Lee's Response to a question... "We have dropped the planned December release of MAX and instead replaced it with an open release date"

In March it was... Full system by early September.... Then it was September 30th.... Then it was December.... Now it's ?????

Beginning to sound a lot like "Reloaded", and that took years to get finished ????

We paid our money, when can we get a straight answer as to when we'll finally get our monies worth???

We won't get a straight answer. We aren't supposed to be happy either. Likely just a case of not enough people working on it, and more folks working on the more successful TGC products.

I'm just wondering when we'll get a tool that works to create a game in, not necessarily completely finished. They should just become what Unity/Unreal/Godot are - complete engines that add things as they are ready. Right now GG Max is pointless to install. It would be nice if it was a working terrain tool at least at this point, and all the other broken features were just added when ready. At least it would be usable for some stage of development.

@ Cobbs

Could not agree more. Based upon the development of Reloaded/Game Guru, this is going to be at least a year or more before we see a partially finished product.

according to Syncromesh....


Who do I contact for a refund?

TGC support.

Its all hands on deck with Max if you really want to know.
To be honest Cobbs you were not even around when the Community voiced their opinions.
It was many of the Community that wanted it delayed to get a good stable release and did not think the September release was ready for public consumption.


Customer support can deal with that for you.

I plan to ask for a refund.

As I see it, in a year of so, when a usable GGMax might be available, then I can choose to buy back in. Yes it will cost more, but it's not the price difference that's the issue.

Ten months ago we were promised a product by a specific date. You guys choose that date, I didn't. Given the years of waiting on Reloaded and Game Guru (now GG Classic) I should have known better. I'm 72 years old and I don't have years to wait around. From here on I buy nothing from TGC until it is a finished and viable product.

In the mean time I have GGC to play with, and I guess for me, it's time to learn C##.

A date had to be entered on steam and back then September seemed to be a realistic date but it was only a PLANNED release date.

Oh.. so it's Steams fault???? If you had begun promoting GG Max with an "Open Release Date" or "coming sometime in 2021" you wouldn't have gotten many buyers.

I feel that going from an announced September "Finished" release date, to a November open release date is not the way the business end should be done. Further, the release of the "Beta's" in late September, were, as we now know, not even close to Beta status.

Look, I don't care. I have already received my refund. I'm still interested in the product, but I'm not buying anything from TGC until it is a finished product.

I apologize in advance if something I am about to say does not sit well with someone, and I want to clarify that this is not my intention.

I understand perfectlly the ones that claim for a refund. The appearance that TGC is giving is not that of a serious company as might be expected. Rather, it is that of a company of friends with a group (more or less numerous) of fans. A serious company exposes a project, with a very detailed development plan (which may not be known by customers) and with a commitment date. Customers who see or buy this product are protected by law. TGC cannot modify these conditions at posteriori. It is not justifiable to say that steam requires entering a date, that date must be entered based on a real analysis. On the other hand, it is highly commendable that TGC consults the community of this forum on what it prefers or when it prefers, but that is not binding on other users. Many of those who have opined, have not even bought it previously. And those tips do not release TGC from its commitment to those who have paid it.

Every time I saw a video on the broadcast showing features TGC wants to implement, (but are not yet implemented) or examples of what they want to develop,.... I think: "oh! these guys do not have a clear specification or road map of the product". Also every time I saw changes in the interfaces, with buttons in different positions,... different ways to achieve the same issue,... I think, they are walking on circles. As soon as they develop GG Classic, I hoped they alredy had the final interface more clear, instead adding and removing things here or there.

Any of the release are not "betas" for me. Normally a "beta" is realeased when you have all the modules of your product ready, so, they still are in Alpha state. Sometimes I am also think if maybe the guy in charge to develop GG Classic is not yet in TGC and they are trying to continue his work without him.

Show photos of the new gallery objets is not a good point either. At this time GGMax must be able to show those models on the product. I understand Lee tries to show something new every week, but for my this kind of things are worst than anything.

Instead to by an early access software It looks like we are funding a crowd foundationing campaign. In other words, there would be other ways to have claimed the money to develop this engine that would have been more successful.

