Hi All,

Here is a recording of our live broadcast today:


And for those who did not get their questions answered verbally, here they are in text form:

Q> ​Can the welcome screen be disabled?
A> Yes there is a tick box at the bottom that will skip the Welcome Screen if you wish.

Q> ​Will entity placement lag be fixed? I’m on an RX 570 8GB gpu, and I’m still lagging when I place my assets
A> If you are encountering extreme lag in the latest builds, post an issue in the issues board with as much info as you can. There should be zero lag when using the editor to place objects.

Q> ​If VR hasn’t started development, can we at least have an idea of what planned features are conceptualized or are otherwise in a decent idea of the features?
A> When you click the Test Game/Level in VR buttons, your level will start and render in both the headset and a copy of it shown on the monitor. You will have VR controller support to move, collect objects, shoot weapons, reload, and will be able to look around your VR environment. Additional options for movement such as teleport will be considered and you will be able to configure/map what buttons your controller sends to trigger game actions. You will be able to test in VR and non-VR without needing to reset the software, and your save standalone games will save as non-VR or VR game titles.

Q> ​What are the plans are for porting old gg classic levels with the new terrain system?
A> The Classic FPM converter will detect the old small terrain heights and reproduce them in the new terrain system. The textures however will be approximated as the new terrain texture system is quite different from the old Classic one, but it will be a good starting point for continuing your game project inside MAX.

Q> Can the terrain brushes go smaller than they do currently?
A>The current terrain system is being completely replaced, and the terrain sculpting and painting brushes will provide greater resolution for editing than currently demonstrated.

Q> Is there a way to turn off the 3d view in assets as that causes the engine to crash? ?
A> If you find a crash, please create an issue in the issues board so we can reproduce the crash and fix it. If you mean you would like the option of the objects not loading in and previewing live when hovering over, post that as a separate issue as an enhancement request.

Q> We will be able to play with the player tall?
A>I will translate that as will you be able to change the scale of the player so they are taller or smaller than the current 65 inches high. This is not currently in the dev plan but if you can come up with some good reasons and use cases where this would be essential, please post in the issues board with your ideas. The reason it is not in the plan is that ALL the out-of-the-box assets such as doors, windows, buildings, items, etc all base their own size on the player being standard height for an adult human.

Q> ​Where do we submit our competition entries?
A> Competition rules, deadline and where to send your entries can be found in the news page., which you can find here.

Thank you everyone for your questions, more answers next week!

You can see the reflection of the sky moving on the tiles in the HDR room.

Classic had a similar issue with reflective surfaces, often showing the terrain as the reflection. I don't think the probe was intended for indoor use.While classic was an outdoor engine with limited indoor support and while max does greatly improve indoor scenery it is probably still limited in the indoor areas.So probably not a bug but rather a simple environment probe that ignores some if not all level geometry from what I saw it didn't reflect any thing else.It does make it useful for using on reflective surfaces likes windows, some metals and such. But practical application makes it not all that useful for general use.

Just checked.The probe works perfectly as intended, lee should have mentioned that the prove needs to be pretty close to the entity and anything that falls outside of the probe box which to be honest is a little small reflects the surrounding areas as well as the sky. So it only covers the area of the box, the rest of the entity reflects the sky as well. So there really should be and option to attach it to an entire entity or grow the box size.

This sounds like Unreal's lightmass importance volume, just in a much more limited way, as it is specific to one light, whereas, Unreal can encompass many. I'm not an Unreal fan (I hate the visual coding with a vengeance and am not quite ready to try C++ with it) so glad to have it in Max even if in a more limited fashion. But really, probably better to do it in a similar fashion to Unreal rather than as is. Having a separate bounds box for this would be slightly harder for the user I suppose, but could encompass several lights.

"We will be able to play with the player tall?" This is not currently in the dev plan but if you can come up with some good reasons and use cases where this would be essential, please post in the issues board with your ideas.

