There is finally a (mostly) fixed version!

[celestion1384]

Well, I've waited about 25 years for this.

I downloaded the latest version of M.A.X. Port, a fan-made rebuild of the game in an attempt to fix all the errors. (I learned about this from a couple of helpful people on this forum)

https://klei1984.github.io/max/about/

I have to say I am incredibly impressed with the work this person has done. I was able to complete a full game (right to the victory screen), on a large map in 232 turns with three computers on the hardest difficulty. I don't think I've ever been able to finish a full game of M.A.X. without game breaking bugs, despite playing it on and off for almost a quarter century.

At the largest point of the game, I estimate about 1,500 units active on the map and several hundred buildings, plus connectors, roads, bridges, all that. During this game, I experienced only five crashes/errors, none of which were game breaking. Two of the errors were simply debugging popups, and i was able to hit ignore and carry on.

What's more, there was little to no performance drop throughout the game. Playing with 1,500 units had roughly the same game performance as playing with 20 units at the beginning.

Finally, I am not sure but he must have made some tweaks to the enemy AI. The enemies not only fought each other (though this took about 50 turns to start happening), but they attacked me aggressively as well. While the AI is not exactly a genius when it comes to base design (though it was building these interesting hard-points of 8-10 turrets in pods around their base), it seemed to hold back on attacks to amass a large force, and then came at me in waves. The AI would still try to avoid the range of my weapons, but it actually went on the offensive and performed reasonably competent attacks (sometimes with dozens of units). Compared to the 1.04 patch, I was pretty impressed with the amount of action happening around the map on many turns. I particular enjoyed watching the AI's go at each other with dozens of fighter jets battling it out.

My hats off to this person. The project is still a work in progress, but I consider it quite playable even by normal standards, and *extremely* playable in comparison to the original patches.

I highly recommend checking it out! It's easy to install.

[klei]

Are you referring to stock M.A.X. 1 under dosbox or M.A.X. Port v0.7.0 or later?

In case you refer to M.A.X. Port could it be that you are using a frame rate limiter of any kind on your system?

For clarification: The GNW engine, engine of the original game, does not have a conventional render loop. The game does not use vertical synchronization and could attempt to flip video card back buffers to redraw part of the screen at variable frame rates that try to stay below 30 FPS. Using external frame rate limiter applications will cause hick ups, stutters and delays. The delays effectively rob the game from available time to calculate paths, hence the light bulbs. If you use a frame limiter, please disable it while playing M.A.X. Port.

[scatters]

this worked for me, got to 200 turns....YES! and thank you.

[igor]

in year 2025 does this work? Can u play past turn 200?

[SpookySunday]

Автор сообщения: igor

in year 2025 does this work? Can u play past turn 200?

It worked for me last year, so I see no reason why it would be different now.
Give it a try. :)

[al]

gracias. voy a probarlo inmediatamente. Me encanta este juego!!

At the moment an error in an unrecoverable game has just been resolved, and I can continue it. thank you so much!!!

[Fonzz]

Are there new maps available somewhere?

[klei]

A map editor that supports the original M.A.X. 1 world file format, custom water caustic effects using the original indexed color palette animations system and more is in the works. The project page can be found here: https://github.com/suns-echoes/max-game-map-editor . The home page with news articles and screenshots can be found here: https://suns-echoes.github.io/max-game-map-editor/ . There is no release date for the editor and there are no custom maps yet.

There were other map editors made by various developers for the M.A.X. Reloaded and M.A.X. Gold projects. Some of the tools and maps can still be found here: https://www.maxr.org/showtopic.php?id=420 for example.

M.A.X. Port supports arbitrary map sizes starting from v0.7.0, but there is no in-game menu support for new maps yet. Original maps need to be replaced still by custom maps. This also means that scenario and campaign missions will not work while an original map is replaced by another one with different tile layout.

Hope this helps.

[SpookySunday]

I wanted to start a new game and installed the port version 0.7.0 on my gog version of M.A.X.
In the settings.ini I found these lines:


[TEAMS]
red_team_name=Player 1
green_team_name=Green Team
blue_team_name=Blue Team
gray_team_name=

red_team_player=1
green_team_player=2
blue_team_player=2
gray_team_player=0

red_team_clan=7
green_team_clan=6
blue_team_clan=5
gray_team_clan=7

Is it possible to enable some sort of a 2vs.2 situation (player+AI vs. AI+AI)?
If no, what are these settings for?
Thanks for the info in advance!

[klei]

Unfortunately there is no team alliances feature in M.A.X. 1. All teams are enemies of each other. Maybe their behavior do not look like it, but that is how it is. The alliances feature was promised to be a new feature in M.A.X. 2 and it was supposed to be available on release. But it was only delivered in the USA v1.40 patch which broke Internet play according to various sources so probably nobody tried that feature out ever. E.g. GOG.com still sells the v1.00 EU version of M.A.X. 2 which is totally broken even though they have all patches for both games. They even possess the official Spanish release of M.A.X. 1 with Spanish voice over...