I understand also the rest of the people that defend TGC, because maybe all of you have known them for years and you maintain a relationship of friendship or closeness. Part of us (me at least) are new in this forum. I am not a developer or graphic designer either and could see it from a distance.

With all this, I also want to clarify that I think that GG Classic is a great product. With a lot of potential and market. A great idea and a good execution. Hence, I continue to trust TGC for GGMax, even if I don't agree with how they are doing things.

In fact, what they achieve with these delays is to lose users. They should continue to show progress on their website so that it really shows what they are working on and that it has not been money wasted.

@Burgos

Well Said.

Sometimes things do not always go as planned and its not unusual for release dates to slip or go forward at the best of times. Unfortunately back in February no one could forsee Covid for example which has also played a big part for many if you have elderly parents or children to prioritise you know what im talking about and probably technical issues along the way. It was not finished in time so what more can they do.
You got a refund so your sorted which is great news.

I was not justifying anything just giving you the facts at the time .. A planned release date was put in way back in February, probably seemed reasonable at the time. It did not make it. The majority of the community voiced their opinions stating it was not ready and needed to be far better and most stated they would rather wait for a far more stable release.
No Aliens involved or conspiracies to get your cash ... Just the way it all worked out.

@synchromesh.
First, I understand these and past months are not easy for anyone.
Second, When you thinks you are not able to reach a milestone you need to explain it clearlly. You will agree with me that GGM is far from be ready as a final release. And, if TGC are the experienced developers I totally sure they are, for sure they known from a lot of months ago that they are not going to be on time.
But until almost the last moment they maintained that it was going to come out on time. I think this is not good decision.

The problem as I see it is that they were trying to satisfy a very specific group of users. They tried to save the dates instead to ask for help and say: "sorry, the things didn't go as expected." (I know they finally do it, but a bit late , I think.).

You said "No Aliens involved " but are you totally sure? Maybe they have kidnapped the TGC team as the initial phase for a world conquest by integrating a code in our brain introduced through VR glasses, and Lee is trynig to warn us in each broadcast with hidden messages in the screenshots he showed,

I did this joke because, I do not want to discuss, I exposed only my impression. And as I said I trush them (TGC) but I am also undertand the people is claiming for their money. It is totally normal. For, ex. every day my son said me: whats a pitty they didn´t finish the program yet.
As a note, my son is a bit frustrated, because while all his friends talk about minecraft, Fornite,... he is the only one talk about Gameguru, and no one here knows it. He is expectant for the new release to show his friends
an impressive level. So, please, TGC post as soon as possible new versions.

I think is not sense to continue the discussion.
- Things did not go as espected.
- TGC is not able to provide a date for the release.
- People who claim for their money, received it.
- We need to attend the next broadcast and check any extrange comments from Lee to discover if there are aliens in his office controlling him

Thanks to read all this bored.....

I'm liking everything I've seen in MAX so far (except the demos that only give
a sepia color!!!) The terrain texture and grass tools look like they will be very
nice to work with. I think we are all anxious to get our hands on a well working
MAX...

Yeah, businesses have to make decisions. They (I suppose) weigh the pros and
cons of different strategies. There are pros and cons of making any new project
development timeline completely transparent from the very beginning. I think the
reason TGC made the choice this time around might stem from the experience
that happened with VR- Quest. There was a non-disclosure project that leaked
out to the community and everyone (including myself) was mystified about the
goal, intent, market, features and so on of said VR- Q. Finally it started to become
clear, and it's great for them to have produced such a product. VR-Q apparently will
only slightly benefit the GGMAX development features and speed to a small degree.

Now I think they want to be completely up front (as much as possible) as together we
all follow a route that is unknown (who has used Wicked Engine before to make a
completely easy to use game engine)? The early buyers are kind of like Patreons or
Kickstarter donators, and I would have been in that group also if my sys. had the specs
to run it. But it's looking pretty smooth as far as UI goes. Hope the rest come to fruition--
quickly man! I want my Bros to get this and start modeling for it!

Surprisingly its no more than 8 or 9 from what i have seen on support and mostly due to the fact they could not run it as they did not read the specs If you paid back in February you got it for Peanuts ( which loads did )

After seeing what TGC are doing to make Max great I can see why there have been so few refund requests just for the sake of waiting a little longer. I own it now and get the current builds. Why would i want to pay 50 bucks later on.

