?	Some questions arose about updates to the launcher program. It was not changed and a new one was not posted. It should not need any changes for quite some time; it's job is pretty well defined and there are no known issues with it.

3/1/2013

What's new in this update? Wow, I can't believe how long it's been since the last update. The time flew by while I tore into rebuilding planets from the ground up. Of course they are not done; none of this stuff is ever done. They should be "usable" now, and definitely better than the old worlds. They are at least ready for your consumption; enjoy.

Resource Reset	Changed the algorithm for generation of resources to remain consistent between system resets. In other words, when the contents of a solar system decay due to no player activity, the system should now regenerate exactly the same when someone returns there, including the resources. Previously, the planets and suns were recreated but the resources distribution and quality would change. An unfortunate side effect of this change is that all the current systems in the galaxy are affected. The presense of all resources and their qualities will now be different.
No Lumenite in Home System	Fixed a bug that allowed the home solar system of a player to be generated with no lumenite.
Broken Bone	Creature eats animal carcass on ground. Carcass is reduced to a bone. Could not make a sewing needle from that bone. Fixed.
Lighting Distance Bugs	Fixed a bug in the distance attenuation calculation for the light emitted by spacecraft, vehicles of all types, and your personal lights. You will find these lights to be much brighter now.
Planet Overhaul	A new planet type has been created to replace the old planets. Existing planets are unaffected. Existing planets will be replaced by the new type if their solar system contents decay/regenerate. Ringworlds are not affected though I may tackle them next. The techniques/code used to create the new planets would work well for ringworlds and other world geometries. City visibility from space is unfinished. You may see something on the planet but that is not the intended final result. All units orbit geosyncronously, no matter where you park them around a planet. Natural resources can be foraged from each individual plant and rock. On old-style worlds, it is based on the terrain 'tile' that contains the resource. No AI has flown near or attempted to land on one of these new worlds yet. Just a heads up...
Building Construction on New Planets	Building construction is somewhat different on the new planets. Buildings claim a circular space. Radius varies by building type. Houses are small. Farms are big. Buildings must be placed 'near' the town square or road but they do not have to touch them. Developments level the terrain for their building. This area may be smaller than the entire area of the development, as with a mine or farm. When drawing these buildings, the inner level circle depicts the area that will be graded. The outer line that conforms to the terrain shows the radius of the development. Paved roads are wider than dirt roads. Don't crowd the dirt roads if you intend to upgrade them to paved roads later. Roads are drawn as straight segments by clicking the start location on the terrain and then clicking the end location. The next segment starts from the end of the last segment so you can draw continuous end-to-end roads. Space bar cancels the current segment so you can establish a new start location. Slabs are a form of roads. When establishing the start location of a road segment, switch between road and slab modes using the mouse wheel or arrow keys. Slabs are twice the width of roads and slabs force the end point to be the same MSL altitude as the start point. Roads and buildings grade the terrain in their area. When drawing buildings and roads, a fine web of lines shows the predicted result after grading the terrain. All types of roads grade the terrain, including dirt roads. On old-style worlds, dirt roads did not grade the terrain. Deleting roads or buildings causes the terrain to return to its original shape. Roads can be deleted while under construction, a change from the old-style worlds. Bases are unfinished. They appear as only a level space with a flag pole. If lucky, troops may appear there too. Control stations are unfinished. Base defenses, turrets, sensor, and observatory stations are not present yet. There is no latitude restriction. I have built stuff pretty close to a pole but not exactly at or overlapping a pole. Harsh environment shell not finished. Buildings and roads in a harsh environment will have no apparent enclosure but they should act as though they do, in terms of breathable environment. Mine and well building appears before any level has been completed. This is a bug. Mine and well should be able to extract any resources that exist within their radius. (I have a note to check this; there may be a problem.) On old-style worlds, this would at most be two, stone and possibly some other resource like ore. Coastal buildings deform too much land to make their port under the sea, leaving the light pole hovering over the water sometimes. I will adjust this.

12/7/2012

What's new in this update?

Shores of Hazeron Launcher

Polished up the launcher so I can put it away and stop working on it. It was fun to play with for a while but now I will get back to working on the stuff that matters, like defense bases.

Besides launching Shores of Hazeron, the launcher now displays a simple slide show of Shores of Hazeron images, changing every 10 seconds; pictures are loaded from your home/Shores of Hazeron/Pictures folder.

Here is a summary of the changes.

Title and copyright text.
Automatically checks for updates when run.
Button added to open this web page to read the latest updates.
Tool Tip Shows Slide Show Usage Tips, i.e.

Toggle full screen vs window mode.
Toggle buttons/file list visibility.
Select next/previous picture.
Select random picture.

Window type fixed so it has a maximize button in Windows.

12/6/2012

What's new in this update?

Update:	I forgot to mention this one.
War Declaration Spam	I fixed a bug that caused war declarations to fail when the other empire was a Forgotten empire. This resulted in repeated war declarations against forgotten empires who owned cities in the area of an empire with a no trespass policy.

Shores of Hazeron Launcher	Very slight changes to the launcher were posted today, hardly worth downloading an update. It now shows a copyright notice. It also cycles between random background images while downloading, including those in your Shores of Hazeron/Pictures folder.
Shores of Hazeron Programs	Monolithic program files were disintegrated into multiple shared objects/DLLs. This facilitates more efficient updating depending upon where changes are made. e.g. The main program executable went from about 100MB to about 5MB. The largest chunks of data are 3D models that rarely changed; they moved to their own files so they won't be downloaded with every update any more.
Terrain Cache Conflict	Fixed a problem with the terrain model cache resulting from running in primeval world mode.
Limbo Bug	Found/fixed one more situation that was leaving players stuck in limbo.

12/3/2012

What's new in this update?

Shores of Hazeron Launcher

The full download of Shores of Hazeron is now just a small installer/launcher/updater program called the Shores of Hazeron Launcher.

On Windows, the SoH Launcher is installed into Program Files\Shores of Hazeron. The 64 bit version appends x64 to the name.
On Linux, you install the SoH Launcher wherever you want. The archive extracts into ./Shores of Hazeron/Launcher. I put it in my home folder, which works well with the next few changes.
When run for the first time, all the SoH files are downloaded and installed to your home folder/Shores of Hazeron/Programs. You can save some downloading by moving your old stuff there. The path to AuScript.bin should end up being your home folder/Shores of Hazeron/Programs/AuScript.bin, with everything else moved accordingly.
The default location for temporary files is now your home folder/Shores of Hazeron/Temporary. It won't move unless you change it in your SoH settings; then you have to move the files yourself if you want them.
Screen shots are now saved into your home folder/Shores of Hazeron/Pictures
Every file is validated using an md5 hash key so the launcher will update all files that change. It will also fix files that have been deleted or modified as a result of virus infection or other data corruption.
This change does not permit the coexistence of the Windows 32 bit version and the Windows 64 bit version in the same user's folder. This problem could be resolved with a bit more work, if anyone can suggest a pursuasive reason for doing so.
There is now only one program to launch when playing SoH, that is the SoH Launcher. It provides options for launching Shores of Hazeron, Spacecraft Designer, Primeval World, Story Editor and Hazeron Mail. You can still run those programs individually if you make your own shortcuts.
SoH no longer shows Spacecraft Designer or Primeval World buttons on the login screen. Those modes are still available but they must be invoked using command line options. The '-designer' option invokes single-player spacecraft design mode. The '-primeval' option invokes single-player primeval world mode. If you don't know what command line options are, use the SoH Launcher.

Here is what the folders should look like starting at your home folder.

Shores of Hazeron

Launcher - Only on Linux if you extracted the distribution file into your home folder. On Windows, this folder will be found in Program Files/Shores of Hazeron/Launcher instead of this location.
Pictures - Only after you take at least one screen shot in the game, using Alt+P.
Programs
Temporary

I created these two myself, just because I like to keep things nice and tidy.
Characters
Ship Designs

Linux Launcher Scripts

The shell scripts that launch the various SoH programs on Linux were fixed to work when the path has spaces in the names. Previously, those pesky spaces caused trouble.

11/29/2012

What's new in this update?

