DescentBB

Before I lose anyone in the length of this post, allow me to make a quick summary:

• New PC game, "Shores of Hazeron".
• First-person MMO, in open testing, completely free to play.
• **The in-game universe will reset on Friday, June 18th!**

Intrigued? Even if not, read on... I think some folks here might find this interesting.




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As promised in a previous thread, allow me to give you all a quick teaser about an online game being developed by the software company I work for, called "Shores of Hazeron".

Yes, the company I work for (Software Engineering, Inc., we primarily develop specialty CAD applications) is jumping into the PC gaming business.

Years ago, 'Hazeron' was a pet project of Dave H., the company founder and CEO. However, it's been steadily getting more serious, and a couple of my co-workers are now spending significant time working on it. [Before anyone asks, I'm not directly involved. However, I definitely get to see some of the code and hear the chatter about features, etc.]

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Q. What kind of game is Shores of Hazeron?

I suppose I should start with part of the official description:

The Hazeron welcome page wrote:[link]:
Shores of Hazeron is an ambitious and revolutionary game of science fiction adventure, intrigue, and war.

...
Have you ever wanted to play a game with no boundaries?
There are no boundaries in Hazeron. Pick a nearby star in the sky and go there. Explore its planets and moons. Build cities and defenses. Expand your empire and prepare to meet the enemy.

Do you want to discover strange new worlds, beam down and see what's there?
There are millions of worlds and trillions of plants and quadrillions of creatures in Hazeron that no person has ever seen, not even us. That's not a worn out movie set down below; it's a dense jungle on the coast of a continent; something lives there.

Have you dreamed about the starship you would drive?
The Enterprise? Nostromo? The Millennium Falcon? A Death Star? Perhaps the Battlestar Galactica? Maybe a Borg cube is more your style? In Hazeron you design your own deck plans and lay out the systems of your spacecraft, balancing performance against capability, mass against force. Then you manufacture them and climb aboard.
...

Q. Huh?

Okay, rather than specifications, how about a teaser? Here are some of my experiences as an early tester last year, along with some screenshots:

[Disclaimer: Some of the in-game graphics are still rough, and many of my screenshots below are from over a year ago, so they include lower-quality models/textures. There is still a lot of graphical work to be done, but the core functionality of the game is in place, it is very stable, and it performs well.]

• Characters
  
  So, the first thing when you sign up for an account (again, it's completely free right now!) is character creation; put together your character's DNA, or choose to join an existing empire's race. The creature-DNA system is pretty cool; one can create a six-legged, four-armed, two-headed creature with horns, a mandible and scales... or a little humanoid with fur and wings and a long tail... or whatever you'd like.
  
  
• Gameplay
  
  Starting off, one's earliest choice is whether to start a new empire (thus starting from scratch), or join an existing one (which leaves you less influential, but may give you immediate access to technology/ships/etc.).
• Local environment
  
  After creating my character, and spawning for the first time in what turned out to be a mountainous polar area, I started exploring. One thing that amazed me was the seemingly infinite variety of species I encountered, including the plant life. In just a couple of hours, I had spotted dozens of different types of creatures with different ecological roles and behaviors, including some species who only come out at night...
• Planets
  
  This, of course, brings me to my planet itself. As I said, I happened to start in a polar mountainous area, but it wasn't long before I found my way to a more temperate area, with vegetation, an ocean, and even some rocky desert-like terrain. Great place to start a city (more on this later...).
  
  One of the very first things I noticed about my planet is that the local sun is very very close, it fills a huge section of the sky, and everything is lit brightly when it's up. Something worth noting is that planet/moon motions are somewhat realistic - the planet actually has an orbit and a rotation which drive sunrises and sunsets, day and night. Here's a shot of the sun setting over the mountains nearby:
  
  
  Note the clouds! From what I understand, planetary weather patterns are actually modeled after real-world dynamics. They have different layers and move with changing winds. I've even seen precipitation (rain/snow) from time to time.
  
