Mechanized Assault & eXploration Reloaded

Subject: M.A.X. Save game converter

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Greetings again.
For some reason i couldn't find the reply button in "M.A.X. 1.04 Dev Informations" thread, so a new thread here.

With help from mague, most of the remaining mysterious parts in M.A.X. save game format was cleared up, allowing M.A.X.G. to load the remaining few unloadable save game files, and i thought people here will be interested in having an up-to-date english version.

Converter/decompiler, 090714, windows version, both 1.56 and 1.04 supported:
http://www.rumaxclub.ru/...14_eng.zip (56Kb)
No linux build so far, sorry.

The program is not directly useful, since it gives out M.A.X.G. saves, but it also have a decompilation option - splitting the save game file into a human-readable description of what's inside it and BMP's with various maps. The latter might be interesting to developers.

Adapting the converter to M.A.X.R. should not be too hard, but i'm not familiar enough with M.A.X.R. data structures to attempt it in reasonable time.

A converter from the remakes to the original format is potentially possible, but some things need to be decoded yet for it to be reliable.
The question is - is it even needed?

One more option - 1.04 to 1.56 saves conversion and vice versa. Any point in having that?

All in all, ideas and are welcome.

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Subject: Re: M.A.X. Save game converter

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This is awesome!

Thanks Artlav

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Subject: Re: M.A.X. Save game converter

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Another idea i just thought of - what about making the inf file compilable?
That is, you turn the save into a text file and bmp's, edit whatever you want in notepad or like, and turn it back into a savegame?
Waste of time?

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Subject: Re: M.A.X. Save game converter

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Hey Artlarv, great job so far.

The reason you could'nt reply in the MAX R Dev forum is cause you are not a in the Dev list yet, but beko should be able to change that.
I didnt know that 1.56 and 1.04 saves are different.. hmm.

I like the way both communities working together again

do it

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Subject: Re: M.A.X. Save game converter

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Unfortunately, yours is the only one that is actually working.
M.A.X.R. is being played, tested, experimented on and developed.
M.A.X.G. is only being developed in circles, without a single game being played so far. By the time someone tests it, the version is already obsolete, and being rewritten.

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Subject: Re: M.A.X. Save game converter

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Still, your work is very important to us to understand how MAX works. File format. Colour palette, FLC convert (btw: could you compile me a 64bit version of your flc converter?), Save games and much more. Your background-digging saved us a lot of time. We may have a more playable version but it has a lot of bad design resulting in mem hunger and cpu circles and crashes of course. And our goal is simply different from yours.

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Subject: Re: M.A.X. Save game converter

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Hello All,

my final goal is a 100% clear Save Game Format as if we have that, we will be able to create a universal converter AND I will create a mission editor so we will be able to provide new content to the original M.A.X. as well (scenarios, new campaign - based on events happened in M.A.X. 2 for example). That will hopefully attract back more old M.A.X. fans.

I will try to make a map editor and tile set editor too just after I find out the complete palette format and it's inner mechanics. Nowadays graphics editors can convert true color pictures into indexed ones with very good results, so "photo realistic" maps for M.A.X. is not that hopeless. I want to play M.A.X. on the surface of Mars or Moon

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Subject: Re: M.A.X. Save game converter

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I have to disappoint you here - the scenarios and campaign victory conditions are hard-coded into the exe, and not in the save file.
You can easily check it on saves by changing the level field and look for what will happen.
So, it's a save game editor, but not victory conditions editor.

Just in case, we solved that a while ago.
Some Starcraft-to-MAX maps here (among the others): http://www.rumaxclub.ru/maps.asp
There should even be a program somewhere that converts an image into a map.

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Subject: Re: M.A.X. Save game converter

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Hello Artlav,


Yes, you mentioned this issue in an e-mail to me earlier. It is sad Still, I hope that I will find out how the mission goals are handled by the game and if I do so, I will see how can I proceed. Normally I would add a new segment to the end of the executable or would use space consumed by dead code (like the robust debug functions) to add new possibilities, but this is not Win32PE which I know much better. The Watcom MZ(LE) compiler does lots of things differently

Anyways, you are right... altering the executable would ruin a big chance to get in good relationship with Interplay/GOG.


That is really cool I will definitively dig my self into this matter (after I'm finished with my current real life work stuff).

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Subject: Re: M.A.X. Save game converter

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We have some thoughts about how to realize missions (e.g. for tutorial) on our own. We didn't start any work on this yet but we may go for a second optional map file e.g. $mapname.xml describing mission goals and event triggers. For this we want to implement an event system interpreting the xml. Basically, when maxr finds a mission xml for the running map the events should be loaded. That way we don't have to fiddle with the wrl and missions could be altered easily.

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