Planet Map Right-Click Menu	The planet map on the Locator (F7) window now offers a popup menu when right-clicked. You can issue mission orders to orbit, hover and land at coordinates. If you are in a transporter room, you can beam to coordinates. This was actually in the previous update but I forgot to mention it on this web page.
Star Map Places Right-Click Menu	The list of places next to the star map now offers a popup menu when right-clicked. Options are similar to those you get when right-clicking places in the star map.
Star Map Go To Coordinates	Solar systems now offer a Go To Coordinates mission order. This is helpful/necessary when directing a ship to go to a system that is more than one sector away. When ordered to go to a specific solar system, the crewman must be able to find that system within the current sector or a neighboring sector. When ordered to go to coordinates, the crewman can navigate there from any distance.
Glue Guns of Death	Some aspects of combat resolution were changed. Armor no longer has a vulnerability to a specific type of damage. This was changed to a specialty vs a specific type of damage, shown on the tool tip as 'Hardened vs <damage type>'. Armor wears down at the rate of 1 point per 10 points of damage absorbed. When absorbing damage from it's specialty damage type, armor wears down at the rate of 1 point per 20 points of damage absorbed. When absorbing kinetic damage, armor absorbs the kinetic 'n' value of the armor plus 1/2 the energy 'e' value of the armor. The effective armor rating vs kinetic damage is n + e/2. When absorbing energy damage, armor absorbs 1/2 the kinetic 'n' value of the armor plus the energy 'e' value of the armor. The effective armor rating vs energy damage is n/2 + e.
Shield Modules	Shield modules are implemented with respect to combat. Kinetic shield module is 100% effective vs kinetic damage and only 50% effective vs energy damage. Energy shield module is only 50% effective vs kinetic damage and 100% effective vs energy damage. Cloaking shield module is only 50% effective vs kinetic and energy damage. No actual cloaking effect has been implemented yet so I don't recommend this shield module yet.
Environment Suit Damage	Environment suits of all kinds (power armor included) now take damage from the environment while they are in use, specifically when worn with the helmet visor closed. The rate of damage varies by atmosphere type and density. This will reduce the health level of the suit and helmet to the minimum without completely destroying them. The suit does not take damage when the visor is open.
Environment Suit Seal	Environment suits and helmets no longer protect your character from the environment when they are reduced to minimum health. The tool tip for these items now shows Environment Seal status as either Intact or Broken.
Shot Naked	Armor and clothing should no longer be utterly destroyed by combat damage or damage due to the environment. Victims should no longer be reduced to nakedness by shooting them. Armor and clothing will be reduced to their minimum health due to damage, which compromises the environment seal on armor and helmets.
Off Line Designer Modules Bug	Fixed a problem with displaying the correct system modules in the off line spacecraft designer.
Character Starves in Off Line Designer	Your character will no longer get hungry in the off line spacecraft designer.
Citizens Can Invite To Empire	Citizens can no longer invite people to their empire unless they are the president or vice president.
Citizens Can Accept Join Requests	Citizens can no longer accept requests to join their empire unless they are the president or vice president.
Citizens Can Revoke Offices	Citizens can no longer revoke the office position of someone in an equal or higher government office position.
Governance Window Update Bugs	Governance window Citizens page now updates properly when you switch characters.
Vulcium and Magmium Ship Armor	Fixed a bug in the calculation of hit points per unit destroyed that caused magmium and vulcium hull ships to take more damage than they should. I haven't tested this.
Crew Won't Warp to Explored System	Fixed a bug when determining if a ship is heading for unexplored space.
Duplicate Items from Forgotten Empires	Items from empires that have decayed will now show as 'Made in Forgotten Empire N'. This fixes a problem where an item from a forgotten empire was sold to a city; the city took the item and paid for it; the seller still possessed a copy of the item when the transaction was complete.
Squelched Person Can Open Channel	People on your squelch list can no longer open channels to you.
Ringworld Hull Wall Collision Bug	Fixed the code that checked for collision with ringworld hull walls. The symptom was ships colliding and sticking with the ringworld walls high above the visible wall. It turned out this had only ever been roughed-in and was commented as such in the code. It is correct now.
Aircraft Technology	Aircraft Technology should have been called Aircraft Factory Technology. It was renamed accordingly.
Officer/Crew Experience	Officers and crew now gain experience by carrying out their missions.
Station Default Name	Space stations are now named after the city that spawns them, unless they are repacing an existing station. When replacing an existing station, a station takes the name of the station that is replaced. If the replaced station does not have a name, the new station is named after the city that spawns it. e.g. If the city Hazeron spawns a station, it is named 'Hazeron Spaceport' or 'Hazeron Starbase' according to its structure.
Warehouse TL Bug	Storage and capacitor added to a city by buildings was not updated when a building increased in tech level. This was reported when a warehouse went from TL1 to TL32 with no apparent increase in city storage capacity.
Dockable Windows Transparency	I overlooked transparency when changing the main tool windows to be dockable. This is fixed.
Mail Window Position	Mail window position was not restored properly. Fixed.
Designer Confirm On Exit	The spacecraft designer now requests confirmation when you attempt to exit without saving a modified design.
Close Build Window Bug	Closing the Construction window now kills the current build command. This was broken in the change to dockable windows.
Game Data File	A file of some basic game data is now distributed with the program. It is included in both the full install and the patch. This used to be acquired from the master server at login. Now a first-time player can enter the spacecraft designer or primeval world without ever logging in to the game servers; previously they had to log in at least once. This also eliminated about 200k of data sent to each client at login, wasting precious bandwidth.

11/21/2012

What's new in this update?

Mission Order Spin Controls	Mission order UI now uses spin controls for all number inputs.
Mission Order Controls Wrong	Click 'Buy Cargo Category' then click 'Sell Cargo Category'. Visible controls are incorrect. Fixed.
Debark Passengers Error	Debark passengers order defaults to blank, implying zero, but it really remembers the last number entered and uses that, which is confusing. Fixed.
Orbit City's Planet Tooltip	Tool tip for 'Orbit City's Planet' order now points out that the navigator positions the ship overhead the destination city. This is consistent and can be used to reposition the ship there if it is in orbit elsewhere around the planet.
Docking Windows	All of the main toolbar type windows can now be docked into the sides/bottom of the main window. This makes full screen mode more useful, for me anyway, because I didn't like having my windows in front of my view all the time. Only the main button bar can be docked at the top, mainly because the docking behavior of the other windows was really obnoxious when enabled to dock at the top; there seemed to be no way to move a window near the top without it trying to dock. The primary cause of this change was my desire to have a less-than-full-screen alternate size for my windows. I tend to line up a few along the bottom of the screen and occasionally want to make one bigger, but not full screen big. Docking provides the desired behavior; windows stay neat and tidy in a confined place until I pop them out, returning them to their undocked size and position, which isn't necessarily full screen. The docking windows also have handy behavior that enables them to be stacked; a row of tabs appears along the bottom of stacked dockable windows. I like to stack my Inventory window and my Construction window. The main window does a pretty good job of remembering your configuration of dockable windows between runs of the program. I just wish it would remember the undocked position and size of windows that are docked when I exit; it only seems to remember their docked position and size when they are docked on exit.
Dialog Error	Fixed an error in a mouse event handler of the dialog box object used for all in-game dialogs. The side-effects/consequences of this error are unknown so I don't know if it fixed anything. Labor window crash comes to mind.
Fullscreen Toggle	Added a button to the main button bar to toggle full screen mode. The key command was not obvious; many people probably didn't know this function was already there.
Right-Click Sector In Star Map	Right-click a sector in the star map now enables issuance of a travel direct to coordinates order, which is the center of the sector. Previously, travel direct and travel via wormholes orders were offered but they did not work.
Sky Box Missing	Fixed a bug that caused the sky box to go blank when a player traveled to another sector. This also caused message text to stop appearing on the screen.
Inventory Minimum Width	Minimum width of Inventory window was incorrect. This enabled the window to be squeezed too small for the inventory diagram.
Bio Window Width	Bio window text is now permitted to word wrap, enabling the Bio window to be squeezed narrower. This enables it to stack with the Inventory and Construction windows better.

11/9/2012

What's new in this update?

Mission Order 'Orbit City's Planet'	Added a mission order to orbit the planet that hosts a certain city. You specify the city, the navigator takes you to the appropriate planet, overhead the city.
Star Map Highlight Filter	Added a UI for configuring star map highlighting settings. This includes options for highlighting based on political stance, explored status, and the presense of specific empires.
Star Map Right Click Menu	Added a right-click menu of options to the star map. You can now move the view point this way and you can also issue travel orders. The AI navigator is limited to what is visible on the nav console screen, namely the 3x3x3 box of sectors around the ship. When issuing travel orders to go to a solar system, either direct or via wormholes, use multiple steps along the way so the navigator can resolve the order destination when it comes up. When issuing 'travel via wormholes' orders, you must ensure there is a pathway of explored wormholes for the AI to follow. The navigator resolves the wormhole routing when the mission order becomes active. At that time, and at each system along the way, the navigator must be able to determine a route via explored wormholes to the destination. The routing is only guaranteed to be resolvable if the destination stays within the 3x3x3 box of sectors around the navigator. You must build a valid mission. An order to go to a city does not imply movement to that solar system, but it does imply movement to the city's planet. The mission leading up to a 'go to city' order must first position the ship in the solar system containing the city. It won't work to right-click a remote solar system and add a mission order to land at a city there. You must add a mission order to travel to that solar system first.
Mission Order Cities	When using the Mission Orders UI to issue Land at City Anywhere or Orbit City's Planet orders, the list of cities is now augmented by data available in your local star map.
Star Map View Controls	The tool tip on the Star Map tab of the Locator window lists key commands that can be used in the star map. Notably, WASDC and Z movement commands have been added. Note that the star map is just a control on a dialog box and it needs input focus to accept key commands. You may have to click in the star map before movement keys will respond; click/drag to look around usually takes care of this.
Star Map 'Look At' Functions	Added two new toolbar buttons to the star map. Look At Selection - Moves the view point to the average center of the currently selected places. Look At Last - Moves the view point to the last place that was selected.
Star Map Bugs	Fixed various bugs with the star map, mostly with managing the local star map data. Switching characters and requesting flags were some problem cases.
Star Map Mouse Look	Click/drag in the star map now rotates more like you are turning your head left/right up/down, rather than on the major axes of the galaxy. This is more intuitive when zoomed way in but feels wierd when zoomed way out.
Sector Create Bug	Fixed a nasty bug in the sector creation code that luckily never had a chance to hurt anything. It was introduced in the 11/6 update.
Star Map Settings	Star map no longer saves/restores the view point position or rotation. Every time the program is restarted, the star map will return to your current location, top-down rotation, closest possible look distance.
Galaxy Density	Galaxy density error fixed in the 11/7 update will make the galaxy display in the star map a bit darker, more contrast.
Look At Place Opens Tree	Looking at a place in the star map, however you make it happen, causes the corresponding place in the tree view to scroll into view.

