Mechanized Assault & eXploration Reloaded

Subject: from max to maxr, an emotional monologue

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Hello guys, it's my first time posting here, i just registered to post this topic. I felt really nostalgic about max today and wanted to play it again. Since the game is ancient and there would be numerous recent releases for windows, osx and linux i thought i'd try for an osx one (that would supposedly have all those "why" bugs fixed) and i came across maxr. I'm a fan of single player when it comes to turn-based strategy games since i like the fact i can go away at any time and come back to my game with everything intact and, maybe saves happen frequently in multiplayer sessions but, those saves definitely don't happen every 10 minutes that i may want to go away from my game window (even for 5 mins). So single player it is. As you're guessing i'm getting to the fact that maxr doesn't have single player.

When i first played this game i was really young so i had the box and everything, however i remembered that i hated something about this game but i couldn't remember what. Yes, the 100th turn bug. Well i don't remember which turn it happened on but i searched the internet and everyone was talking about a number around 100.

What i want to ask is why hasn't anyone bothered to fix this. I mean, take the original game and just fix its bugs, without changing anything else. It's an amazing game. I've seen this happen to many games that have a following but not this one. And it's been ages!

Well i of course have to say good job guys, you really made a game similar to the one i remember. It must have been a ton of work and many people are enjoying the outcome. But it's not the *same* game. The new graphics look really clean to me and i really enjoyed those pixels. But it wouldn't be up to you to recreate something like this, obviously. I would suppose it would be up to a large company with millions to spend on graphics etc. Imagine max, the same max, being redesigned by a company of the magnitude of blizzard for example. Imagine max with starcraft 2 graphics.

Honestly why isn't anyone interested in this kind of game? When i was young and first played it it felt every move i was making was risky, the battles were extremely meaningful, i was trying to create a road to a newly constructed mining station to bring vehicles there quickly to protect it as i was building the connectors. I was building habitats to house people for my colony. I was frantically looking for gold with my surveyors (i've no idea if i'm saying the names right but i'm guessing you understand what i'm saying). I was creating air-to-ground aircraft to destroy the towers of a nearby base as tanks waited behind to finish the job. Platforms on water, enemy raids bringing hell to my turrets, power stations destroyed so my mining stations couldn't support the production of new vehicles...etc etc.

This isn't c&c or starcraft or warcraft or even homm. This is max, and it should be remade from scratch. I mean a max 3 or 4 (i know there is a 2 but everyone said it really isn't worth it so i never tried it). I mean a max of 2017. And i've no idea why hasn't any major company bothered.

Having said all this, i have to say again, great job to you guys. This "emotional monologue" honestly doesn't aim to demean your own efforts. It's just a huge "why".

Subject: Re: from max to maxr, an emotional monologue

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That's... beautiful

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Subject: Re: from max to maxr, an emotional monologue

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Brings back good memories!

Subject: Re: from max to maxr, an emotional monologue

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I like reading your post.

(and by the way, you can keep the "pixel design" in MAXR if you have your original CD data's. ;)... But still MAXR is multiplayer. I heard an AI was in project, but I don't know if it's still under going, or not. ^^)

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Subject: Re: from max to maxr, an emotional monologue

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Hello. New guy here. I must say I found this project because of the bug explained in the OP. I'm on turn 80. I have 2 alien tanks, an alien fighter-bomber and 2 alien ships, one of then is Mk III with a retarded amount of armour. My base is fairly developed and I have been playing for awhile and the game always crashed on the green AI turn.

This game is a god-sent though becasue now I can trick my friends to play it with me >:). Keep up the good work guys.

Subject: Re: from max to maxr, an emotional monologue

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Congratulations, and Welcome.

Interplay MAX crashed because the AI is stupid and creates far too many units that slowly start to overlap (seriously, engineer on top of scout, I've seen it. And constructor building factory inside mountain or alien base somehow) and none of the pieces can move. I've spent days analyzing some games. It requires you to cheat, and [MAXSUPER] a scout and assault gun or something to clean them out, then go back to playing as if nothing happened

MAXR-0.2.9 is a godsend, seriously, I agree. I like it because there's no rush to do anything. Make tea, have dinner, whatever. It just waits patiently. I can't do shooters anymore, I'm too slow and my ticker can't take it. And MAXR is doubly awesome because I can hack about in the code and try out mods and tweaks. I love to program C in my spare time, and my C++ is pretty weak, so MAXR is excellent practice. I'd say it's 50/50 - half of my fun is hacking the source. It's a big enough project, I should get years of fun out of it.

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Subject: Re: from max to maxr, an emotional monologue

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I've never seen maxr that way but I guess you can do that

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Subject: Re: from max to maxr, an emotional monologue

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Remakes of game ideas are actually quite famous nowadays. For example recently "Stardew Valley" came out which takes a lot of the feeling of Harvest moon and puts it on PC. Things like this are not easy all the time. A lot of people struggle with the idea of "what makes this game fun, compelling, engaging?" and then recreate that feeling. You know, sometimes even the music is crazy important - one reason why Civilization 5 wasn't liked that much is because Civ4 had one of the best soundtracks ever.

So here is my attempt in recommending new (or other) games that come kinda close to some of the feelings you might have had when you played MAX back in the days. They might not give you ALL of the same feelings, but I certainly believe that these games also have other facets that make them good games:

-"it felt every move i was making was risky, the battles were extremely meaningful," - sounds like the challenge of round based combats. You could try the XCOM games. I only played the remake "XCOM: Enemy Unknown", but it seems the old games have fan-versions which make the old games better, because they definitely were different. I recently watched some livestream videos of the old games and they definitely are some special kind of challenge: https://youtu.be/P_VrpVKbaeM?t=29m59s And they play the sequel on the highest difficulty, it's crazy. You also build bases in these games, but it happens outside of the combats and is "real-time" if you wanna call it that. It's more like you start doing everything you can do and then you fast forward until you can do a new thing.

-"i was trying to create a road to a newly constructed mining station to bring vehicles there quickly to protect it as i was building the connectors. I was building habitats to house people for my colony. I was frantically looking for gold with my surveyors" - This sounds like you like Management games. I LOVE Factorio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpKatKpyabI To be fair it doesn't have the greatest combat, but if you like spending many many hours into a project and then you feel like you did everything yourself, this could be for you. Maybe look into Rimworld as well, not sure though. but of course these two games are not turn based.

All that said, yeah there isn't really a game that combines all these feelings someone can have in MAX. It doesn't need a remake, especially because the people who have the rights are probably not interested in doing it, but it could need some kind of spiritual successor. I assume the market for that doesn't exist, so we have to hope for indi devs.

Subject: Re: from max to maxr, an emotional monologue

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I'm sorry I was late to the post but the reason M.A.X. crashed was a bug in the line executable.
See
https://www.maxr.org/showtopic.php?id=762
on how to solve the issue which will let you play the original much longer. It does not let you play forever but I have seen games later then turn 300.

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Subject: Re: from max to maxr, an emotional monologue

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Where can I get the MAX-R source code? Is it openly available? I'm learning programming and would be great to interact with MAXr's code in order to learn a bit more. In what language the code is done? I'm learning Python with the Panda3D engine (under 300 MB install size and lots of guides) to start, but in the future I want to go (hopefully) into C++ and C#+Unity
I was also wondering, MAX 1 original source code is lost forever apparently, but what about MAX 2 code? Couldn't we use MAX2 code as a template for its multiplayer features? Or mod MAX2 to behave like MAX1 (firstly take out that disgusting useless alien clan hahaha)

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