With regards to defects that are present in the retail version of MAX 1.04 I know of a couple of issues that you don’t have on the defects list.

First of all spies don’t seem to work correctly in my current game I have spies that are all +32 when I disable the grey teams mining station it should be disable for 2 turns however it comes back on line the next turn not sure what causes this but something dosn’t work properly.

Second ghost units on my current game due to some corruption somewhere there is a ghost scout that belongs to the green team just south of my base which appears and disappears as you move the camera around.

Third I’ve seen the computer air transporters drop a unit in a square that is already occupied by another unit which should be impossible.

Fourth I’ve seen the computer produce units from a light vehicle plant when the computer only has a single power generator and therefore can’t possibly produce units from said factory due to insufficient power.

Additionally I’ve seen the computer produce multiple units from the same factory on the same turn which should be impossible.

I’ve also seen the computer produce said units from a factory that was not only disconnected from power and resources but was also supposedly disable for multiple turns as well which again should be impossible

Additionally the computer is a cheat and can see your units even when it shouldn’t be able to in order to prove this start a game against 3 god mode computers and take about 15 scouts save the game then just play normally for a few turn you will probably get attacked by at least 1 opponent using a scout rush if you put the [maxspy] cheat on you can watch the computer come right for you, the big question is how does the computer know exactly where your base is when it shouldn’t

the answer the computer is a cheat and can see your units and your base when it shouldn't be able to as further proof of this assertion reload your save but this time use the [maxsuper] cheat on all for your scouts and then again play normally for a few turns and this time observe how the computers behavior changes and notice how it doesn't attack because the computer can see all of your super scouts and knows it can’t win.

Ergo the computer is a cheat and can see your units and your base even when it shouldn’t be able to.

Another defect that’s isn’t listed is the computer simply giving up and doing nothing for hundreds of turns in my current game the gray computer started just south of my base so I sealed the area off with concrete blocks and the computer seems to have given up and just sits there turn after turn doing nothing not sure why it doesn’t just move south and start building on the neighboring island

Yet another defect is engineers using the path ability to build a road can get stuck upon reload same thing happens when units are set to auto fire then can get stuck and there shot get frozen in midair and the units becomes completely unusable.

another defect i have observed is units / buildings taking damage when they shouldn't for example say i have a tank with 30 armor and said tank gets attacked by a enemy unit with attack power which is less then 30 the damage calculation should be zero since my armor is higher then the attackers attack power yet in spite of this the tank still takes 1 point of damage which is incorrect and this could lead to units / building being destroyed when they shouldn't be

Yet another defect i have noticed is that when i want to load a units with an air transported if the unit is already under the air transporter i have to move the air transporter to the side because it wont let me select the unit under it.

Also Defect 152
Air units are not allowed to move to a grid cell where an enemy mine is detected by the mouse cursor selection algorithm. This is counter intuitive and creates a tactical disadvantage if the enemy creates a huge minefield along its borders as in such cases the player’s air units are simply unable to go near the enemy base.

is not correct or perhaps more accurately it's incomplete that is to say Air units are not allowed to move to a grid cell that is already occupied period!! it doesn't matter what is occupying the tile wither it be buildings, units, mines connectors concrete blocks or turrets.

so for example by building concrete blocks over a large enough area you could also prevent aircraft getting anywhere near you.

Hello Sarxis and Cursed-Ghost, there is also a discord server link on the github front page if it looks more appealing: https://discord.gg/TCn8DpeBaY than github.

I monitor M.A.X. forums on gog.com and steam. I monitor max:reloaded, macs and max:port discord servers. Your valuable feedback will be put into good use. Currently I am busy with adding true type font support. I will respond slower than usual.

hi

sadly i have issues with a lot of pages these days and can't get them to load because i don't have an update browser currently I'm using firefox 52.9.0 which was the last release to work for XP and mypal 29.3.0

So its unlikely that discord would work for me plus i don't have a web cam a mic or a discord account which is why i suggested setting up a web form, so that people can send you feedback directly having said that if you monitor the GOG forum then i could just post feedback here.

if you like i could zip up the save file for my current game and attach it if it would help.