The real reason doesn't matter.

Meanwhile I was one of the people who did not realize the specifications, because it was not very easy to find them and the software did not run on my laptop , but in my case, as I explained a few months ago I bought a new and expensive PC, weeks before they announced that they won't be released on schedule. So in my case the software was not that cheap. If TGC has said before that they aren't ready yet, maybe I could wait to buy a more powerful PC for less money.

I am not angry with this, I did not claim for the refund, But I understood perfectly who claim for it, because at the end, the reason does not matter. It is a simple contractual agreement. TGC sell something under any conditions, people acept that conditions and if any of the parts not comply with their obligations the other part can cancel the agreement and receive its money and rates. Thats all. In the moment TGC sall things, on Internet they have to face those situations and obligations.

What happen if I said to TGC, please give me the software, and I will paid you for it in february the double price. Imagine they acepted. But in february I said, sorry, understand I have some troubles,..... I can not paid now,... maybe in other date. (remember they did not know me, as soon as this 8 or 9 people did not know TGC guys personaly)

In sumary is a contractual issue. Sorry, I like talk a lot.

Yeah, I see where everyone is coming from here - we all entitled to our opinion, and of course we will all do what we think is best.

What I see is TGC actually making a real effort to deliver a solid tool, and the tool we all hope it will be is dependent on not taking shortcuts this time - no half baked features - just make it great.

In my opinion the price of Max is too low, and to get it at a lower price in leu of waiting for development to happen is worth the setbacks thus far. If you already have it why not just wait till the wheels start turning and see where the thing goes, if it all goes pear shaped it will just be like one of those bad pizza nights when everything you ordered got messed up somehow.

Obviously it was a little disappointing when Max didn't make the release date first put out there. At least it is not crazy expensive, and in development for ages (any Star Citizens around)

Make MAX Great!

OldFlak....

Oh thats not fair..
Poor old Chris Roberts has only raised $550 million of our money and its only 8 years late. Give him another week
Ye i paid a lot more for that than Max

I only paid the absolute minimum for SC about 4 years ago, never really got caught up in all the hype tbh.

Sorry I dont know the story of Star Citizens, I saw the page and it cost 45USD only, to test the alpha. Additionally this was a crowdfounding and I think they did not said that the game were be ready in one year.

Another issue, is that TGC is not improving enougth things. It is true that now the engine is much better, but there are a lot of Engines that provide great free features (driveable vehicules, third persons,. better water effects, better import scenes from Blender, easiest character imports,... And some of them are free or only cost 10$. Ok GGM is cheaper, but is not the cheapest one. Ok, Gameguru is easest to learn and has a clean interface (That is why I like it to teach my son) but is very dificult to found support or manuals.

Today there is a lot of video tutorials, but personally I hate them. those are good to understand how to do something. but when you are looking for something specific, you need to spent hours viewing videos and videos till you found the exact minute where someone esplain how to do something you are looking for. GG has a lot of functions, but if you are looking for an especific one to do an specific task, there is nowhere you can find description of that function. For me this is a big problem.

Even though I appreciate the reasoning behind pivoting to an open/rolling release date, I also recognize from a developer perspective this can lead to endless scope creep and release-purgatory.

Just looking historically, FPS:Reloaded had initially announced Oct. 2013 release. It didn't officially release until May 2015 and then another 5 years of what can largely be considered bug-fixes and performance-improvements rather than major feature enhancements (including a couple redos of the engine as part of that).

GGM shifted from Sept. to Dec. to Unspecified for the release. What the community lacks yet is a real and definitive v1.0 Roadmap that shows exactly what features are completed and what ones are in-progress that are needed to consider v1.0 ready for release. Lee does great with the weekly updates but casual lurkers and those wanting to see the bigger picture in anticipation of a release don't have a lot to go by.

Well yes to most of this.
When I paid the money early, I didn't expect it to be on time. I know how development goes and most software has got delayed. It was stated at the start that the release date was not a definitive date.

