Mechanized Assault & eXploration Reloaded

Subject: 0.2.9 commentary

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First of all: 0.2.9 is great. The code re-work is brilliant, and nearly all of those things that didn't work in 0.2.8 are now working properly.

Thank you very much. After a few days of playing and hacking around the code, I have a list of comments on various things, none of which are crucial. They are all just about putting the final polish on things. They are in no particular order, mostly as they occurred to me while playing.

- option "Click to Scroll" which stops the screen scrolling when the mouse hits the screen edge.

- option to "Invert mouse zoom", a common option in all programs that use the mouse wheel to zoom the way MAXR does. BTW it absolutely great that the zoom targets the mouse cursor.

- Build paths for engineers and constructors are not saved, or are not restored correctly.

- HOME, END, UP, DOWN, PAGEUP, PAGEDOWN need to work in the build menus. Perhaps DELETE too. One of the dialogs still doesn't have ESCAPE/ENTER working yet.

- The original had the term "exploding" for the description in the unitVideo/unitDetails widget (top left) after a unit had been hit.

- Mobile units had the menu option "Enter" as the corresponding action for "Load" in the Depot/Hangar/etc, so you can tell a unit to Enter the depot, in addition to requesting the depot to Load the unit.

- Get the window positioning hotkeys [ALT]F5-F8 into keys.xml so they can be changed. All of the ALT-F keys are scooped by my window manager.

- Date format in the saved games. I like YYYY-MM-DD, but at least it's not MM-DD-YY. Is it possible to put the format string into maxr.xml so it can be suited to user? (and not argued over until end of time:)

- occasionally unitNext ignores an engineer or constructor who is just finished building. I'm not yet sure why this is. Maybe its movement was exactly 0 when it started building? That's just a guess.

- In 0.2.8, the files menu was like PAUSE, the game went into lazy idle and the CPU settled down. In order to PAUSE in 0.2.9, I have to suspend the process (CTRL-Z). Also I liked it better when the files menu came up over top of the main screen like a dialog. Now it blacks the main screen out. I prefer the previous behavior.

Please feel free to disagree or comment, I would very much like to hear other opinions.

I'll try to offer patches for the ones I can, as I get around to them.

Again, thank you for the awesome work.

Take care.

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Subject: Re: 0.2.9 commentary

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Hi mdooligan,

thank you very much for the feedback


Of course this would be great! Nevertheless I think it would make sense to open some issues on the bug tracker for your points.


That could be useful features. Please create 2 issues for it.


That will be fixed by the current work on the game logic. Savegame handling has been rewritten completely.


Right, please create an issue for that.


Is this really necessary? Sounds like a trivial detail for me.


Correct. There it already an issue on our tracker: https://git.maxr.org/maxr/maxr/issues/477


Yes, would be nice to have all keys configurable. Please create an issue


Is this really important? Of course it would technically be possible...


I haven't observed something like this yet. Can't see anything suspect in the code. So we need more details when this happens to be able to fix this.


Yes, we have an open issue in the tracker for fixing the high CPU load in menus.


Did we change the behaviour? I can't remember how it was before. But don't blank the background in dialogs and menus that are smaller than the screen resolution is a valid point. --> Issue

Subject: Re: 0.2.9 commentary

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Just one explanation:


I changed this by intention. Everything that is small (i.e. smaller than a menu) is handled as dialog and generates a transparent background. Menus (i.e. everything that took the full screen in the original game) on the other hand black out the background. That is because at some point (probably far, far from today) I want our menus to scale to the full screen, so that you will not see the background with that future implementation. The current behavior just tries to be consistent with what the original intention of dialog vs. menu is.

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Subject: Re: 0.2.9 commentary

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Thank you very much for the replies. Excellent feedback, and I will get familiar with your GIT/bug-tracking system.

I couldn't find a TODO in the source tree, so I have no idea which are being worked on, and what has already been noticed by others, but I have seen some comments in the code relating to issues that I noticed.

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Subject: Re: 0.2.9 commentary

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When the game is playing and you open files window to save, it's nice to see the game in background, also you can see which turn so you can put it in the save game title. When the game is over, however, it's nice to have black.

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Subject: Re: 0.2.9 commentary

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As superfluous addendum, attached is shrunken PNG of original preferences screen, accessible from the right-most of the top 2 HUD buttons: (FILES and PREFERENCES), just as some sort of reference if there is any need for it. Note the "Click to Scroll". Notice also there is "Double Unit Steps" which means to speed up the mobile unit movement, expecially for the ones like scouts with lots of movement. I don't believe this one is necessary anymore, as the units move quickly enough in 0.2.9. 0.2.8 was pretty slow, I had some hack to speed things up, I think it was something in defines.h which has been removed in the code clean-up.

I'm not a big fan of mindlessly trying to make exact clone of original. There's plenty of options that are absent in the original but definitely should have been in there. That DONE + NEXT feature is a brilliant example, it speeds things up so much, no more poking at that tiny little button over and over and over...

There's another thread around here with some talk of trying to acquire the original source code from Interplay, mostly as a joke. Besides Interplay having lost their own source code, it's important to remember that the original game crashed all the time, and the IPX network code is worthless these days. I'm pretty sure that the code in MAXR is a decent step up from whatever Interplay had going on back in the early/mid 1990s. MAXR-0.2.9 already works better and is more playable than the original ever was.

Also attached is grainy PNG full window grab of the prefs dialog located over the game screen during a live session, like MAXR with Alpha instead of Black in window.h.

Thumbnails of attached images:

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