11/7/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

Galaxy Density Error

Fixed an error in the star density calculation that was resulting in too many stars in new sectors. This change does not affect existing sectors, just new ones that get created. This causes a slight visual change to the appearance of the galaxy in the Locator window, not worth posting a new patch.

11/6/2012

What's new in this update?

Galaxy Shape Changed	Changed the algorithm for determining star density in each sector of the galaxy. Previously, this was purely a mathematical (boring) calculation of a four armed spiral. Now it's much more interesting, providing more variation of star density throughout the galaxy. The galaxy viewer on the Empire tab of the Locator (F7) window shows a representation of this. This change does not affect existing sectors. However, new sectors that are generated will contain the proper number of stars prescribed by their 3D position in the new galaxy model. Consequently a sector that decays may return with more or less stars than it used to have.
Galaxy Viewer Galaxy Display	Changed the method for displaying the galaxy, incorporating the number spin box at the top right as a density adjustment. My computer starts to get slow at over 100 density. 200 is too slow for dynamic rotating and zooming. 500 is ridiculous but the picture is worth the wait. Be sure to have the view of the galaxy oriented and zoomed the way you want before bumping the density to 500 because it's way too slow to dynamically change the view. Cached some data at a couple of different stages of the rendering. That may use a fair bit of memory at high density but the result is faster redraws when rotated and zoomed, especially noticeable at reasonable density levels (less than 200). Here is what I got when I set my density to 500. It took a couple of minutes to generate the picture. Click the image for the full screen shot that I grabbed.
Galaxy Viewer Data Reduced	Reduced the size of the data sent to the client in response to galaxy viewer empire data query. This was done in a way that maintains compatibility with the current client. You don't have to get the latest client update to continue using the galaxy viewer.
Galaxy Viewer Stance Colors Bug	Fixed a bug that caused the system stance colors to be incorrect until after the empire flags were requested. Empire flags are only needed to see the little flag next to the city names. They are not needed to resolve political stances.
Galaxy Viewer Slow Update	Improved speed of UI update when galaxy viewer data or empire flags received.
Galaxy Viewer Progress Control	Added a progress control while updating UI when galaxy viewer data received. The progress control has a Cancel button.
Galaxy Viewer Unknown Empires	Unknown empires now show up in a distinctive pink color, instead of showing up in the color of your empire's default stance toward unknown empires. This takes precendence over enemy presense so a system with unknown cities and enemy cities will show up pink, not red.
Galaxy Viewer Deselect All	Added a deselect all button to the galaxy viewer. (A cheer rises from the crowd.)
Galaxy Viewer Selection Filter	Added a toggle button to only show the selected places when any places are selected. This enables you to select a few places and then turn on the filter to only see those places. When a sector is selected, all the systems in that sector are displayed even if they are not individually selected.
Galaxy Viewer Icon Buttons	Replaced texty buttons with friendly icons.
Galaxy Viewer Axes	Changed color of galaxy axes to purple. Improved draw code to work better when zoomed in close to an axis line.
Galaxy Viewer Wormhole Lines Bug	Fixed a draw bug that caused wormhole lines behind the eye plane to draw randomly across the view.
New Empire Start Location	Changed the code that finds a start location for new empires. It is unlikely anyone will ever notice a difference.

11/2/2012

What's new in this update?

Empire Viewer	Empire tab added to Locator (F7) window. This replaces the web-based galaxy viewer. This provides a much-needed big picture of the known galaxy as explored by your empire.
Client Login Errors	Fixed some issues with logging in to the master server when creating a new character, whether joining an existing empire or creating a new empire.
Character Settings Crash	Fixed a bug that caused a crash when the Character Controls Settings UI was displayed.
Misc. Crash	Fixed a bug that caused a random crash of the client program when receiving new objects in the scene.
Enter Login Default	Enter key at login screen should now select Login by default.

10/29/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

TCP Communications Failure

Fixed an error in the TCP communcations code that prevented some people from logging in to the master server. Those who failed due to this error could run the program and create a new empire or join an existing empire but then they would wait forever for the master server to respond at the shooting stars screen.

Master server connection log shows this was afflicting quite a few people. Thanks to Mitchel for bringing it to my attention last week and working with me to get it fixed.

10/26/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

Morale Penalty for Bases Not Changed	There is no change to the morale effect of bases in this update. This is contrary to my post on the forums saying the change would be in the next server update. I plan to put some significant work into bases to fix problems and make them better. The morale effect change will wait until then. For those who have not read the forum, the morale effect of bases will be changed so it is calculated based on the total population of all cities in a resource zone vs the total number of bases in a resource zone. Cities will not be permitted to build bases in neighboring resource zones even though other parts of the city may still extend into neighboring zones. Bases that already exist in other zones will be removed when this change is implemented.
Lost Spacecraft Bug	Found/fixed one cause of people getting stuck in solar systems that are not loaded on any worker server. This is the primary reason for the update today. I'm weeding out the few remaining situations that leave people stuck, unable to log in. It's such a distraction to interrupt everything and rescue someone who has gotten stuck. I'm tired of people getting stuck. It hurts...make it stop...
Galaxy Viewer Removed	Some players have noticed the removal of the Galaxy Viewer and it's associated data from the Empire Standings page. It presented problems both technically and for players of the game. It revealed way too much intel about the locations of empires in the game. This precedes a change to the shape of the galaxy. I didn't want to have to reflect that change in a web module. A consequence of this is the speed that the empire report process gets done. It used to take over half an hour and now takes about two minutes. This allowed the frequency of the report to increase to every 20 minutes instead of hourly. I will add a galaxy viewer to the Locator page in the game. Then it will be an in-game object that restricts your view to the data "known" to your empire. I intend to have this in the next client update if I don't get too side tracked by people getting stuck in limbo.
Private Ships Lose Cargo When Destroyed	Privately owned ships will now lose all of their cargo when destroyed. Money in the ship's fund is not lost.
Transport to Ship in Stasis Bug	Player calls for beam up to private ship. Ship is destroyed; placed in stasis. Player steps into transporter and emerges aboard ship in stasis. D: Fixed. Destination transporter portals are now removed from spacecraft when they are placed in stasis. This causes the origin portal to do nothing when a player steps into it.
Critical Production	Citizens don't work as hard when a city is occupied. Their probability of deciding not to do work when it's their turn to do work is equal to the disloyalty percentage. This can destroy occupied cities, particularly in harsh environments, because they don't make enough food or air to survive. Food production in all environments is now considered to be critical to survival. Citizens running processes that make food will now work every time, regardless of disloyalty. Air, water and electricity production in harsh environments is now considered to be critical to survival. Citizens running processes in a harsh environment that make air, water or electricity will now work every time, regardless of disloyalty.
Dark Matter Death	Players have reported sudden unexplained death due to dark matter. Death by dark matter occurs when a spacecraft departs a solar system with no officer aboard or no player aboard who is on line. I fixed some cases where the scene syncronizer thread would fail to update the online state of the player. This may have contributed to unexplained dark matter deaths.
Construction Limitation	Buildings or other city developments can no longer be constructed in a resource zone that contains an occupied city. The next client update will provide a cursor indication of this. Until then, it just won't work for no apparent reason.
Surrender City Conditions	You can now only surrender a city if you own all the flags in the city or if the recipient of the surrender already owns one of the flags in the city. Essentially, you cannot surrender a contested city to an empire that is not involved.
Helm Unresponsive to Enemy	The helm console is now unresponsive to an enemy unit seated at the console. The enemy unit must wait for the capture sequence to be completed.
Private Ship Capture Scuttle	Private ships now automatically initiate a 30sec scuttle sequence when captured.

10/19/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

UPDATE
War Declaration Spam	Fixed a bug that caused a war declaration message to be generated every minute if a unit was detected from an unknown/forgotten empire.
Travel To Coordinates Nav Bug	Fixed a navigation bug when traveling to coordinates. This bug was introduced with the previous improvement to the navigator's strategy. Should be better now.

Ghost Stations	Fixed a bug that caused stations to sometimes spawn and not act as obstructions to movement until the next server restart.
Officers Won't Fly Through Explored Space	Made adjustments to navigator strategy for determining if they are heading into unexplored space. Let's see if they get better.
Seize Funds Exploit	Capture a city. Seize funds. Disloyalty level drops. :O This provided another way to improperly reduce the loyalty decay period on an occupied city. It is fixed. Now their disloyalty gets worse until they revolt.
Multiple Empires Capture City Bug	A bug was reported where multiple players from different empires captured the bases at a city. There empires were friends toward each other. Then they were unable to capture the town square. I am unable to reproduce the bug. The rule is fairly simple. Each player in the town square influences movement of the flag, either up or down, under the following conditions. The player's empire is not neutral toward the empire who owns the town square flag. No base flag is owned by an empire that is an enemy toward the player's empire.
Pirate Station Scuttle Bug	Fixed. Might see a few more pirate stations now.
Pirate Crew Behavior Bug	Fixed.
Passenger Exploit	Load passengers. Kick from roster. Load passengers. Kick from roster. Etc. Ship filled with hundreds of passengers. Go somewhere. Unload passengers. Loitering passengers grab berths. Unload passengers. Etc. :O Fixed. Now passengers will vanish from a ship if they no longer hold a berth. It may take up to a minute for them to disappear.
Subsidized Ship Export Policy Bug	When 'Spacecraft Requisition' policy is set to 'Anyone', enemy units cannot take the captain's berth. Fixed.

10/18/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

UPDATE
Contact Mail Spam	Fixed an unfortunate bug that caused every contact with a wild animal to be treated as a new empire contact, which created a LOT of mail. This shows up as contact with a blank empire name. :P
Private Ship Recall Bug	Fixed a bug that prevented private ships from recalling from stasis if they were destroyed while repairing.