With this post like to make a few observations / suggestions

First off gold and fuel trucks are basically useless since gold refineries and power stations / generators don’t actually have any ability to store gold ore or fuel so even if I load up a fuel / gold truck I can’t actually transfer there cargo to the my gold refineries and power stations / generators yeah I could connect them to a silo but if I’m going to do that I’d be as well to just connect them to the complex.

Additionally we don’t need 3 different types of trucks it would make more sense to have just 1 truck that can carry ore, gold or fuel

My next observation / suggestion is that research centres should be able to take more than 1 person in order to save space because in long games you very quickly reach a point where in order for your research to continue at a reasonable pace you need to build more and more research centres and this is simply impractical as you just don’t have the space in most cases.

For example with the current set-up if I want 100 research I have to build 100 research centres and 34 habitats and that takes up an huge amount of space where as if each research centre could take between 1 and 12 people well now to get 100 research I only need to build 8 research centres assuming that each research centre can take 12 people and if each habitat produced say 6 people instead of 3 then instead of needing 34 habitat you would only need 17 and if each habitat produced say 12 people instead of 3 then you would only need 8 habits so these 2 things combined would save a huge amount of space.

Additionally I’d combine habitats and ecospheres into a single building since you really don’t need ecospheres and habitats you only need 1 or the other.

My next observation / suggestion is that when you are conducting an operation it doesn’t make sense to need a mobile scanner, a supply truck and a repair vehicle to support your units it would be more sensible to have just 1 multipurpose support vehicle that has the scan range of a mobile scanner and can both repair and rearm your units therefore I’d combine the mobile scanner / supply truck / repair unit into a single multipurpose support vehicle additionally I’d increase the cargo carrying capacity from 30/50 to 1000 especially in light of then fact that for each point if damage a unit sustains it requires 1 unit of materiel to fix it so your support vehicle would run out of materials to quick if the storage capacity where not increased.

With regards to storage silos personally I hate these because again you very quickly get to a point where the materials you are producing are grater then your storage capacity and those materials just get wasted if you have nowhere to store them either that or you end up having to build hundreds of storage silos to store the stuff, which takes up an unreasonable amount of space and this is a problem in every RTS game that implements silos instead of just doing the sensible thing and giving you unlimited storage capacity I’ve had games on Command & Conquer, Dune, Age of Empires and so forth where something like 90% of my base is nothing but storage silos.

Personally I think silos in RTS games are one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever seen and it would be far better to give you unlimited storage capacity and simply do away with silos altogether and maybe just put a little numeric counter in the top right hand corner of the screen to indicate how much materials gold and fuel you currently have.

failing that the capacity of your silos / mines needs to be increased dramatically to something a bit more realistic like 1000 ton capacity for each silo and say 500 ton capacity for each of your mines.

Or another option could be to make it so you only need 1 silo for gold 1 for materials and 1 for fuel and then just make each have an unlimited storage capacity or if not unlimited you could simply increase the capacity to something like 100,000 while this isn’t unlimited it would mean that even in long games you wouldn’t need to build more then 2 or 3 of each

now I know that there are some purest out there that would probably disagree with this assessment but if you are going to go to all the trouble to fix all the bugs and the like and make things work right on modern computers then why would you not also fix the short-sighted and badly though out design decisions like this also.

I guess the best thing to do in the long run if you are going to make changes like this at some point is to make the changes optional

a good examples of this could be auto fire now in 1.03 auto fire was switched off so if you wanted to attack a target until it was destroyed you would need to click multiple times where as in 1.04 you need only click once and the unit will keep firing on the target until it runs out of shots or the target is destroyed, personally I can see a use case for both modes so it would be nice to have the ability to control this via the options window same thing for reaction fire it would be nice to be able to have a bit more control over this.

one other thing I'd like more control over is how alien units upgrade rather than just randomly assigning a few points to a given stat or stats i'd like to be able to choose what gets upgraded when an alien unit levels up so maybe let me right click the alien unit in question and then choose where to assign the upgrade points

What is your antivirus software? NSIS is a state of the art windows installer solution since decades, it should not be the problem source. The game, the DLLs and the uninstaller executables within the installer are copied from the GitHub build server. I cannot do anything with the DLLs. The installer, uninstaller and game executable could be signed by an officially recognized certificate, but I have no such a thing. It is an open question whether current certificates are accepted by Windows XP still.