Of course, I was really hopeful that it would be this year or early in 2021.
However, this gives me more time to prepare and get the game ready for GGMax.
Am I excited about GGMax? YES.

Game Guru Karen! Chill out GoDevils...

These days I find it impossible not to see this project through a deeply cynical lens. The original September release date was optimistic at best, and based on implementing only five key features; a new character creator, improved terrain controls, VR support ported over from VR Quest, a third party graphics engine, and a new UI. TGC hoped these five features would sate the community enough that they'd forget they'd almost completely abandoned Game Guru Classic for most of the previous year, and that was on the back of several lacklustre years of bug-fixing and half-baked features.

Understandably, a large swath of the community were not exactly thrilled about this news.

TGC underestimated their users and their needs. In an effort to quell the palpable anger brewing on the boards, TGC began adding several huge features to the list; 64-bit, dynamic LUA, multi-grass. You want to know why we haven't seen a roadmap for v1.0? Because there isn't one, just a list of features hastily scribbled on a Post-It note on Lee's desk. And guess what? It turns out lashing together multiple modules developed separately in isolation is really hard, so the amount of work required is way more than initially estimated.

The backlash over the announcement of Max prompted TGC to be more transparent this time round compared to FPSC: Reloaded. Unfortunately, this has created a constant thirst for content and news at a time when the improvements are minor and incremental. Why do think they are always talking about grass and the new UI in the live broadcasts? Because those are the only things they can tweak easily without it breaking! Conversely, broadcasting once a week with nothing really new to say is doing more damage than broadcasting once a month with evidencable progress.

As has happened many times before, the lack of proper project management, and due diligence coming into this project is doing it a lot of harm. And all the open release date does is kick the can down the road and allow the expectations, and the pressure to grow. I feel for TGC, I really do, but they have no one but themselves to blame.

AE

Yeah, can't say I disagree with any of that AE. However I do hope that Max becomes what we all want it to be.

I now find myself in quite the dilemma as far as GG goes. After the brief taste of what Max has to offer thus far, I find I simply cannot work with Classic at all - it is simply ugly render wise, but performs so much better than Max does at the moment - hopefully that will all change with further releases of Max.

Classic now is not on my system, and I don't plan to install it again. For me GG will only survive in the form of Max. I really hope it becomes Great - but that needs to be sooner than later - not like the very long road with FPSC Reloaded\Game Guru Classic.

In the meantime I am learning to use UE, if Max comes through with huge improvements before I get too comfortable with UE then it just may see the continuation of existence on my system, which in turn will culminate in the continued development of Naelurec.

I really think the team (that is TGC now) can do something great with Max - I just hope it is not too late getting to the party.

At any rate it is still worth the money I paid to see where it all goes.

Just make Max Great!

OldFlak....

It would be fair to say making a mountain out of a mole hill is a understatement.

The key is to be able to develop your product without having to ask anyone for money, so there are no deadlines, etas, and so on.
The pressure does not help anyone, not if you want to develop your product as you want, there is no logic that you are forced to deliver an incomplete product, to meet a delivery date.
Meanwhile, videos showcase, broadcast, demos, trials, etc.
and when you are done you bring your product to market.
This is just my way of thinking and it's not going anywhere.

Just to add to the convo here, its not like your paying money for something and receiving nothing. You are still getting regular builds of the progress. While it could be argued that they are alpha's and not beta's at the very least your getting something throughout. The scope of what they are building impresses me with how far they have gone in a short time. For me personally and a few others like me that are making games in GG Classic, in the meantime, we are looking to see where things are at in 2021 with Max.

A rushed development is not something you'd want. Trust me.

It won't, it will become "OK & usable", just like GameGuru (classic), just like FPS Reloaded, just like FPS Creator. By the time anything 'great' might be available, Game Guru MAX would have moved on to 'GameGuru Ultimate' and the whole process will start again.

I really hope that Lee can stick two fingers up at me and call me a <insert expletive here> for how wrong I am, but we'll see.