Originally the max.ini configuration file was not meant to be edited by end users. All settings were supposed to be changed via the sound card setup utility or the game itself. The above settings are changed by the game in an event driven way based on player interactions. Whenever a new game is started the above settings store each teams' team-name, team-type and team-clan. It makes no sense to change these settings by hand by users as they are stored into saved game files and restored from there on load overwriting whatever was found in the ini configuration file. The game flushes, or updates the latest settings in the ini configuration file when the user exits the game. A cunning player might use this as a cheat or exploit. We start a new game, save it, exit it and we learn what clans the other players rolled simply by looking into the ini configuration file.

Team-type 1 is human player. Team-type 2 is computer player. Clans, like Musashi or Axis Inc, have numeric indices corresponding to their clan names. But all this is irrelevant as none of these settings matter much. When the user starts a new or loads an old game all these settings will be ignored or overwritten eventually.

The M.A.X. 1 & 2 computer AI uses a complicated task manager system. There are 46 different task types in the first game. E.g. move, survey, attack, obtain unit, path request, rendezvous, and so on. Most of these tasks evaluate various situations based on team-type and similar unit parameters. Adding a new alliances feature or back porting the original feature from M.A.X. 2 into M.A.X. 1 is possible, but would require a lot of rework or redesign. The M.A.X 1 reconstructed source code is 4 MiB C/C++ without inline documentation and 762 KiB of it is basically the task system. That much needs to be adapted.

[SpookySunday]

Thanks for the detailed info. A 2vs2 mode would be awesome though.
In a previous post you wrote about the cheap hacks the devs introduced with patch 1.04:

"The arch enemy is selected by an algorithm that determines who is the strongest opponent, the most probable winner team, and if there is any human player among the teams, that player’s weight is now orders of magnitude bigger than any other criteria effectively defeating the sole purpose of the selection algorithm."

If there is a value that determines the AI's 'arch enemy', is there no way to change that value to make the AI fight a specific opponent? Or put another way: When 1.04 introduced the "AI ignoring each other to focus on the player" principle, doesn't it mean there could be a way to manipulate that design flaw in such a way that we can set individual enemies for every team?

And on to interpreting the settings.ini: I started a new game with green and blue as opponents. That's why grey has no team name, clan 7, 6 and 5 are numbers representing the clans.
What made me think about setting allies in the first place was that in the beginning of the game I saw both blue and green approaching my base with tanks and scouts, ignoring each other completely. I saved the game and noticed this in the ini:
red_team_player=1
green_team_player=2
blue_team_player=2
gray_team_player=0

[klei]

I agree, further hacks could be added much easier. But they would also introduce further anomalies, odd behaviors.

[Alpenhörnchen]

Is there a way to fix the steam Version for Mac?

[klei]

To get the most out of the original MS-DOS version you could try these steps: https://klei1984.github.io/max/fixdos/ , but it will not fix the 200+ known bugs that are in the original.

M.A.X. Port does not provide a Mac build. As far as I can tell the source code is in general portable. The software is built upon the SDL2 framework and the miniaudio library for sound. Both of them support macOS.

GitHub recently added public free to use macOS arm64 (M1) virtual machines to be able to build software on those native environments so finally support could be added.

I never used a Mac nor a macOS for more than 5 minutes. But most importantly macOS has its own base directory standards and it requires its own app bundling tools and related quirks. I have no Apple Developer account either to sign and notarize the application. Learning these things would take me months and I am busy with other work packages. So lets hope that someone else with these skills will make it happen sooner or later... sorry that I cannot help.

[Alpenhörnchen]

Its using DosBox for mac with the original m.a.x. Windows files. So can i copy the 32/64 windows files into it and try to fix the dosBox aswell?

200+ would be nice. Last time i tried it years ago it crashed way sooner.

[klei]

Автор сообщения: Alpenhörnchen

So can i copy the 32/64 windows files into it and try to fix the dosBox aswell?

Assuming that the DOSBox version on maxOS is compatible with the settings file found in the windows version of the emulator, e.g. 0.74-3, then it should work. You just overwrite the M.A.X. files and the conf file from steam_patch.7z and done.

Автор сообщения: Alpenhörnchen

200+ would be nice. Last time i tried it years ago it crashed way sooner.

As the original MS-DOS executable has 200+ bugs, reaching to turns 200+ means that you have to make compromises.
- Play with enhanced graphics disabled to save system RAM (MS-DOS emulated RAM). Every time you start the game you need to disable that feature in the main menu Setup screen!
- Play against a single computer player, not more.
- Do not let the computer player amass a big army. E.g. do not use bunker tactic. The more units, the more computer AI tasks, the more glitches and save file corruptions.
- Use maps only that have minimal water tiles, make sure that the computer and you are on the same continent. This way many of the air and sea transporter computer AI glitches can be minimized.
- Do not play against Master and God tier computers. They are cheating. They always know the position of all of your units and due to that they attempt to amass a defense army to match your military power. We do not want computers to amass big armies as that leads to bugs eventually...


An alternative option that might work. There is a software called Wine. This is an emulator for Windows applications that is available for macOS too. With this emulator you could attempt to run the Windows version of M.A.X. Port which contains more than a 100 bug fixes. If you do attempt this and it works let me know as version 0.7.0 is somewhat outdated and the latest GitHub actions automated builds expired already so I would trigger the builds again and then you can download the latest version with a free GitHub account.

Hope this helps.