Essential Supplies	When selling or exporting, cities now maintain a minimum stock of certain essential items. The minimum stock quantities are based on the population of the city. On worlds that cannot support animal life, cities keep a minimum stock of air and water; they keep no minimum stock of air or water on hospitable worlds. On worlds that cannot support plant life, cities keep a large minimum stock of food; they keep a smaller minimum stock of food on hospitable worlds. The city inventory lists all of the things they have. A request for things for sale lists only the sellable stock of things available, holding back the minimum stock.
Citizen Depletion of Occupied City	When loading crew and passengers, a city keeps enough population to man 90% of its jobs. An exception is made for people in the chain-of-command of a city; they are permitted to take all but the last two people. This was changed to keep the 90% minimum in occupied cities, even if you are in the chain-of-command. This eliminates an exploit that permitted most of the population of an occupied city to be loaded as passengers and then executed, making it easy to genocide the remaining inhabitants. This provided another way to bypass the loyalty decay period as described in the last update.
Retail Store Imports/Sells Vulcium and Magmium	Retail stores should now import and sell magmium and vulcium. These were accidently left off their list. They are both construction materials and spare parts so the retail store should sell them.
Enemy City Connected By Land Imports From Enemy City, Possibly Just Electricity	I checked the code to verify this. Enemy status alone does not prevent import of goods from other cities. It is your empire's export restrictions that control what commodities are exported, including electricity.
Cannot Trade Cargo With Transporters Alone	Fixed two bugs in the trade transaction code that prevented ships from trading cargo with cities within transporter range. In my testing, I was able to then buy and sell cargo and load/unload citizens. I was also able to call for an exterminator. Repairs and upgrades cannot be made in this way because a ship must moor near a station to stay in orbit.
Board Citizens, Only One City Responds	When cities answer an offer to board citizens (crew, troops, passengers, officers) on the Trade channel, they sometimes only provide some of the requested citizens. This closes the offer, preventing other cities from filling the remainder of the request. The captain of the ship must then make the offer repeatedly until all slots have been filled. Cities now leave the offer open until all other cities have an opportunity to fill the request. A single offer to board citizens may now result in answers from several cities, each providing some or all of the requested citizens, until the total boarding offer has been filled.
SOS Spam on Empire Channel	Spacecraft no longer send SOS or other similar messages on the Empire channel. They used to only send these messages on the Friend channel. I recently added the Empire channel also. That change was unwelcome because the Empire channel opens automatically on the client of every empire member, preventing players from ignoring the pleas for help from their fellow units. Units now only call for help on the Friend channel; they no longer send those messages on the Empire channel.
Empire Contact Conditions	A lot more encounter conditions between units will now 'make contact' between two empires, including contact via comm channel communications. A recent situation arose when a player could not land at a city that answered his hail. The city did not show up in the Land at City orders UI. Their two empires had not made contact yet. The hailing empire had a default stance of enemy toward unknown empires; the Land at City orders UI does not list enemy cities that do not have an airport. The city did not have an airport and its empire's default stance was neutral, enabling the city to answer the hail. With this change, the two empires make contact when the city is hailed. This initiates/syncronizes their stances toward each other. The city's empire stance would change to enemy, reciprocating the hailing ship's enemy stance. The city would then remain quiet, simply logging the enemy communication in its event log.

10/16/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

Sector Decay Problems

Disabled sector decay code that seemed to be the cause of all the recent problems. We'll see how things go after the servers wake up.

City Genocide Exploit

When citizens in a city get injured, they now stop coming out of their homes for a while. This eliminates an exploit that enabled a single enemy ship to hover over a city, systematically exterminating the entire population. Genocide still works for small towns, which might be believable, but it won't work for a large city.

A large city is supposed to take days to change allegiance, allowing the original owner an opportunity to reclaim it. It doesn't really work in a game like this to allow the largest cities to be conquered in 10 minutes.

Loyalty is the mechanism for creating a slow transition of ownership where the amount of time is dependent on the population. Loyalty changes at the rate of one person per city report. New citizens who move into a city are not automatically loyal. That is why a city experiencing rapid population growth shows a drop in loyalty, which is expressed as a percentage of the population. It's not because less people are loyal; it's because the total population is higher.

Loyalty change is akin to the flag at a flag pole. At 100% loyalty, the loyalty "flag" is at the top of the pole. When the town square is captured, loyalty drops slowly until it reaches the bottom, then the allegiance changes and loyalty creeps back up again. If you recapture a city fairly soon after losing it, little loyalty is lost and it doesn't take long to get back to 100%. If you ignore the problem, the city becomes loyal to the occupier.

There are 112 city report periods per day. Losing one unit of loyalty per report, an occupied city of 800 people takes about 7 days to fall from 100% loyalty to 0% loyalty, at which time the empire of allegiance changes and the city is no longer considered occupied. Then it takes another week to rise from 0% to 100% loyalty.

The loyalty value is not truncated when population drops below the current loyalty value. Loyalty just drops slowly to the current population, one unit per city report. However, when the population is reduced to zero, the loyalty value is lost. This enables an attacker to bypass the occupied portion of the loyalty transition period by simply killing every single citizen. That should now only be possible if you wait until all the citizens are outside before massacring them.

10/10/2012

What's new in this update?

Troops Not Manning Ceiling Turrets	I thought this was fixed once before. Found my previous change. <shakes head slowly> It's fixed properly now. :P
Turret Design Error	A turret or hatch on the max top of the tallest ship allowed in the design studio shows no error but it prevents the design from burning to disk. Fixed.
Ship Door Render Bug	One door on every space ship renders half-open. It also does not appear to open or close when activated and it does not make any sound. Fixed.
Spacecraft Designer Client-Only Mode	You can now enter the spacecraft designer without logging in to the servers. That means you can design ships while the servers are down.
Primeval World Client-Only Mode	You can now enter a primeval world that does not require logging in to the servers. You are pretty limited in what you can do. There are wild animals and you can handcraft things.

10/4/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

Sector Decay Disaster	A logic error caused a lot of empty sectors to be deleted that should not have been deleted. This necessitated two rollbacks of the database, losing a few days of new player accounts, characters, spacecraft designs, cities, etc. I apologize for that; rollbacks are something I try hard to avoid. The first rollback fixed most of the data errors introduced by the sector decay bug. Some characters may still be stuck unable to log in. Post your dude's name and/or id to the limbo thread on the forums, or ask an agent on line. Someone may be able to rescue you. Now that the dust has settled, sectors are decaying when appropriate. This helps to maintain a manageable data load. Instead of 260k sectors with 4.5M solar systems, the number is currently around 55k sectors with less than 1M solar systems.
Player Decay	Players who have not been on line for 60 days are now subject to a new form of decay. This only affects players who are not in a city and who are not aboard the ship where they hold a berth. When a player decays in this way, they simply recall home if their empire still has any cities. If their empire has no cities, they are reassigned to a randomly selected empire that has a capital city and an open immigration policy before recalling home. This accomplishes two things. Solar systems are allowed to decay that are otherwise only hosting a person. Empires are allowed to decay that have no cities when no people remain in that empire.
Manager Server Thread Lockup	Player decay flushed out a long lurking thread deadlock bug. It has caused the manager server to lock up once every couple months or so. The problem became acute when the server grid started up and decay-spawned two thousand characters. This bug could also cause the master server to lock up but I'm not sure that it ever has.
Dead-head Limbo	Players have been getting stuck more frequently while dead-heading between systems, probably due to the increased use of warp drives. This was an excruciatingly painful bug to find. I spent half the day following a ship called Rare Bird as it traveled from one server log file to another, pooping out valuable clues as it went. After warping around the galaxy for some time, it arrived in a system, departed for another system, and arrived again from the same original system, departing again for the same other system! Now two of them were chasing each other through the galaxy. D:
AI Warp Drive Usage	Some improvements were made to AI warp drive usage. Fixed dangerous altitude conflict between the navigator and pilot when flying to/around a sun. Officer does not call the travel order complete if the FTL drive is hot. This allows the crew to finish the warp braking maneuver. Engineer no longer engages warp drive near the sun, particularly when heading to a different system.

9/28/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

Sectors Decayed

Finally finished. Sorry for that. I didn't think it would take that long.

Warp Drive AI

Crew now operates warp drive as follows.

Navigator sets the destination waypoint very close to the sun, just above the distance they would orbit the sun if ordered.
Engineer engages warp drive at maximum available warp speed to get there.
Officer clears the order when the ship is within one solar system radius of the sun and it is traveling less than 25,000m/s.

This enables a human to keep the warp brake going as long as they want, until they clear the travel order. The officer must not have the con if you want to do that.

