Haxus has, without warning, given up on Shores of Hazeron. Ironically, this happened like a week after he finally added client-side movement prediction, which was one of the biggest complaints people have had over the years.

SoH was one of the most frustrating games I've ever played, but I loved it anyway. For all its many flaws, it was a free Linux-supporting online space game with entire procedural galaxies to explore, planets to land on, and the ability to design and build custom ships, stations, and cities. You started out on an undeveloped planet with nothing but a torch and a knife. You'd build a city building by building, mine and extract resources, establish industry to produce tools and components, expand, and eventually build spacecraft. They were proper SF craft with artificial gravity and hallways. You'd lay out the rooms and modules with a CAD program, and when the ship was built you could walk around in it, sit down at various consoles, manually repair/dismantle systems, etc. You could add vehicle bays and drive motorcycles and other vehicles into it; you could even make a big carrier craft and land smaller craft inside it. And once you took it up into space, you could point it at any star in the sky and fly there. You could go to other planets and systems and build more colonies. You could get AI officers to fly cargo ships around collecting resources from your frontier colonies and hauling them back to your industrial worlds, or have them patrol for enemies. As you continued searching and expanding to find better resources, you built up an entire empire. You could cooperate with or attack other players' empires as well (though the combat mechanics were fairly rough).

It was a great compliment to VO and KSP; pretty much what EVE should have become. But now it's dead.

I think I'm going to binge-play VO for the rest of the night or something.

That's a shame. After hearing about the movement update a few days ago I was about to start playing again.

Awe :-( I'm a miss it, didn't play much recently - well I don't play anything much atm - but will miss haz. Legocar is dead, long live Lego!

Perhaps it still lives after all, or at least it will live again eventually. He made another post on the site:

Shores of Hazeron is morphing into a different game. It may be back sooner than you think, sort of. Ship designs and DNA may play a role. Lots of juicy code needs to be distilled; we'll see what remains.

Check here once in a while for updates.

New post by the Haxus:

December 15, 2014

I've received a fair bit of e-mail asking for some sort of status on the future of this game project. I apologize for not answering every single one. This post will have to suffice.

Shores of Hazeron is a gigantic software project, perhaps more than I can get done. I've been working like a madman for months developing a smaller-scale game from the vast code base of SoH. The primary goal is to pull together a complete, concise, playable game that I could get done. It has of course taken longer than expected but its almost there.

Close on its heels, I have another game concept that I will likely pursue. It will also draw heavily from the SoH source code, though in an entirely different way. The goal of this game is the same as the first, to get it done, playable and posted.

After those two games are finished, I may return to working on Shores of Hazeron. I kind of miss it.

I hope that was enough information for the curious.

Looks like the new game has kind of started, it has a name at least http://gw.softwareengineering.com/

Not accepting new accounts at this time, but I'm a keep trying ;D

Looks like SoH without DNA or any kind of design (cities, buildings, ships). I wonder if there will be a limit to how many empires can fit in the new, smaller universe space, forcing players to join existing empires, or if it will run several universes simultaneously.

I hope he fixed sundiving and planet-crashing AI. :P

Fri Feb 6, 2015
Ok, we're on! Gravity Well 6 is officially on line as of today.

Go easy on me if there's trouble. Long-time friends know that I am extremely responsive to software issues.

I have to admit to being extra nervous today. It's probably because there's money on the line. Shores of Hazeron was free. With Gravity Well there is definitely a higher level of concern that we get this right.

Thank you for your interest in Gravity Well; it's very encouraging.

Best regards,

Haxus

Looks like its game off, unless someone tells me otherwise :(

I can't believe he made it paid. I'll deal with bad AI, crazy bugs, and 90s graphics for a grand scale and free space/empire sim, but paying for all that is not appealing.

Still got a VO subscription? ;P

At least lately they're moving away from the 90's graphics. :)

Caught that did you? ;P

For all its flaws, VO will always be special to me and I'll be subbed if I can afford it. SoH, on the other hand, needs something else to make it worthwhile.

Update from Haxus:

Feb 8, 2015

Friends,

Shores of Hazeron is off line for now. It may be back some day.

If you would like to play my latest game, go to the Gravity Well web site.

Shores of Hazeron players will find the appearance of Gravity Well to be very Hazeronesque. Don't be fooled though, it's not the same game. It is a complete finished game, not subject to the constant barrage of changes due to active development. A few minor issues cropped up upon initial release; those will be fixed but then it's done.

Once Gravity Well is off and running I plan to work on another small-scale game before returning to Shores of Hazeron.

Thanks for playing.

Yours truly,

Haxus

Ooh, exciting!

Feb 10, 2015

I may have been pursuaded to revive this beast. Give me two or three weeks, maybe a little more.

There was some discussion on the topic here.

Haxus

Hmm. So it sounds like he's going to fire it back up, but mostly ignore it for now while he continues working on other stuff. I probably won't return to the game until he actually resumes development and gets around to either finishing the survey management interface or adding an export button. The way it is now, exporting the data by hand means copy/pasting it body-by-body, which would be incredibly tedious. But if you don't do that, you have no way to search the data, meaning you'd have to go through it all manually. And to hell with that.

But at least we have solid confirmation that he is going to resume working on it eventually. That's great. :D

It's almost up already! http://www.hazeron.com/

New accounts are still disabled in SoH for another day or so, until I get the last few pieces worked out. I do not intend to work tomorrow. It is Sunday and I have chores around the farm to take care of.

I have already made changes to restrict players to a 9x9x7 sector box in the Shores of Hazeron galaxy. One side-effect of that is that system transitions now occur at sector boundaries where previously you could be well into the next sector before transition occurred, So now the space is a combination of cubic sectors, subdivided by sector bounded Dirichlet domains, which are the solar systems.

I'm going to make the download free so potential players can be sure it runs on their computer.

Then I'm going to charge a monthly fee.

I am going to charge $10 per month to play. I will also add a Donate button for those who feel peculiarly generous.

-Haxus

http://gw.softwareengineering.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3&start=150

Many of the dedicated players in that forum thread specifically requested a paid subscription model to support Hazeron and Haxus. I guess I'll have to try it out.

Didn't enjoy Gravity 6 much, but I did try _all_ the Gravity games before Hazeron. Errm, Gravity kind of used to be like space invaders/worms/lemmings with ships so it's defo a new idea. I'm so glad SoH is coming back, and I will defo give up $10USD a month to support the resurrection of Haz for a bit.

Game's up and running. He's got an update out already that fixed a couple bugs.

http://www.hazeron.com/status.php

More people online than there was when I played (usually averaged 20-60), even with the sub fee.