  There is one particular experience in my early exploration that I have to mention. Not too long after I started the game, I saw something absolutely huge on the horizon. As it rose, it became clear that it was another planet! As it turns out, I am on a small planet orbiting an absolutely massive gas giant. So I get views like this pretty often:
  
• Technology / Development
  
  As I was starting a new empire from scratch, one of the first things I had to do was get my cities started. Thus I had to learn the art of city planning/building:
  
  
  This 'SimCity'-ish interface seemed a little odd for a first-person game, but it actually works well. It's considerably better than trying to run around in first-person and setting building locations (you can do so, but it's a pain).
  
  
  With some work, the city grew in population and technology, and now has a stable self-running economy. It's been there for over a year (real-time) now, without monitoring, and continues to produce technology, commodities, and funds.
  
  
  ...Okay, now I can get to some of the really fun stuff:
• Travel & Exploration
  
  You know the famous phrase, "First star to the right, and straight on 'til morning"? Well, those stars aren't just aesthetic, they're actually places you can go! Build a spacecraft, head toward it, and eventually you will arrive in that star system, with whatever planets/moons/cities/etc. are there.
  
  Of the most impressive things I've found about Hazeron is that it's highly seamless. Unless you're travelling between sectors, there are no loading screens. Transitions when entering/exiting a planet's atmosphere, or entering/exiting ships and vehicles, are handled 'on the fly'.
  
  Yep, you can walk along the mountains or an ocean floor, get in a rocket and go to a moonbase, build a spaceship, go to another system, and walk a shoreline there... all without a single break or load-screen.
• Space
  
  On a clear sky at night, you can see hundreds of stars:
  
  
  (The one on the left is an older screenshot, before some graphical work was added.)
  
  As I mentioned before, the explorable universe in this game is INCREDIBLY vast. It's literally GALACTIC in scale. Allow me to illustrate:
  
  Planetary/moon surface -> Star system -> Sector (each with multiple systems) -> Explored sectors map -> Galaxy
  
  -> -> -> ->
  
  Every sector in the game is unique, with a huge variety of stars, planets, moons... and rarely, even a ringworld!
  
  
  Note: The game is scaled to be playable, but it can still take time to get from place to place, especially if you don't yet have warp/wormhole technology. Fortunately, all new players start pretty close to each other, galactically-speaking. Hopefully this makes for more frequent and interesting encounters/battles.
• Ships
  
  There are a few small built-in vehicles you can use early in the game (boats, cars, etc.), but one of the primary goals of the game is to develop your empire's technology to the point that you can start designing and constructing your own custom space stations and ships.
  
  [Note that this isn't "assemble pre-defined ship parts". This is much more like, "walk into a holodeck and lay out the blueprint" (literally, you walk into a studio with an array of tools for creating a very complex structure).
  
  Just for example, here are a few of the user ship/station designs that have been created and appeared in-game. One might look pretty familiar...
  
• Controls
  
  Obviously, Shores of Hazeron isn't a simple game that can be picked up immediately. There's a steep learning curve... but somehow I don't think that will be a problem for folks here; this *is* the Descent BB, after all.
  
  There are a LOT of controls, but nearly all of them are customize-able, including joystick input!
  
  The thing that took the most getting used to (and one of the things I began to really appreciate) is that the game is heavily windowed. Felt a little clumsy at first, but I found that being able to stretch and re-arrange all my controls was quite handy at times.
• Combat
  
  I don't have much experience with combat beyond a few scrapes with carnivorous creatures, simply because I never got to the point where I could create ships and send soldiers into battle. However, I can tell you that the guys working on this have been doing some serious work on battle encounters (both local and ship-to-ship). I'll post more about this at some point.

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<Sigh> I'd like to add more, but it's late, and I'd better get to sleep. I'll try to answer questions over the weekend as I get the chance.

Hopefully this triggers some interest, and perhaps a few of us can create a DBB empire powerful enough to rival my boss.