9/27/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

System Decay Limbo	A number of players got stuck in limbo over the past few weeks while traveling between systems. The data suggested these people were going to systems that decayed due to inactivity. I think I fixed this bug; we'll see.
Officer Announces Order Completion	The officer who has the con now announces the completion of mission orders on the crew channel. They will make this announcement at galaxy range if none of their human officers is in the system with them.
Aye, fly into sun.	Fixed a bug that caused AI pilots to veer into planets and suns when going too fast to stop at their destination.
Deceleration Strategy	When going too fast to stop at the destination, the AI pilot now flies away from the destination while decelerating until the point at which the ship can decelerate inbound to the destination. Then the pilot turns around and decelerates the rest of the way in. Previously, the pilot would circle the destination while decelerating.
Navigate To Sun	Navigator now sets the nav point at the edge of the sun, rather than in the middle of it. The course is better for warp braking and other reasons. Navigator clears the nav point when the ship is within 1 au of the surface of the sun.
Engineer Operation of Warp Drive	Engineer now engages the warp drive at maximum warp when traveling to another solar system. Engineer shuts off the warp drive when there is no course set, unless a human is manning the helm. That way, warp braking is achieved until the navigator clears the nav point, at 1 au from the sun.
Sector Decay	Sectors will now decay from existence when no longer needed. Previously, sectors persisted forever once they were created. This developed into an enormous data load for the master and manager servers. UPDATE 12:47MDT Upon startup, the master server started deleting 261,337 unneeded sectors and their contents. UPDATE 15:13MDT Still deleting sectors... UPDATE 15:57MDT Still deleting... This is going to create one heck of a DELETE query. D: UPDATE 16:28MDT Still deleting... If the DELETE query fails, we'll have to start over. I've already updated the code to perform deletes in batches but it doesn't affect the running server, obviously.
Navigator Announcements	Navigator now announces certain events, such as laying in a course to a destination or arriving at a destination.
Habitable Moon, No Officer	Habitable moons 3,800km dia should never have existed, but they do. The code was unchanged that permits them to occasionally exist. They will now produce an officer where previously they would not.
Infinite TL32 Magmium Made in Toucan Empire	Dyadic Paragon was reported to possess infinite quantities of TL32 magmium manufactured by the Toucan Empire. The Toucan Empire has been gone for a long time and they have no more cities in the system; where is the magmium coming from? Answer: The system appears to have a very large but dwindling stock of this magmium. There is no infinite source, just a lot of it.

9/21/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

Burden Prevents Movement in Gravity Well	Fixed. Your personal burden has no effect on your movement in a gravity well. Previously, a heavy burden would immobilize your character in a gravity well.
Private Ship Ignores Captain Request	Fixed a bug that prevented privately owned ships from giving the captain's berth to enemy units, even if the ship had no captain or officers at all.
Officer Decay Bug	Fixed a bug that caused the officer aboard a ship to feel neglected when not hailed, even though a commanding player might have been aboard. Previously, they depended on receiving communications on the comm. Now the presense of a player aboard who is in the chain of command of the ship satisfies the officer's need for contact. You must be aboard for at least a minute on line.
Agent Changes	Made a few minor changes/fixes to the Agent UI. A Windows patch was posted today for this reason alone. It is the only change. If you got the 9/20 update, don't bother updating with this patch if you aren't an agent. Unfortunately, the updater touched all the files so their dates changed. The only ones that actually changed were the Windows patch files. Eliminated Kick Stowaways since reconciling the roster does that now. Fixed check box states not updating when switching characters. Added a Load Design command to load any design in a design studio using its design id.
Path Crash	Fixed a crash in AI path code that killed a server today. It was new code, or at least recently touched. It is possible for this to crash the client when performing a path analysis of a design but I did not build a new client just for this; you'll have to wait for the next update if your path analyzer crashes. This particular bug fix did not make it into the client patch that was posted for agents.
Agent On Line Status	The Players Online page accessible from the Server Status page should now show the names of agents in italics. We'll see...
Player Stats Bug	Fixed a bug that caused players to stop showing up on the Player Stats web page when stuck in a certain kind of limbo, usually experienced only by agents or characters summoned by agents.

9/20/2012

What's new in this update?

City Loses Items From Inventory	Fixed a bug that caused a commodity of a city to be lost entirely. The bug was triggered when a city received a commodity better than one it already had in stock and the quantity of the commodity in stock combined with the new commodity exceeded the storage space of the city. The lesser commodity was lost entirely in this case. It was reported in various ways. Exploit to destroy a city's inventory by selling them one single TL32 Q255 item. City inventory of the items lost when new item added. Destruction of a building reducing city storage followed by sale of a commodity to the city. City inventory of the items lost when new item added. Starvation caused by farm TL increase just before city report. City inventory of the food lost when higher TL food added.
Yohan Can't Move	Yohan aboard an incredible TL30 spacecraft could not move after crew was loaded. AI pathing caused the tick thread to grind to a complete standstill too long for any object to move. Cached a valuable piece of data collected while pathing for reuse on subsequent path queries. Stored more data in the path data structure of each ship design. This was fairly costly from a memory standpoint but it dramatically reduces the path query on many ship designs, slightly reduces the query on the rest. Optimized functions used by AI to locate control stations that need to be manned. I can move easily aboard Yohan's ship now. There was a short delay, a few seconds, when I loaded a fresh crew onto his ship but then movement about the ship was smooth, with the occasional jitter due to pathing as dozens of crew and troops made their way to their stations.
Yohan's Ship Has Lots of Doors	Yohan's ship has 764 operable doors and hatches. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the number of doors and hatches that can be animated using my spacecraft shader. Fixed a rendering error when the number of doors that can be animated by the shader is exceeded. Those extra doors are still functional but they cannot be animated. They now show up permanently in 'half open' state when they cannot be animated, like they were supposed to. Spacecraft design analysis now lists the number of operable doors and hatches in the design, in the Avionics section. A yellow message appears if the number exceeds the limits of the shader, which is around 275, plus or minus depending on the number of weapon bays and transporter rooms in the design. Ship model caches are no longer valid. The new SoH client will automatically recreate them as needed. This is just a heads-up for people aboard large ships as you will get the spinning orb for a while until the ship model is tessellated over again. UPDATE: A minor rendering error resulted from this change. One single door or hatch on every ship will now render as a half open door/hatch. It does not mean you have reached the maximum number of doors or hatches. This will be fixed in the next client update.
Ship No Model Render Shorter Walls	Made a slight improvement to the 'no model' rendering of the ship that you get when the full 3D model hasn't been built yet. It is just solid floor polygons with lines at wall vertexes. The walls are drawn slightly shorter so their top edges no longer bleed through the floor of the deck above them. This helps to clean up the appearance of the floor.
Ship Top Down Render Half Height Walls	Walls are only drawn at half height in the 'tactical' top down view of a ship that you get when aboard a ship in top down view. This seemed to improve the appearance slightly.
Cartesian Coordinates	Cartesian coordinates are now entered into a single box, rather than separate X, Y and Z boxes. Formatting details are provided by the tool tips on the input boxes. Travel Direct to Coordinate mission order coordinate input was changed. Beam to Coordinate transporter order coordinate input was changed. GPS page of Locator no longer includes localized separators into large numbers, e.g. commas in 1,000,000. This facilitates copying and pasting those coordinates. The coordinate input parser does not want comma separators in large numbers.
City 'Buy' vs 'Sell' Message Error	Ship not on a road slab tried to sell cargo. City said must be on a slab to "buy". Fixed.
Health Bar Size Setting	Render tab of Settings window now has a slider to control the size of the health bar that is rendered for you and your vehicle or mount.
City Reports Sailboat?	Indigo City reports having a sailboat. The city is in the mountains. Fixed a bug when tallying boats. They are a special case as they do not usually reside "in" the city so much as they reside "next to" the city.
City Beacon Name Wrong	City name wrong on beacon after city renamed. Correct after client is restarted. Fixed.
Surgery Unit Eye Position Wrong	Eye position of character is wrong when in a surgery unit. Fixed.
Map Zoom Button	Map page of Locator now has a button to use for zooming in/out. This accommodates players who do not have a mouse wheel.
Occupied City Worker Toggle	The state of worker on/off switches at manufacturing processes can no longer be changed in a city that is occupied.
Ship Purchase/Repair Won't Combine Stacks of Items	When buying or repairing a ship, the city will now combine multiple stacks of eligible materials. Previously, the city would report insufficient materials when combined stacks of dissimilar materials would have worked.
Fetch Doesn't Fetch All	Fetching materials at a manufacturing or construction process stops if it depletes the stack of commodities from which it is fetching, even if more stacks could have been fetched. I have to Fetch again to get more stuff. Fixed.
City Report Ships	City report now lists all spacecraft in the city and all empire-flagged spacecraft in orbit over the city's planet.

9/14/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

Tech Level Effect on Storage and Capacitor	The storage and capacitor added by all buildings is now increased by their individual tech levels, at 5% per tech level.
Troops Won't Use Top Turrets	Fixed a bug that prevented troops from finding ceiling turrets.
Travel Direct to Coordinate Bug	Crew will no longer leave the solar system while following a travel direct to coordinate order unless an AI officer or online player is aboard.
Jump In Place Bug	Jump in place on a spacecraft and I end up standing knee deep in the floor. Fixed.
Respawn to Capt Slot Bug	Respawn aboard a ship with no berths puts me at the helm in a 'sleeping in bunk' pose. Fixed. Now you spawn standing in that case, which means you do not get protection from airless environment that would be provided by a berth with a bunk.
Killed While Riding Bug	When killed while riding an open vehicle (motor bike or sailboat) or an animal, your body now falls off the vehicle/animal. Your body does not fall to the ground when riding a citizen or player.
Server Thread Finished Bug	Fixed a bug that crept in with the upgrade to Qt4.8.2. The problem caused a manager or master server to sometimes fail to notice when a subordinate server disconnected.
Server Thread Lockup Bug	Fixed some code that was accessing a data structure in a way that was not thread-safe. This error is the prime suspect behind a few unexplained server lock-ups in the past few months. The lock-ups always seemed to be associated with assigning/revoking sectors and systems to subordinate servers. The error was found in code that manages those assignments/revokations.