"would have moved on to 'GameGuru Ultimate' "

You mean FPSC [reloaded[reloaded[reloaded[reloaded]]]]?
Look, I'm supportive and pretty excited to see what they have done so far...
I'm not even so big on hyper visuals for games-- just more about good ol
classic fun game play.
But still, would just like a little road-map and expectations notice (though I
haven't even bought the product!) But I think that's what we are all a bit antsy
about-- When? Where?! How?! Why?! It gets quiet around here, and we get bored
and impatient! Let's just see and realize the work that has already occurred.
So good work, Lee. Hope we can provide a little motivation for your crew!

Well said Avenging Eagle. I agree.
I bought GG Classic way back in 2015, and stopped using it at that time because it was very unstable.
5 years later, I saw the MAX pre-order, bought it, my expectations were high I must admit. I thought it would really be released in October (never had experience with past TGC products in the past). Then TGC decided to push it to December, I agreed also. Then the open release date... well that discouraged me honestly. I worked for 20 years in software development with different technologies and I never worked with an open release date for I product I was working on in my career. None of the businesses I worked for would have accepted that. As a QA/DEV manager, I must say this software lacks proper testing by a real QA team or person. Now the main testing is being done by the community it seems for MAX, I might be wrong though. Basic functionalities are broken in MAX. Planning is key in any software project. Start with a scope and stay with it. Sure there might be delays here and there. But if you have a fix list of features and stay within that you can release close to the date that was planned. Now it seems things keeps changing and there is refactoring of code during the beta phase which is odd for me. Anyway, since MAX has no release date. I installed Unity yesterday, looked at a couple of tutorials and was impressed quite honestly. So I will learn it. I have an advantage I know .NET. If in February MAX is still in the "beta" phase, I will probably ask for a refund. Sad, because I did buy quite a lot of assets from the TGC store from many talented artists here (and I own 95% of the official assets also) . And I even invested lots of time in learning GG classic in the last 6 months in preparation for MAX. I had a nice project for VR in mind. But will use Unity now since everything I need is ready with it and many assets are affordable also, just need to start from scratch. Don't get me wrong, I do wish for the best for MAX. But careful not to ruin the reputation of the brand...

@OldFlak
I totally agree. And i need to confess i also checked other engines like Godot and recently S2 Engine HD. I was really impress with the last one. And also is a good comparison: Both are developed by small teams, both runs on Windows only, both have similar prizes, similar quality of documentation, ...
I did not known S2EHD before but now I saw in that Engine a lot of things I would like to see in GGM:
-Awesome Weather an water simulation
- Vehicles and road tools
- First or 3rd persons views
- Inventory of items,
- Possibility to define different Keymaps
- Multilayer texturing
- possiblity to change any parameter of the objects on runtime trough the scripting.
- A visual machine scripting.
- A buiding generator
- An animation tool
- Cutescenes.
- Availability to produce any kind of game, not only FPS.
- A good import asset tool
- .....
But well my intention is not to compare engines here. I only want to note that TGC needs to define a good roadmap, with clear milestones and dates. Because in other way, they are going to loss a lot of players.

As @OldFlak said, if I feel conformtable with other engines while I am waiting an stable version of GGM, maybe could become late to give another opportunity to GGM.

Of course I will always be grateful to GG for having approached this world of game creation and having served as a basis for experimenting or dealing with more complicated engines.

Well let's see if the guys at TGC can surprise us in no time.

Who is, us or TGC lol?!

I agree with T-Bone's point. As much as I malign TGC, they are not the "scam artists" many comments on Steam and YouTube say they are. For one thing, they are definitely working on a product and have good intentions, it's not a cash-grab and they have not deliberately set out to lie to their customers; that's just a consequence of their piss poor project management skills.

AE

@qcrocknet, I totally Agree

S2 is a great engine. The problems are two fold, though - 1) no docs. Want to know what those zillion controls for various lights are for? Too bad. 2) crashes. The engine can crash frequently for a variety of reasons when you start to develop in it. Oh, and a third one that really set me off - it doesn't always keep your material settings. Well, the numbers stay the same, but the engine seems to flip out from time to time and metals become something other than metal and flip back again the next time you open the software ... or not. It's a crap shoot at times. The engine has a ton of possibilities, but the developer is slow to make updates and, according to someone who knows him, seems to be distracted by the next new and cool thing to add (which means we never get docs because he's too busy playing with the next programming toy for S2). It's why there's so many cool features in it. It's also why it's never really a completed, solid running engine and why the UI never gets any love. Despite what I've said here, I really like S2, but I can't see using it for an actual project ... yet.