There is no asset installer yet. One is in the works, I cannot give an eta about when it will be ready. For CD-ROM version just copy over the MAX folder from the CD to a new write access enabled location and install (or copy) max port into that folder.

The error you observe comes from the threading library which is a dependency of the GCC C++ runtime environment provided by msys2 which runs on GitHub's Windows Server 2019 host runner. Possible solutions: 1) build MAX Port using static linking (eliminates all DLL dependencies). 2) build MAX Port on Windows XP or cross-compile it on Linux using a GCC or CLang environment that is old enough but still supports ISO C++17. 3) Dig the Internet for a libwinpthread-1.dll which does not depend on GetTickCount64 from kernel32. The function GetTickCount64 is not a 64 bit OS function. It simply returns the system time on 64 bits so that the timer does not overflow every 49 days.

I will try to create a statically linked build target.

I observed something similar once, will try to reproduce it.

This is a cascaded error. The root cause is that the operating system (DPMI server) runs out of free heap memory. The memory issue is on the list.

I will try to reproduce this.

Based on my previous code reviews scoped on the production manager module this should not be possible. A more precise description would be welcome. E.g. it is possible to produce units if there is a fuel storage unit a power generator and a factory. If there is no fuel storage unit nor a working mining station the power generator should stop and factory should stop as well.

In theory this is only possible if the unit raw material cost is <= 0. The build task control flow should normally not make this possible. There should be serious memory corruptions in effect to make this possible and the chance for the application not to crash in such a situation is very small. It would be good to record such an event to know more about the context when this happened. A saved game could also be useful.

This violates a lot of task rules which again indicates that there should be some serious memory corruptions. It would be good to record such an event to know more about the context when this happened. A saved game could also be useful.

This is a design change in M.A.X. v1.04. According to various sources end users complained that computer players are too passive or they fight each other instead of the player and this makes the game boring. The original authors already worked full time on M.A.X. 2 at the time and their "solution" to this complaint was the following two changes:
1) At the beginning of each turn computer players decide which other player is the biggest threat (who has the most team points). If a human player's team points are >= the computer player's team points the human player's threat level gets a 1000x bonus making the human player the arch enemy, preventing computer players to directly engage each other. Mind that this does not mean that computer players will not attack each other when they are in danger.
2) when expert or harder computer players are initialized at game start or reload all mining stations and eco-spheres of all players become known to them immediately. Whenever you reload the game you give away the locations of your newly built mining stations and eco-spheres.

I also think that this design change was more of a cheap hack than a proper solution. On the other hand this change effectively made the computer players more active and probably calmed the loudest complainers allowing the development team to give their full attention and love to M.A.X. 2 which turned out to be a true... um... well... :D

Based on my code reviews the computer scouts or other recon units must see your super scouts at least once to add them to their threat maps. As soon as your super scouts were detected once, their attack range becomes a no go zone until the computer can plan an attack with a group of units that could potentially kill the identified threat. In such cases the enemy recon units, e.g. scouts keep at scan range distance and loiter around to keep the threat zones up to date.

If you still have this saved game please post it here. There is one potentially related defect. Certain clans prefer to have several constructors right at mission start. If any of these get build jobs to construct a mining station at a location which needs a water platform than there is a high chance that the computer will not be allowed to create material storage units and this starves the computer player... it is a deadlock like situation for the AI. Maybe that has happened... maybe not. We shall see in the saved game file.

I will try to reproduce the road use case. The auto fire means sentry unit? I never observed something similar, if you can give more context I could try to reproduce it. In worst case though its again just the good old out of memory issue which prevents task state machines to progress from transient states.