9/12/2012

What's new in this update? Posted early due to server crash; cross your fingers. :D

Vehicle Empire	Vehicle empire now stays in sync with the driver's empire. Previously, the empire of a vehicle did not change if the driver's empire changed while they were in the vehicle.
Transporter Room Destination Options	The Beam Over button on the Comm window now shows a dialog with various destination options if you are standing in a transporter room. Transporter destination options are only available on the Voice channel and on the Crew channel, if you are a member of the crew. The dialog provides a way to tell the transporter operator where you want the transporter locked on to and whether to beam to or from the destination. Destination options include: City - Destination is the town square of a city within transporter range. Coordinate - Enter a 3D XYZ coordinate in meters relative to the location of the spacecraft. Planet - Enter a longitude latitude coordinate on the surface of the planet you are orbiting. Ship - Destination is inside the hull of another ship within transporter range. Transporter - Destination is the transporter room of another ship within transporter range. If the transporter console is manned by an AI crewman, the crewman operates the transporter beam. When using Ship and Transporter destinations, the crewman negotiates transport aboard ships protected by shields as follows: Ok if player requesting transport is a crewman or in the chain-of-command of the destination vessel. Ok if destination is a station with its hull doors unlocked. Ok if destination vessel is commanded by an AI officer and currently executing a crew or passenger load order, specifically during the preboarding period. Ok if destination vessel is commanded by an AI officer and currently executing a troop load order, specifically during the preboard period. The transfer is further restricted to players who are in the same empire as the destination or in their overlord empire (the one their empire is a vassal to). If the transporter console is manned by a player, they will have to do their best to carry out the order. All destinations except the 3D coordinate can be accomplished using the console.
Path Checker Crashes	Fixed a bug that caused the path checker in the design studio to crash.
New Character Wrong DNA	Created a new character in Imperium. Appeared in town square with DNA of indigenous people. Capital of Imperium is an alien city. New character should have gotten the citizen DNA of the city. Fixed.
Warehouse Storage Bug	A warehouse now adds more storage to a city than an eight story jeweler, or any other building built to the max height.
Environment Sounds Bug	Environment sound effects were wrong for agents while invisible. Fixed.
Fighter Spawn Bug	Spacecraft A fetches a fighter to a vehicle bay. Spacecraft B is aboard spacecraft A in the vehicle bay. The fighter is placed aboard spacecraft B. Spacecraft A fetches another fighter, ad infinitum. Fixed.
Severe City Decay Penalty	I think I fixed a bug that was causing cities to report extremely low morale due to not being visited recently, when in fact they were visited recently. I am not 100% certain of the fix. Please speak up if you have a city with this problem.
Autopark Vehicles In Bays	Vehicles in spacecraft vehicle bays now automatically park themselves. Get the vehicle into the room and exit the vehicle. It will move to it's proper parking spot and orientation, even if it's stuck in a wall. This only works when the appropriate type of vehicle is placed in a bay that lacks one. A space fighter F1 will not autopark in a bay for an SUV, or a bay for a space fighter F2 for that matter.

9/6/2012

What's new in this update?

Star Rendered Wrong Size	Fixed a bug when rendering companion stars in binary and trinary systems. The bug caused companion stars to be rendered at the same size as the primary star, instead of at their proper size. This bug was introduced when porting suns to GLSL.
Construction Goes Under Terrain	Fixed a bug that permitted terrain to go too far down into the planet model. Existing terrain that is already broken is unaffected; it will not be fixed unless/until you build a new road there.
Agent Ported and Could Jump High	Fixed a bug that caused encumberance weight to be lost when an agent teleported.
No Sun at Ringworld	Fixed a bug when rendering suns for a viewer standing inside the atmosphere of a ringworld. This bug was introduced when porting suns to GLSL.
Town Square Safe Zone	The town square can now be used as a refuge from the wilderness. Wild animals no longer see people who are in a town square.
Galactic Positioning System	Locator now has a GPS tab that shows your coordinates relative to the galaxy, sector and solar system.
Mission Order Travel Direct to Coordinate	A new mission order was added to travel directly to a coordinate. The coordinate may be relative to the galaxy, sector or solar system. Many people have asked for this feature.
Agent Teleport Limbo	Fixed a bug when agent teleporting to a person in a vehicle that had no empty seats. The agent was lost in the void at that point.
Crew Trouble Landing on Fast-Rotating Worlds	Fixed crew landing logic to deal with fast-rotating worlds. The apparent change is they begin their descent at 20 degrees rather than 10 degrees of the target, which is a little steeper. In addition, once they begin their descent approach they will not break off the approach if the target rotates away from them, unless it rotates over the horizon before they enter the atmosphere.
Bases Under/Above Ground	Fixed a terrain positioning bug that caused bases on sloping terrain to hover above the ground or embed in the ground. All existing bases are affected/repaired. They do not have to be rebuilt.
Spacecraft Capture Sequence Spam	Fixed the messages emitted while capturing a spacecraft. There were several problems, particularly with privately owned ships. Note that the empire of a privately owned ship is not changed when it is captured. The only result of capturing a privately owned ship is that the capturing player loots the ship's fund.
Pirates Collide When Attacking	Fixed a bug that caused crew to creep their ships closer and closer together when in combat until they collided. This usually resulted in a bunch of ships stuck together in frustrating ways. It was probably the worst part about fighting pirates.
City Capture Exploit	Fixed a bug that may have enabled a certain city capture exploit. That exploit enabled a player to capture the town square of a city without capturing any of its bases.

8/28/2012

What's new in this update?

Remote Door Open/Close 'M' Key Broken	Fixed
Broken Bones	Fixed a critical problem with certain bones. Data was corrupt on bones left behind by animal carcasses decaying in the environment. Attempts to do certain things with those broken bones resulted in server lockup and/or crash. If you have one of these broken bones, please destroy it.
Server Thread Communication Error	A slight change to the signals emitted by the Qt 4.8.2 QThread object caused a recent spate of limbo. This affected entire solar systems and everything in them, including agent attempts to go to those systems.
Fetch and Run Manufacturing Processes	Fetch and Run on manufacturing processes can now be used by anyone in the empire when the worker is disabled. When the worker is disabled, only AI workers and players from other empires are prohibited from pushing Fetch or Run.
Construction Blocked	Fixed a bug that caused off-line enemy players to block construction. This was sometimes exploited when attacking by placing a player at a base under construction then logging off.
World Population Limit	World population limits are now applied on a per zone basis. See World Resource Zones in the game manual for specific numbers.
City Zones of Influence	Cities now exert control over their entire resource zone. See City Zone of Control in the game manual for details.

8/22/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only. Some of these changes will not take full effect until the next client update, scheduled for later today.

Update	I forgot one to mention this one.
Seige	"Attackers completely surrounded a number of my cities in unconstructed pressurized slabs (the hardest building to build in the game) in their cities. These can't be removed until they're completed, which is practically impossible in cities without labourers. Until they are removed, the cities can't expand." Solution: You can now bulldoze enemy roads that are under construction. Unfortunately, this bypasses the requirement to perform the labor needed to grade the terrain. It seems like a less serious problem than being hemmed in by indestructable road sections. Client update needed for this change.

Friendly Fire	"My ships, stations, and laser bases were boarded and used to destroy the remainder of my fleet. They weren't captured (which would allow the other ships to return fire), the attacker simply sat at the fire control station and blasted the other ships into oblivion." Solution: 1. To fire a weapon bay on a ship, the gunner must be on the crew or in the chain-of-command of the ship. Otherwise the weapon does not fire. 2. To fire a weapon bay at a base, the empire who controls the flag at that base must be friendly (not Enemy or Neutral) toward the empire of the gunner. Otherwise the weapon does not fire.
Ghost Infiltration	"Once aboard a ship, the attacker can sign out and remain there invisibly. At any point in the future (as in, when he can do the most damage), he can sign back in and fire the ship's weapons, or fly it into the sun. There is no defence against this, as logged-off players can't be detected." Solution: Reconcile Roster button on Spacecraft page of Governance (F12) window now kicks stowaways in addition to removing people from the roster who are not aboard. All players who are not on-line and who are not on the ship's roster are forced to recall home. Client update needed.
Flag Spam	"The attacker's favourite tactic was to litter my planets in town squares which could be used as respawn points. They can be built much faster than they can be captured." Solution: Whenever you place a town square on a planet, all other cities of your empire that have no completed buildings are deleted entirely. The test for completed buildings ignores the town square, roads and parks.
Production Hijacking	"Players who don't have any authority over a city can still run production and (even worse) buy private spacecraft. So, the attacker could simply run my aircraft factories (although they couldn't change the production order) and swipe the fighter that was built. Also, they can buy private ships for themselves from my spacecraft factories. The only defence was to bulldoze all vehicle factories in my cities." Solution: 1. When the worker is disabled at a manufacturing process, only players in the chain-of-command of the city can Fetch materials or Run the process. 2. Spacecraft Sales export policy added to restrict sale of private spacecraft. Client update needed to change Spacecraft Sales export policy; default setting is Export Only To Friends. 3. Spacecraft Requisition export policy added to restrict captaincy of subsidized spacecraft. This controls who a subsidized ship will grant the captain's berth to. Ship empire immediately changes to new captain's empire. Stations are not affected by this policy; the captain must be from the same empire as the station. Client update needed to change Spacecraft Requisition export policy; default setting is Export Only To Friends.
False Flag Operation	"Attackers created empires for themselves with the same name as existing empires to cause confusion. Fix: prevent the creation of empires with non-unique names." Solution: Fixed a bug that permitted empires to be created with non-unique names. Duplicate empire names were renamed when the servers restarted.
Illegal Immigration	"Attackers used open-immigration empires as starting points for their invasion, or as targets. Fix: Open Immigration should either be disallowed or the default should be changed to "By Invite" or "By Request."" Solution: Default immigration policy for new empires is now By Invitation. Client update needed for this change.
Unknown Occupied City Workaround	"I haven't figured out how they did this yet, but the attackers seized my capital (a city of 800 people) and, in a matter of minutes, bulldozed all of its buildings. I know you can do this by killing the civilians, but that generally requires a ship with a lot of turrets, something they lacked." This may have also been the bug reported as... "1. Create a new empire and set your policies to default unknown empires to enemy. This is necessary because trying to do this to empires you have encountered previously doesn't seem to work. 2. Take a 2nd character and join any open empire that has defense bases at their capital 3. Stand on the flag, then join the empire you made while still standing on it. you will then capture the city without capturing any of the bases. 4. Transfer your newly captured cities from the new empire you made to whatever empire you see fit 5. you now have captured a city without having to capture any of the bases" Solution: Fixed a bug in a cache of data that may have caused this. I am not 100% certain it was the problem. I have not performed this specific test to check. It would be great if someone would try it and let me know the result.
Vehicle Fetch Bug	Vehicles fetched to spacecraft were not observing empire export restrictions. Fixed.
Berth Request Ignored	When a spacecraft receives a berth request, it now responds with the reason for rejection when the berth is not assigned. Until a new client is posted, you will receive a "garbled transmission" instead of a proper message.