GameGuru MAX? The jury is out on this one. It's way too early to tell. I have my concerns, too, but I am waiting to see what happens as time moves on. It was only $25 to get involved with it and that's about what it costs for two to eat at McDonalds any more. So, I'm not going to cry about it if MAX never truly becomes a usable system. Still, I think that Lee wants to do right with MAX. And he has help this time round, too.

@Argent_Arts
I know the S2 Crashes, I had some while testing, thats also another simil with GG. . I did not mention because i do not want to talk about the different issues on both systems. S2 was also at 20$ last week, so, again it is a prize I can spent without problem.
But When you see the games made with S2, I was really impresive.
I can imaging what could happen if both teams (S2 and TGC) join their effort in the same Engine. taking the best points of each platform. This could be awsome, and all of us could have the best engine ever..
Regarding documentation,... I think GG is not a good example of great documentation. Youi need also to look for them in hours of videos, or thousands of post to find anything you need. For people like me that does not have much time,.. I preffer to have a good manual or help integrated in the app instead of video tutorials.

GG's docs are terrible, too. You have to hunt through the forum and other places to even figure out what an FPE files is or whatever. So, yeah, I agree.

Plus lua scripts solve the issues, but don't work in multi, which means multi is very feature-bereft and seems questionable and confusing what a developer is supposed to do with it.

Yeah, I see it in a similar way, and I would expand the "piss poor" to

* Expectation Management
* High-Level Producing
* QA Management

skills on top.

As for PM itself, I would love to hear what tools and internal processes are in place and how they are enforced.
Is there a JIRA, or at least a poor man's variant like Trello?
Does the concept of sprints exist?
Are MVPs defined for all releases, as well as dependencies for deliveries?
Is there any (semi-)professional QAing & bugtracking ? (don't you even dare to mention the Github mess)
What's the process for prioritizing tasks and bugfixes?

I mean, not asking for a full blown AAA-producing pipeline, that would be insane. But all points listed above are mandatory for student projects, fgs.

All I know is there was a clear GG wind-down / blackout after 2016. People didnt really upload GG vids after 2016-ish, and they were already very scarce. The engine is a hidden secret and barely exists on youtube, hard to even find hobbyist videos, let alone much custom dev content. Updates didbt seem to revitalize GG until Max came around. So TGC hasnt garnered much confidence in the longterm area but we'll see haha.

Ya think .. Hmm I dunno

Well those numbers are fine and dandy but his point still stands. Longterm...TGC have a really bad track record. Like it is hard to give them the benefit of the doubt on anything.
All we have is the past to go on. And it is really eerie how similar fall of 2013 and spring 2020 have played out. They made a lot of talk back then in 2013 and 2014 and...2015. Lot's of talk about working on optimizations, importing, lighting, AI, GRASS, terrain, intels VTUNE chip to hunt down those naughty performance bugs. Making a great game engine where users can make awesome games with no limitations.
And when it was done and out everything was just... ''meh''. Not to mention the whole debacle that FPS Reloaded never actually came out cause it was yolo'd into GameGuru rebrand and original backers got the shaft.
BUT I really hope that isn't the case with Max, and against all logic and my own better judgement... I trust TGC and friends will deliver a badass product. A product where devs will be proud to have a splash screen for their game with the GGMax logo on it. And players will know they are in for something good because of it.

They do not need to use JIRA or Trello. Github has also a project board, which allows project management. I use it a lot and it works for most projects.

Why Lee not has showed us a board, like this in one, in one of his livestreams? It is very likely it does not exist.

yeah.......no.....that is where I am going to stop you. Could be unity, unreal, the space quest engine from 1988 and wouldn't make a difference if the engine is good but the developer can't make use of it.

How many and how many things can you avoid if you are able to develop a project without having to ask anyone for anything.

I am one of the many fanboys willing to wait long enough to get the GGMax that I want, or something very similar to this.

