Mechanized Assault & eXploration Reloaded

M.A.X.R. (Mechanized Assault and eXploration Reloaded) is a fanmade strategy game by the community of maxr.org. M.A.X.R. is OpenSource and a remake of the old M.A.X. by Interplay from 1996 featuring network games based on TCP/IP (e.g. over the internet). The game can be played in a turn-based mode (with or without time limit), or simultaneous mode (all the players take their turns at the same time), and features combat in air, land, and sea. Three resources are present on the maps - raw materials, that are needed to manufacture units, structures and ammunition, fuel, that power generators need to function, and gold, that is used to purchase upgrades. This game is a mix of realtime and turnbased strategy with battle chess character. It is released under the GPLv2 and GFDL (see COPYING and COPYING.README)

The project was founded 2007 by Albert (alzi) Ziegenhagel and Bernd (beko) Kosmahl and is based on "MM's Max". The original author Michael Mönch, who wrote the first version of "MM's Max", had no time for his project any more and offered the source to anyone who asked for it. M.A.X.R. represents the hope and wishes of many M.A.X. fans all over the world to play M.A.X. bugless and in multiplayer mode over the internet using TCP/IP.

Soon after the founding Eiko (eiko) Oltmanns joined the team and together M.A.X.R. learned TCP/IP in no time. The Win API was completly removed and translation support was added. Beeing POSIX compatible and available on english M.A.X.R. became international very fast and after the joining of Paul (pagra) Grathwohl a Mac hacker had been found too. The source was made little/big endian safe and can now be compiled on any POSIX compatible system - even on AmigaOS. After two years of development M.A.X.R. even made it into some major GNU/Linux distributions like Fedora.

Due copyright issues the additional tool "resinstaller" has been written. Since maxr.org is not allowed to distribute licensed material like graphics and sounds of the original game M.A.X.R. was in need for an original game CD for a long time. The resinstaller does it's magic by extracting and copying the needed files to their proper places in the M.A.X.R.'s folder structure and their required file formats. Beside covering missing files the fans of the original game could configure their M.A.X.R. installation to be as close to the original as it is possible.

That was however only the first step. The team realized early that the resinstaller was nice indeed but only players with the original CD could be reached that way. A game that requires a no longer distributed CD - means no way to obtain a legal copy nowadays - was pretty useless. As a conclusion the creation of a free graphics set started in 2008 and shipped today M.A.X.R. can be played as standalone too.

The goals of M.A.X.R. are still the same as in the beginning: Beeing a remake of the original featuring network games. The team focused on this fact and network playing works pretty stable today. Some features are still missing - like single player missions, hot seat mode and AI.

MAXR is known to work on the following operation systems and distributions:

AmigaOS4 Fedora Linux GNU/Linux Mac OSX Windows

...to be continued