8/18/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

Broken DNA Fixed

DNA was fixed today. A backup was made just before the DNA was updated. Let me know ASAP if you experience some horrible bad side effect as a result of this change.

1,898 of 35,158 players affected.
3,297 of 90,454 AI citizens affected.
228 of 5,947 cities affected.
322 of 104,011 planets affected.
1,295 of 2,833 empires affected.

UPDATE: If your character is changed to something undesirable, I will fix it. Just e-mail me a .chr file containing a valid character DNA and I will change your dude for you.

DNA Validation Crash

Fixed a bug that caused servers to crash when validating certain DNA combinations.

8/17/2012

What's new in this update?

OpenGL Shader Language Port	The hard work of implementing GLSL has begun. The primary purpose of this port is to gain compatibility with Mac OS X, which does not compile the SoH GPU programs, presently written in Cg shader language. I have built SoH on Mac OS X. It appears to run fine; Cg is the only roadblock at this point, a pretty big one I might add. In the first pass I will concentrate on eliminating all use of the Cg shader language and associated libraries, replacing that code with GLSL code that produces the same result. It's going to be a LOT of work. No work is being done to improve appearance or display performance. Those things will be tackled later on, after the Cg stuff is all gone. A few objects are shaded using GLSL in this update. Please let me know if you observe an error in drawing any of these items on your screen. Components of the sky box, painted when creating the sky box texture. The sky box is a dynamically generated view of the galaxy from your current solar system. Universe stars Galaxy stars Galaxy star "milky way" aura Nebulae Sky box, the acutal display of the sky box itself in your scene. Near stars, the + shaped ones. Suns, the burning orb effect. Initial results and impressions: GLSL and Cg coexist harmoniously. This was a concern. Failure would require the port to be thoroughly complete before a new client could be posted. That could easily take months. GLSL is not compatible with the (deprecated) methods used throughout SoH for tessellating models. The change to the code is easy but laborious. This increases the time needed to complete the port. All code that creates display lists must be converted to create vertex array objects instead. VAOs are supposed to be faster/better than display lists because the geometry data is stored in the memory of the GPU. I'm not sure why a display list could not also be stored there; the semantics would seem to imply/permit it. There is a lot of work to be done. The GLSL port is too big to do all at once without any attention to bugs. Each object is highly isolated. Between porting of objects, I will take time to fix bugs and post new client updates.
Character DNA Exploits	Players have hacked .chr files and successfully used them to create extraordinary characters. Some characters have been reported with over 1,800 hit points. This led to fixing a number of bugs on the character creation screen. The most obvious bug happened when loading a .chr file. The resulting display of the character and the control settings were incorrect. This is fixed in the update today. Before the fix, the actual DNA that was loaded from the .chr file was sent to the server, regardless of the state of the controls on the client screen. The problem was compounded by the fact that the server did not check the validity of the character DNA in any way. This meant that any .chr file that did not result in a disabled 'Enter Hazeron' button could be used. D: This weekend I will run a clean-up utility to fix the existing bad character DNA in the database. Unfortunately, of 35,000+ characters in the database, about half of them have DNA errors that make them invalid. Consequently, my fixup utility makes some attempt to modify the overall size of invalid characters to make them valid, if that is the problem. It also ignores minor errors where a character is not too far from being valid. Characters who cannot be fixed/ignored will have their DNA reset to the default human. This reduces the number of characters that will be affected to about 1,400. Character DNA is stored in other places, such as city worker DNA, capital city DNA, etc. It will be similarly fixed in those places as well. The server now checks the validity of the character DNA that is submitted by the client. That server validation code will not go live until I run the DNA fixer this weekend. I'd rather not risk a forest fire on the server farm on a Friday evening.
Build Configurations Changed	The Debian 6.0.5 and Ubuntu 10.04 distros suffered an unexpected fate. The linker cannot resolve the function glBindFragDataLocation on those two Linux distributions. It is defined in the header files so it compiles just fine; apparently no actual code exists in the GL library so the linker is dissatisfied. It appears that function cannot be resolved unless the installed GL implementation supports it. Those SoH clients are built on virtual machines that do not have anything but stock video drivers installed. Ubuntu 10.04 64-bits is an exception but I'm not sure that it is trustworthy. It was built on a computer with an nVidia GPU driver installed. The linker was able to resolve the function reference on that computer so I posted the result. It may only work if an nVidia GPU is installed; it has not been tested on a computer with an ATI GPU. UPDATE: Tested on Ubuntu 10.04 64-bits running on an Alienware m17x portable with dual ATI Mobility Radeon HD5800 series GPUs. No problems.
What Now?	A lot of people have asked me what I am working on right now. A player recently submitted a nicely formatted list of exploits that were used against their empire. I am attacking the items on that list with a vengeance. I intended to fix all of them in time for this update. Problems tidying up and building new GLSL code on various platforms took a lot more time than anticipated. Work on the exploits list will resume on Monday.

7/20/2012

What's new in this update? No significant code changes. Don't bother downloading this version if you have the 6/22 update.

More Build Configurations	Configured ten computers with fresh OS and build environments to compile Shores of Hazeron. This makes more different client-side configurations available. Mac OS X is in progress; it requires significant SoH code changes to abandon Cg in favor of OpenGL Shader Language. It's a lot of work but I am looking forward to eliminating an API. I prefer to use fewer APIs because they create challenges to cross-platform compatibility. Debian 6.0.5 32 bits Debian 6.0.5 64 bits Fedora 17 32 bits Fedora 17 64 bits Ubuntu 10.04 32 bits Ubuntu 10.04 64 bits Ubuntu 12.04 32 bits Ubuntu 12.04 64 bits Windows 7 32 bits Windows 7 64 bits
Ubuntu 8.04 Dropped	Dropped Ubuntu 8.04 because it is two long term support releases old. Send me e-mail if you really really want this version back.
Qt 4.8.2 Version Upgrade	All build environments now use Qt 4.8.2.

6/26/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

No E-mail From Password Reset

The web program for resetting an account password failed to send e-mail to anyone, except me. It appeared to work fine here, didn't work for anybody else though. This was a mail server configuration error. It is now fixed.

6/22/2012

What's new in this update?

Update
Password Mail Failure	A few people reported they did not receive any e-mail after resetting their account password. The login server was not providing a 'From' address when sending that mail. A lot of mail servers might have rejected the mail because it had no from address. The login server has been fixed. Please try again.

Security Update	SHA-1 hash keys implemented to protect login account information.
Spawn Rules Changed	Spawn sequence is now... Ship on which you hold a berth. Home city Capital city Random city Empty habitable planet. The significant change is that you are no longer reassigned to a new empire when you get to step 5. Instead, you find yourself on a new empty habitable world somewhere in the galaxy. Empire of allegiance and office are unaffected. I just realized that I did not update the tool tip on the button bar. It still describes step 5 as it worked previously. The tooltip will be correct in the NEXT client update. UPDATE: Spawning game manual page updated to reflect this change.
Lost Empire Bug	The change to the spawn rules eliminates the only condition that caused a character's empire to change involuntarily.
Spawn Limbo Bug	Finally found the cause of some characters getting stuck in a strange state in the respawn queue. It affected players in empires with only one city where that one city was the capital city. I've had a flaming item for this in my to-do list for a long time.
Reset Password	The Login Accounts section of this web site now enables the password for an account to be reset, with the result sent via e-mail to the address on file. The option to have the current password sent to your e-mail address has been removed.
System Decay Change	Solar system contents no longer decay to nothing if there is a player character in the system, even if they are not on line. This is specifically the final decay stage when the planets and moons would be removed due to inactivity. Previously characters in a system that decayed in this way would respawn elsewhere. Now they would most likely cause a new system to be created in which to spawn them.

6/18/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

Server Crash - Bad Door Index	Trapped a bug that caused servers to crash when an invalid door index was used to open a door of a spacecraft. The exact cause is still unknown but the servers won't crash any more. Instead, they will leave a bit of information in the log that may help find the problem.
Server Crash - Creature Environment	Fixed a bug that caused a server to crash when a creature was in an invalid location.
Body Pose Bug	Fixed a bug in the body posing code of player characters.

