Server Crash
The servers crashed three times in the past few days. Two crashes happened over the weekend.

All three crashes were caused by the same bug, triggered by a spacecraft lighting up its FTL drive while someone aboard was in a design studio instance. The bug was fixed.

Stellar Black Holes
I had a to-do item to make more black holes that are not supermassive black holes.

Stellar black holes may now be encountered as you explore the universe.

• These are the smallest of the black holes and they do not have intergalactic wormholes.
  
• Stellar black holes are always accompanied by one or two companion stars that may have planets.
  
• Wormholes in a black hole system terminate at the first companion star, like at the core. Errors were fixed here. They may have been positioned incorrectly at the core, before this update.
  

• Neutron stars are the dead husks of large stars that went supernova, not quite massive enough to collapse further and form a black hole.
  
• Neutron stars have twice the mass of regular stars. This is adequate for game purposes.
  
• Neutron stars spin. The surface speed of some real ones approaches the speed of light.
  
• Neutron stars pulse in a repeating pattern that is unique to every neutron star.
  
• Neutron stars pulse in the visible light spectrum, though most real ones emit only invisible radiation.
  
• Neutron stars may be primary or companion stars.
  

Whenever I try to take off in a helicopter or rocket, things get real laggy. I lowered settings in graphics but I don't think it is that as I have no lag at any other time. as soon as you get away from the city things get better. You don't even have to be looking at the city, you could be looking up at space and the lag is still so bad. Makes flying near / around cities impossible. for landing I just aim from far away and hope for the best.

I really want cloaking shields to make an appearance, at last. They've been tantalizing us on that list for ages. I've been replaying some Mass Effect recently, which has a lot of lore about stealth systems, and I thought some of their concepts would translate quite well to Hazeron's existing mechanics.

Detection in Hazeron basically works by emissions. We know this because of the "emissions" detected on your starmap, and because spacecraft on the ground without power can't be detected. As in Mass Effect, your "cloaking shield" could basically be a giant heat sink. It can absorb emissions up to a certain threshold, after which it has to be discharged. While active, a cloaking shield would protect a city or a ship from sensor scans and negate any starmap emissions. You couldn't lock onto it to fire a weapons bay, but you could look out of a window and see it, transport aboard it with manual aiming, shoot it with a turret etc.

The cloaking shield system would have an absorption rate and a buffer. The system would use heat sinks for a buffer, more advanced sinks (vulcium) being more effective than simpler ones. A Cloaking Shield Module (perhaps divided into tiers, like warp drives?) would modify the effectiveness of the sinks, according to its own quality. The volume of the system would define the absorption rate. Let's say a Q255 vulcium heat sink, used by a Q255 shield system, gives you a buffer of 10 joules (obviously the real value will be astronomically higher: many terajoules). Your ship draws 5 watts of power when manouevring normally. If you have 10 heat sinks in your hold, you can stay cloaked for 20 seconds, till all are consumed. Now, your system volume gives you an absorption rate of 3 watts. You are now putting the 2 overflow watts into the buffer, so you can last 50 seconds. When the buffer is full, or when the shield is deactivated, your ship will vent the stored energy in a burst, allowing it to be detected, possibly at long distances. In this example, using low power ratings, a Q87 system using Q87 cryo sinks might only buffer .3 joules per sink. If you have no sinks, you can't activate the shield at all. You need X sinks to press start- maybe enough for 10x the "idling consumption per second" value?

If you reduce your power draw, hurtle through a system with grav drives and sensors off, shields down etc., you might be able to stay cloaked for a long time. Some ships might be able to cloak permanently,but they would be good for little else. Perhaps you can't fire or use transporters while cloaked. Black Ops bases with good supply chains and low power requirements might be able to stay cloaked indefinitely. But warping around, manouevring or running lots of manufacturing processes will quickly exhaust your heat sinks. 

I'll run some numbers, but I think this could be quite a solid basic mechanic. Any thoughts?

Would like the production facilities to have smoke coming out when they are working. or even add the strobe light for different effects.

Crew loaded from my main shipyard are no longer using EVA suits, clothing or laser pistols, even though these are plentifully available. They are naked with wrenches.

Troops are fine, with vulcium armour and laser rifles.

I could not transfer funds from one galaxy to another, in the same zone. Suspected relic of the old galactic discontinuities?

I received a message, "Funds have been transferred. We will both receive &c." No funds were actually received.

Do you see what I see? Filters on, but only two options on the police station. Not to mention I have the henri station on media in my backpack. Also when I publish designs in the designer they do not show up. 

I saw that we were limited to just one head light. 

Wondering if it is still just as complicated if we could have more but only 1 could be on at a time and can be controlled at one of the stations? 

I am thinking a turret light, a hover light, a docking light. ect... You wouldn't need them all on at once but maybe being able to cycle which one is on.

Bulldozer Broken
Bulldozer is broken in old style cities. It does nothing. You cannot delete buildings.

Fixed a logic error in recent changes to select items under the cursor. This was the primary reason for the update today. The bug was too obnoxious to let it live all weekend.

Creature Turn Jolt
Creatures sometimes make a strange jolt when they start turning.

The sudden huge turn bug, recently fixed in spacecraft, existed in two other places in the code, animals and sentients. They are now fixed.

NPCs Repeat
When talking to NPCs, they often repeat their responses.

Improved NPC decisions about what to say. They will now rarely repeat things they have said recently.

Design Preview Crashed Server
A server crashed because of a preview in a designer.

Fixed a bug where a pointer was accessed by the designer in a way that was not thread safe.

Server Deadlock
A server locked last night.

Reworked some code to prevent deadlock.

STL Import/Export
I had a note to import STL files if no license was required.

The STL file format is described here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STL_(file_format). The file format is not proprietary and it was trivial to implement. Here are some key facts.

• The STL file format is commonly supported by 3D printers.
  
• File data can be either binary or ASCII format.
  
• The file unit of measure is not defined.
  
• There is only one solid model in each file.
  
• The file only contains surface triangles.
  
• There is no color, texture, transparency or other information to describe the appearance of each triangle.
  

• Binary and ASCII formats are supported.
  
• The unit of measure is specified when imported.
  
• The solid in the file is imported as a mesh, at the current position of the grid.
  

• Data is exported to the file in binary format. I wrote an ASCII exporter. The files are a bit bigger. Does anyone need the option to export in ASCII format?
  
• The unit of measure is specified when exported.
  
• The current position of the grid determines the position of the exported solid.
  
• Visible faces of parts are exported.
  
• Doors, landing gear, turbo lifts, and turrets are exported in their current states.
  
• Hidden parts are not exported.
  
• Parts invisible in the final model are not exported. e.g. voids, barriers, paths, etc. You don't have to hide them to get a sensible export.
  

Some cities will vastly overstate the number of manufacturing jobs they have running. For example, in one city that only has 2000 mining jobs plus maybe 25 others, it reports 15k manufacturing processes being run.

Edit: possibly related to http://hazeron.com/mybb/showthread.php?tid=323 ?