Don't get me wrong guys, but I look at GGMax at the stage it is in right now, and I just see a lot of things that I can do with it, well, and many others that I can't, but I bought this product to enjoy with it, and How am I going to enjoy myself, thinking only about what I don't have?

I am already .. Its what you create that counts and your faith in the end result.

Yep same goes for me ..
No matter how good Max is your going to get a few moans, Some like to moan, Unity, Unreal forums full of moaners.
Nothings ever perfect. If it was we would all be using it.

Sure, but at the moment you received money from "anyone", you assumes a legal and moral responsibility. This is something you need to take into account when you sel something.



Agree also, but in this cases Unreal, and Unity are also free of charge and it has a much bigger community and more difficult to satisfy. But of course, the owner of the products must check if the claims are justified or not. In the case of GGMAX, peoplo is only claiming about the state of the development.

For sure GGM could be a great Engine in a future, but just now it is only an idea. I saw a lot of projects with good intentions dead because at the end was impossible to join all the parts together.

For now it is not possible do anything with the last release, still terrain not work, vegetation either, there is not multiplayer,. jitters,.... I am not cryng, I am only agree to express my unhappyness. Sometimes you need to said that you are not happy with something to get progress on a matter. On the contrary this development will become a non endless project.

My son is learning the tables of multiplications in his school. He study ithem very little. I totally sure he is going to learn them in a future, so, some of you will think is much better not to push him to study. But this is not correct. Because if he does not learn at the same time that his colleagues I totally sure he is going to suffer a lot.

Something similar is happening here. If all the funguys continue telling TGC, ok, take your time,... for sure they are going to produce a good software in 5 months more, but, they are going to loss also a lot of users, they are going to worsen their reputation,...

So if any of you "love" GGM I suggest to push (always with respect and friendly) also TGC. When you overprotect something ... in the end you are damaging it.
Sometimes a slap on the ear is good, before they screw up.

I am also willing to wait as long as GGM takes to develop. In the meantime I'm still working on my game project in Classic and looking forward to its next engine bug fix, which could help with that project going forward. I'm also dabbing into App Game Kit as well. Which has been a lot fun. Additionally learning C# in the meantime as well.

When it comes to indie game development, I think people should be using this time to expand their learning and not hold Max to any reliance of making your game right now. You can learn to code using VS Code or Notepad++ or do 3D modeling with programs like Blender. You could even jump into Unity and Unreal and play about in those environments in the meantime. All of these tools are free. There is no need to refund Max.

I think in 2021 Max should be a pleasant surprise for those looking for an easy to use game engine. I wouldn't abandon it now, but also not expect it now. So use this time to really find out your strengths more in game dev. We have a lot of awesomely skilled people in a wide range of skillsets. You can communicate with them directly on the Discord.

I prefer TGC to be in charge of the direction of GGM, so we do not see similar fates as Reloaded, whereas it was seemingly community directed and often led to core mechanics being skimmed and unusual features being prioritized. Also there was some early talk of going 64bit back then as well but the community pushed back against that. GGM is looking honestly pretty great and I dont want to contribute to any stress for the team on that. Just let them do their thing and test out the builds as they come. Lots you can do in the meantime.

We just need to accept that TGC operate in a particular way and thats how its always been.

There has never been a roadmap or a plan for FPSC, FPSC X10, Reloaded, GG Classic or GG Max. The project starts and at any given point, the scope or approach may change, features might be cut or changed, there is very little communication and limited support.

In fairness, Max has been the best start to a project of all these. There has been more transparency, better updates and the product has a lot of potential but the lack of project management and quality control has caught up with it now.

I don't think anyone is opposed to having a reasonable delay to improve Max before release but it has now already been 2 months since the last beta so the UI can be redesigned which is a perfect example.

The question now is can TGC keep Max on track and deliver this time or will it slip into development hell like all the previous products. If they are going to save it they will need to think about the next steps and releases very carefully and regain confidence.

The specs for Max are fairly high and a lot of people will need to at least upgrade their GPU or possibly even their PC. This will also raise the stakes and expectations to deliver a good product as customers have invested significantly, not just the price of the software.

We have seen the 1st setback for Max now so its very important we see a positive response from TGC.