4/20/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

AI Pathing	Spent some considerable time fixing a bunch of bugs in AI pathing aboard spacecraft. Found some surprising errors. The AI is much better now. As always, there's room for improvement. Some changes affect the path analysis provided in the Design Studio. This will have to wait until the next client update.
Turret Fire Hits Ship In Design Studio	Fixed. This bug was claimed to be fixed once before with failed results. I think I got it this time.
Server Crash Due To Job Completion	A recent spate of server crashes was caused by completion of jobs. Nice to see people are using them more. Sorry for the hidden land mine. The problem is fixed.
Empire Standings Page Stopped Updating	Empire standings page stopped updating. The process depended on a really slow recursive query, resulting in a growing time to complete the task. The report process finally started taking over an hour to complete, at which point the next instance destroyed the temporary data being created by the running report process. That query and some others were optimized so the report takes about 4 minutes now. That slow recursive query was used by a data integrity cleanup process when starting the master server. The optimization cut about 1/2 hour off the startup time for the master server.
Empire Standings Totals	Added some totals information to the empire standings page.
Empire Standings Rankings	Added a ranking column for top-level empires.
Spacecraft Railings	Railings finally work in spacecraft. You can jump, fly, or float over them. You can also sight and shoot targets through railings. Previously, railing walls acted just like solid walls for all purposes.
Server Status During Startup	Server status now shows master server status while it is starting up. Previously, it would show Down during a long startup period in which the master was preparing or loading data. Now at least you can tell it is alive.

4/13/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

Scene Master Unit Changed	The scene master server ran out of RAM and had to move to a different unit. Unfortunatly that means the IP address of the scene master changed. The DNS change has been posted but it may take up to 24 hours to propagate to everyone. To play before the DNS propagates, you could add this entry to your hosts file. 74.63.187.81 scene.hazeron.net
Pilot Orbit Logic Changed	I was in the middle of working on pilot orbiting logic. It was barely tested when this server issue cropped up and demanded immediate attention. Pilots may be a little better now or they may be worse; we'll see.
Vehicle Destroyed In Bay Bug	Vehicle attacking a ship from inside the ship caused damage to the vehicle bay. A vehicle was determined to be destroyed. The attacking vehicle was selected and destroyed, to the surprise of the attacker. That bug was fixed.
Character Delete Bug	Finally trapped an elusive bug that managed to delete a small handfull of player characters over the past year. Player characters are never supposed to be deleted under any circumstances. There is no code in the system that explicitly deletes a character record from the database. Even when you delete a character at the startup page, they are only flagged as deleted, not really deleted.
Job Rewards	Job rewards are now mostly paid out of the citizens account rather than the govt account. This is mainly because the citizen account usually contains more money than the govt account.
Ship Commissions	Commissions paid to ship architects now come out of the citizen account rather than the govt account.

4/12/2012

What's new in this update?

Observatory	Observatory building added. An observatory only requires tools and building materials to construct, no special technology. It provides a ground-based navigation station just like on a space ship, except that you cannot set a route of waypoints. Walk to the center of the observatory to find the console.
Radar Station	Airport terminal now provides a ground-based sensor station like on a space ship, except that you cannot lock onto targets. Walk to the center of the airport terminal to find the console. This ground-based radar is usable at tech level 1; it's not until TL2 that sensors are miniaturized enough to go into a spacecraft. Yes, even a really really really big spacecraft. All sensor units in a city are added together, like on a space ship, to form a single radar system. Each airport terminal is equal to 1 sensor unit. Each defense base is equal to 10 sensor units. The radar system is the highest individual tech level of the airport terminals and defense bases. Sensor range of cities is not a change, just previously unpublished information. This is how sensor range for cities has always been calculated.
Hangar	Hangar building added. A hangar only requires tools and building materials to construct, no special technology. It provides a place for off-line mothball storage of spacecraft. A player can store one ship per hanger. The ship is stored invisibly out of the scene. Ships can be stored if the player is in it's chain of command or if the captain's berth is available to the player. Ships cannot be stored if any person is aboard. That means AI or players, on or off line. Any number of players can store ships in the same hangar. A player can launch their ship from a hanger. The ship launches into orbit above the hangar. An option permits the captain's berth to be assigned to the player automatically at launch. All ships stored in a hangar are lost if the hangar is destroyed. Ships can only be mothballed or launched from a hanger if the city is not an enemy toward them. Ships in hangars of cities captured by enemy are unaffected. They just become unavailable until politics change.
Pirate Station Spawn Bug	Pirate stations are supposed to be upgraded daily by a new station that is one tech level higher. They were getting upgraded with a new station of the same tech level. This meant that they stayed TL1 and would never go away. That bug was fixed.
City Visitation Bug	City visitation is supposed to be automatic for all the cities in your character's home sector. Due to a bug, all the cities in your character's empire were visited instead. That bug was fixed. The cities still think they were visited if you logged in recently.
Officer Sell For Free Bug	Officers should now accept 0 as payment when told to sell something and accept any price. I haven't tested this.
Map Compass Size	A spinbox was added to the Locator to adjust the size of the compass image. This affects the Compass page and the Map page separately.
Map Zone Info	Locator map now shows zone number, latitude zone, elevation zone, and foliage present at crosshair location.
Agent Teleport Bug	Fixed a body positioning bug when an agent teleported to a player.
Private Ships Don't Spawn Any More	Private ships no longer respawn when they are destroyed. Instead, they are removed from the scene just like any other destroyed ship. Then they are stored off-line until summoned. The player respawns at their home city instead of their ship when their ship is off-line. Any person on the roster of the ship can then summon the ship to their location by hailing for it on the Crew channel. The ship spawns overhead in orbit, in the state it would have been when it used to respawn, that is, mostly destroyed. Controls for spawn tieing a ship were removed.
Spawn Terminology	Spawn Recall renamed to Recall Home. Spawn Tie renamed to Declare Home City. These terms seem more understandable to someone not hip to MMO lingo, where the term spawn does not mean fish laying eggs in a stream.
Bio Shows Berthed Ship and Home City	The name of the ship on which you are berthed is now shown on the Bio (F8) window. The name of the city you declared to be your home city is also shown. These will not update until the next time you take a berth or declare a home city.
Spacecraft Page Shows Berthed Ship	The Governance (F12) Spacecraft page now shows the name of the ship where you hold a berth, on the Release Berth button. This will not update until the next time you take a berth.

4/5/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only.

Update
Login And Server Handoff Delays	Long delays, up to a few minutes, at login and during solar system transitions were becoming worse. The delays were caused when new sectors were created. This was due to the increasing number of sectors and solar systems, which is currently at 94,545 and 1,190,237 respectively. The culprit was a painfully slow search routine used when stitching the wormholes together between new and existing sectors. The search was optimized so the delay should no longer be significant.
Officers No Longer Prevent City Decay	Cities no longer consider visits by officers to their solar system to be adequate contact with the empire. They want a human player to visit their system. Cities incur a -1 morale penalty for every 4 days since their system was last visited by a human player. Previously, visits could include AI officers aboard a ship.
Home Sector Wake Up Call	A character is now considered to visit the cities of their home sector whenever they are on line. Their home sector is the sector that contains the city they are currently spawn tied to. The spawn city is notified of the character being on line. If the city's empire is still empire, friend, or vassal toward the character's empire, the city notifies all other cities in the sector that are the same empire as the city, not the player's empire. All cities that are the same empire as the spawn city are considered to be visited by a human for decay prevention purposes.

Bullion Production Overflow	Fixed a 16-bit overflow when a manufacturing process created more than 32,767 items. The current client will show a max of 32,767 when a process makes more than that. The client-side fix is postponed because I didn't want to force everybody to download an update just for this one bug.
Ship Decay	Spacecraft on road slabs will now decay if they have no officers on the roster, either human or AI. A ship must have a human or AI officer on the roster to prevent decay. Sorry, all those parking lots full of unused ships must go.
First Person Message Context	The context of server messages sent to a player was changed to first-person. These messages usually represent quiet thoughts of your character and first person seemed more appropriate.
Inaccessible Parts In City Inventory	Fixed a bug that caused some items to be inaccessible in a city's inventory. They were showing as multiple item groups in the inventory. Those multiple groups were combined; multiple groups will no longer be created.
Position Of Pirate Station In Ring	Pirate stations were positioned incorrectly in rings.
Pirate Ship Spawn	Pirate ship spawn rules were tweaked slightly. The significant change is that players may now trigger pirate ship encounters. Pirate station encounters are still only triggered by AI officers in command of a ship. The Pirates page in the Game Manual has details.
Redeem Govt Debt Message	A message is now generated when you redeem govt debt to report the results.
Scan Report Wormholes	Wormholes on scan reports will now indicate whether or not they are charted by your empire.

4/2/2012

What's new in this update? Server update only. Not many changes. Other activities created a distraction for a few days.

Pirate Stations Not Spawning	Thanks Ikkir for tipping me off to this one. Fixed a minor bug that prevented TL1 pirate stations from spawning.
Pirate Ship Self Destruct	Pirate ships were sometimes not finishing their self destruct sequence until they appeared in someone's scene. This caused them to hang around when they could otherwise be cleaned up and deleted by the server.
Pirate Officer Suicide	A few pirate officers were found drifting EVA in space when they should have deleted themselves. This caused them to hang around when they could otherwise be cleaned up and deleted by the server.
Economic System Documenation	Game manual now contains documentation explaining the ecomonic system.
Warp Drive Documentation	Game manual now contains documentation explaining how to operate warp drives.
Training Mission Documentation	Game manual now briefly describes the two training missions Getting Started and Rocket Training. Descriptions include conditions necessary to trigger them and the rewards earned.