I don't suppose there is a Linux client?

I always had a dream of a game similar to this from around when I first played Solar Winds, which an old 2d adventure/\"rpg\" space game. You could fly around, visit other planets, communicate with them, accept missions, and so on. All cool. However, when you fully upgraded your sensors, the fully zoomed out map revealed a host of star systems, but you could never travel to all but a few of them due to an \"alien forcefield.\" I thought at the time (when I had first played the game, its technology was already well dated), \"I'd pay a lot of money for a game of this simple level of technology if it had *millions* of inhabited star systems and planets.\"

I think the one dimension in which my dream game and the one you're linking to differs is that in mine, planets would already be largely pre-inhabited by intelligent aliens with interesting histories and cultures that already have missions for you. However, in your game, it looks like you're taking an automatic generation approach to solve the numbers problem? If so, I assume then that you are not generating anything on the order of intelligent species, certainly not with unique histories and cultures? I suppose that in your game, the onus of creating histories and cultures is on the player. But from a perspective of strictly exploration, I wonder many *uniquely* *interesting* worlds your game is capable of generating, as perhaps that would be a more meaningful statistic, albeit more fuzzy. I think the lack of some scripted intelligent societies on these planets might hamper this number. In general, I'm sure there is an \"interesting\" versus \"easy to generate\" tradeoff here. Even if you had a team of humans creating all of the worlds, all things being equal, the more worlds they had to create, the less interesting they would be.

In any case, I don't have enough free time for an MMO right now, but I will keep this in the back of my mind, especially if there's a Linux client.

Foil, that link you provided returns a 404 error, I tried it without the \"index.html\" part and it worked. just thought you should know.


http://www.hazeron.com/

Jeff250 wrote:I don't suppose there is a Linux client?

Shores of Hazeron built on Microsoft Windows, 32 bits.
Shores of Hazeron built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 32 bits.
Shores of Hazeron built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 64 bits.
Shores of Hazeron built on Ubuntu 8.04, 32 bits.
Shores of Hazeron built on Ubuntu 8.04, 64 bits.

I didn't read everything, but it looks pretty cool.

I'll have to tell my brother about this.

AlphaDoG wrote:Foil, that link you provided returns a 404 error, I tried it without the "index.html" part and it worked. just thought you should know.


http://www.hazeron.com/

Thanks, AD.

I tried to edit the post, but it appears the db issues are causing a timeout.

Apologies for the link, folks.

Jeff250 wrote:I don't suppose there is a Linux client?

Absolutely, there is.

Jeff250 wrote:I think the one dimension in which my dream game and the one you're linking to differs is that in mine, planets would already be largely pre-inhabited by intelligent aliens with interesting histories and cultures that already have missions for you. However, in your game, it looks like you're taking an automatic generation approach to solve the numbers problem? If so, I assume then that you are not generating anything on the order of intelligent species, certainly not with unique histories and cultures?

The species generated for each habitable planet have ecological roles and behaviors, and certainly interact with you (I've been killed by some monstrously huge carnivores, for example), but no history/culture.

That said, one of the more recent developments in the game is a "story" system. I haven't seen it, but my understanding is that it provides a sort of adventure mechanism, with various species as the characters. Users even have access to a "story editor". If there are many questions on this, I might try to get the creator in here to answer them.

FYI:

With many players trying to get a jump-start on their empire after today's universe reset, there will be a number of people on the Hazeron TeamSpeak server (ts . hazeron . net) this evening.

The game creator and developers will all be available there, so if anyone is interested, tonight would be a great time to start.

Update: The Shores of Hazeron universe is wiped clean, and is now open for new empires!

A \"Descenters\" empire has been created.

Well, in only a day or so since the universe reset, FOUR empires have already developed enough to show up on the Empire Status List, and three of them have developed the technology for building custom spacecraft.

That said, Matthew from PlanetDescent has created a \"Post Terran Mining Corporation\" empire (he deserves some props for starting well as a new player), and I've joined with a character on another planet. With some work, we should also have similar technology soon.