This is a deliberate design decision. Any attack of any power will result in at least one damage. This creates an interesting game mechanic that a lot of small units can kill a super bulky enemy unit. Such events create memorable moments and a lot of satisfaction especially in campaign missions from which one or two deliberately create situations where the enemy only gets bulky units and the player meek junk. So this is not a bug its a feature :)

I agree this is poor UI design and I hate it too. There are several similar limitations in the game. I will document this as a defect.

True. Each use case limitation that is caused by different game logic or implementation site will be documented as an independent defect.

You have many good points. I will keep them in mind.

Panda antivirus about the only one that I could find that still supported XP when I check the about screen I says v18.03.00

[edit]
After further investigation it seems as though NSIS installers being flagged is a virus is in fact a common problem as you can see here https://nsis.sourceforge.io/NSIS_False_Positives

it seems that this is due in part to the fact that bad guys also use NSIS installers to package there malware and instead of unpacking the installer and then scanning the contents my antivirus is just triggering on the installer its self when I try to run it having extracted the contents using 7-zip and then run a scan everything comes back clean, same for the 7-zip archive.

One possible way to avoid this issue is to use a different solution for building the installer for example.

Inno Setup: https://jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php

This is also a free solution for building installers that should work in a similar manor to NSIS and is in fact what was used to create an alternate installer for syndicate wars port that would extract the game files from either the CD or the GOG version as the original installer only worked with the CD version.

the other is to report it and get it fixed which i tried to do only i can't figure out where I'm supposed to report it I tried going to the panda website but couldn't find a way to report false positives about the only thing i can think of is to make an account for there forum and then try making a post there to report the issue. That’s fine I just though it would make life a bit easier for people running newer systems who can’t run the old dos installer without having to install something like dosbox first while its not a difficult thing to do its just extra unnecessary messing about that may well put people off who might otherwise be willing to give max port a go and provide feedback I see well sadly I have neither the tools nor the know how to build stuff my self so that’s not an option as for downloading libwinpthread-1.dll the issue I have there is I have no idea what version I need nor do I have a clue where to get it from plus from a security perspective I have concerns about downloading stuff like that from some random website because there is no way to know if the file has been tampered with I know that might seem a little odd given that I’m running an obsolete unsupported system now but that’s why I need to be extra careful about what I download just in case.

What I am curious about though is why not just set up a build environment locally on your computer where you don’t have to worry about github dependencies and then just upload the resultant package once the build process is complete? Rather then using the github build environment obviously doing this has some downside but its not like you are doing nightly releases where doing things this way just isn’t an option From what I can tell this happens when a factory is set to build but then the build process gets interrupted because you take out a power station for example or maybe you blow up a connector severing the factory from the complex each turn the computer will try to turn on the factory to continue building the unit but wont be able to because of insufficient power yet in spite of this the very action of the computer trying to turn the factory back on each turn still seems to count towards the build process why this happens I don’t know but my suspicion is that maybe its not registering that the factory is off due to insufficient power

So switching the factory on is registered and the flag is set to on but the automatic shutdown that then occurs due to insufficient power doesn’t trigger the off part which should set the flag to off again so at the end of the turn the build process continues incorrectly if that makes sense.

This will continue until the unit is build at which time the factory goes dormant and stops building properly. I have seen this happen with both the light and heavy vehicle plans I’d assume that this could also happen with other factories but I’ve only ever observed this with the light and heavy vehicle plants.

What corruption occurred to allow these things to happen I’m not sure but I’ve only seen this happen the once and sadly I don’t have the save anymore Clearly that’s not the full answer as to what is going on and doesn’t explain the behavior I have observed from the computer where it appears as though the computer is using the max spy cheat and can see not only my base but also my units to This is plausible but as far as I can tell the computer scouts never actually get that close and yet still behave as though they have