I'll post again when we have space technology; players who want to skip the 'building' phase and just jump into a world with cities and vehicles and spaceships available can wait until then.

Update:

The PTMC empire now has a capital city, and some minimal space technology. If anyone wants to start a player and join, you'll start in a city with vehicles/weapons/rockets/spacefighters/etc.

I would like to bumpify this thread.

We've now gone way past those simple ships and fighters. We are now developing bigger and badder things such as Matt's new Avenger class Battleship with extremely powerful shields and whopping huge twin super laser batteries! That baby will be an \"unstopable force\" that does not and will never know the meaning of an \"unmovable object!\"

There's also my soon to be developed S-2 Spy Hunter AWACS (Advanced Warning And Control System) with twin laser batteries, a decent count of internal shield generators, max armor, max hit points, and a sensor range of about 2 MILLION meters! That's HUUUUUGE in this game! It'll be able to see our entire solar system from any point within it! That's enough to see my enemy, his house, and his mama's house!
Future designs include a small hanger as well! \"lol Some AWACS \" says Matt!

C'mon! The devs have been itching for a fight and a fight they will have! A fight that they cannot possibly win! The only thing that can save them would be their admin powers!
So we must over come that! There is ALWAYS strength in numbers! We need starship captains to man our ships that are constantly idling at the bases, collecting dust. The enemy shall be defeated quickly, and the PTMC will be at the head of the universe, just like in Descent! It's Manifest Destiny!

So what are you waiting for? It's all right here!


Be all you'll ever be, in the PTMC!
Prepare for Descent!



EDIT: I've just recieved the best news that I've heard all day! Matt's ship IS NOW COMBAT PROVEN to be the juggernaught of space! His powerful lasers snuffed out the power and engines on an enemy ship, causing it do drift into the sun. Matt just watched and laughed as our arch enemy was helpless to save himself! A humiliating defeat for our enemies! More fuel for our fires of determination! Onwards! To infinity, and beyond!

I know this is an older topic, but I just got into Hazeron myself and though there are some issues (LAG, Graphics, LAG, and UI), it is fascinating.

It makes me think a bit of Mankind (www.mankind.net - A MMORTS) in its scope, but this is even bigger.

Now if we could merge this with Infinity (http://www.infinity-universe.com/) and the I-Novae engine... whoo boy would that be great!

-Matt

I hear that the lag has finally been fixed, but the ultimate test for that would be to give Terra a visit.

Graphics are practically at the very bottom of the priorities list (and mine). Most of the stuff are place holders. This is only very early beta. BTW, they just added engine trails and they made the wormholes look awesome a long time ago. Becides, graphics are the first 5 minutes or less of the game. Then gameplay is forever. You've played D1/D2, right?

AI guys definately need work, though.

I downloaded the client, but can't seem to get it to work. I start the game and enter my log-in information, but then I'm stuck at the \"getting account info\" screen indefinently. Anyone know a solution to this problem?

EDIT: After 15 minutes I got a message that I couldn't connect to server; try again later.

I think I'll try again later.

They have been messing with the servers a lot lately... go to the Shores of Hazeron website to see if the servers are up before you try to log in.

Even with the servers down, you usually can get past the getting account info, but you can't go further than that afterwords when the servers are down.

Someone else is having similar problems on the forums. Nobody in the community knows how to fix it. The devs will get around to everyone's technical problems in due time. Stability and lag are their first priorities.


Honestly, it's a thing of chance that you have the right combonations of hardware and software to get the game running from the start.

Try updating your drivers.
If that doesn't work, throw your hands into the air. Next, try to scream a lot. That way we know antother one can't log on. Then bring your fists down on the keyboard repeatedly at high speed. Then chuck it like a frizbe out of the room. Finally, grab the monitor and ram your head through it and wear it like a necklace until next Thursday when the devs usually release a new client.

Hope this helps.