For example I will often play on the sanctuary map and usually I’ll land on the big island in the top left of the map the computer scouts wont come any close then where the lands and water meet and that’s not close enough for them to of detected my super scouts which I basically just park next to my initial mine therefore I don’t see how its possible for them to of added my scouts to there threat map its difficult to explain the odd behavior I’m seeing from the computer maybe if I’ll try downloading a screen recorder and try recording it hummm…. I wonder…. Ok ran in to a problem with this can’t attach the save the GOG forum wont let me it seems the GOG forum will only let you upload images. What I means when I say auto fire is I set a unit to attack a structure but don’t have enough shots to finished the job so on the next turn the attacking units auto fires finishing the job it started the previous turn now if you save when such a thing is happening some times on reload some sort of corruption can happen and the shot will be frozen in mid air and the unit will become unusable it’s a very similar bug to the one that can happen when using the path ability upon reload sometimes corruption can happen and the engineer will get stuck mid task when you look at it on the map the engineer will be frozen between 2 tiles what I might try and do is see if I can get this to happen and then make a new save Personally I’d still consider this a bug at lease when playing a custom game or playing against another human player if my armor is superior to the my opponents fire power I should take no damage because otherwise how are you supposed to get past your opponents defense grid ?? this is less of a problem when playing the computer because the computer doesn’t know how to build a coherent defense grid but playing again a human player that is turtling like this could in theory make them impossible to beat because you can’t get close enough to there turrets to take them out due to the fact that you still take damage even when you shouldn’t to be honest turrets in MAX particularly in a long games can get really overpowered.

thinking about possible future changes one other changes that might be an idea to to allow tanks to move and fire to help counter scout rushes at the start of the game

in a similar vain it might also be an idea to allow mobile AAA units both land and sea based to move and fire to make it easier to counter air attack if you don't have your own fighters

here is my current save file

https://www.udrop.com/838x/SAVE1.DTA

Hi

Ok so after playing around a bit more with max port trying to figure out if there was way to resolve the GetTickCount64 error and get max port working I have discovered it’s not so easy as simply replacing libwinpthread-1.dll with an older version when I try this I get a new error

The procedure entry point RegLoadMUIStringW could not be located in the dynamic link library ADVAPI32.dll

By the looks of it what I need here is something akin to the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime libraries but for GCC so my question is do they actually make a GCC runtime library that will work on XP? I tried going to https://gcc.gnu.org/ but to no avail

Looking for answers I came across this comment on stackoverflow

To compile for older Windows versions with MinGW you need to define _WIN32_WINNT to an older version for (0x0501 for Windows XP) when compiling your application as well as all of it's dependencies, including the standard library provided by MinGW.

So in essence you need a MinGW compiler that was itself built to support Windows XP and build your application and any libraries it may depend upon with it.

If I’m understanding this correctly then basically if there is no runtime library I can install to get around this problem there isn’t going to be anything I can do on my end since I lack the tools and the know how to build this my self, and that’s assuming I could actually find an old version that would even work on XP as for Linux that’s not an option since I have never used Linux before so I have no idea how to operate it.

MSYS2 does not support a 32 bit environment since 2021. MSYS2 does not support Windows XP since 2016 or so. The Windows XP compatible MSYS2 environments with cached packages I did found all fail as the archives only contain base packages and not their dependencies that cannot be found by the old package managers. I am technically not capable of reconfiguring the package manager to find and adopt to new repositories. The last MSYS2 environment that supported Windows XP is said to supported only a GCC compiler that featured the ISO C++14 standard. M.A.X. Port requires minimum ISO C++17 compatibility. Therefore I give up on building M.A.X. Port on Windows XP. The only remaining option is cross compilation e.g. on Linux hoping that there is a GCC version on that host operating system that supports ISO C++17 and is able to rebuild every dependency, including SDL2, targeting Windows XP. I doubt such an environment exist. Regardless I may investigate this later too. For now, I give up, this activity takes too much of my limited time.

I see well that's unfortunate but I’m not really surprised given how old XP is now, thanks for trying anyway.

i am curious though why does maxport need ISO C++17, is it just because of the way you are building the port aka using newer features that aren't available in older versions?

Recently I witnessed the frozen shot in mid air issue. The affected unit froze in attacking state. At the same time basically all units that were doing something stopped and at the end of the turn the game waited for ever for the busy units to finish what they were doing...

Never seen such a behavior before. The affected saved game file is basically broken. I saved the issue for later analysis.