Good reasons? It's obvious to anyone who actually tries to make actual games, that player size being scalable is pretty useful. Sure, you can have a default size and make media work with that. No problem, makes sense. But really? Limit it just down to that? What if I want to make an Antman game or a King Kong one? I have to scale all the media to suit, rather than just the player? I've been here before, ah yes, with Game Guru. Makes no sense to anyone prepared to think for a minute on it. Scale the entire world, or just the player? No brainer. Player scale is probably the easiest thing to do and is still being set aside for idiotic or obtuse reasoning. Make the media set for the DEFAULT scale and if people decide to alter the players scale let them! I can't see anyone arguing against this.

@Dvader-you are smack bang on, I thought the same, scaling the player would be easier than doing it the other way around.

I did that question because of Dvader's assumptions, I really think the same.
Also, I've no time now to prepare a video and so on, but I modeled a table with a soldier as a template, the table height is the middle of the soldier height, when I go to test game, the player height is the middle of the table height. What I mean is that the player's height only reaches the table legs, is it because my table is a giant table? then why the table is at the middle heigh of the soldier?

Even making the player smaller would be good, I was toying of the idea of making a "land of the giants" type game in classic, but the thought of scaling all entities up to a huge size put me off. The ability of change the player size would of been an easier option.

About my issue with the player height I mentioned above, just my fault, I've realized I missed the LUD, now it is corrected for all the meshes.
Now works fine.

I myself sometimes want to increase a bit the height of certain chars, meaning they are stronger than the others, the same with the player, or even the opposite, maybe my player is the typical anti-hero, smaller, fat, an ordinary guy.
We should be able to adapt the player height to the meshes we are going to use, even custom ones. imho.

Standard doorways in most classic models are a common set height i think ?
You have not got much room to play with if your going to increase the player.

It is not for playing with classic models, in fact, I'm going myself forgetting GG models to work in GGMax, I love classic models, in fact, they may help a lot for fill up the scene, but at least the main models should be models following the GGMax requirements to avoid issues.

It is no a matter to make all your models higher to match with the new player height, just having the ability to increase/decrease player height if needed.

Sorry, I no very familiar with hulk, but afaik he drinks something and suddenly he is a super-hulk, big one, and very strong, to be ready, and when done he back to the normal. How you get that in GGMax if the player's height is untouchable.

Having now been trying out Max proper to do a jungle level for the competition, Lee and co have made some fantastic progress... super smooth on my GTX1070Ti I have loads of the jungle assets so far in the level with no slowdown at all. Some glitches are still apparent, but I have had no crashes yet.

Will make some time this weekend, if time allows. Do have some idea what I would like to do for the level. So this should be fun to see what people do within the rules.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/28778755
Echo-- dR. wHo's Nemesis' (the Daleks) voice: (/\/\/\/\/)
"We - shall - NEVER - allow - other - games - than - FPS on here! Exterminate!"
Scales:
Scale the player down,
the map scales equally.
Want a double size map, cut the player in half.
Want a 20 times bigger map? Cut the protagonist object down to (5)% of it's original size.
Did that
adjustment
for
a
flying
space-ship.
However
the
hard-coded
map
is
still
kinda
small-ish.
But scaling stuff is a real curiosity.

Light probe adjustment sorts that.

1. Games where the player assumes the role of a child (horror games come to mind, particularly), in which case their "standing height" would be 1 or 2 feet shorter than "standard adult male". (Or any genera game, for that matter, where the player is a child, a baby, or maybe a dog or a cat for the game's duration.)

2. As others have mentioned, any game where the player will not be an average-sized human, but rather a giant, an insect, a toy army soldier, or inside of a two-story tall mech-suit in a futuristic war-torn sci-fi city battleground.

3. Levels or long sections of a game where the player will be in an area with a very low or partially-collapsed ceiling, let's say, in which case holding a key to crouch for the entirety of that experience would be impractical and just not fun (and holding the crouch key also dramatically slows down movement speed, does it not? What if that's not wanted?)

4. The ability for trigger zones to manually adjust the player's height when they, for example, come up to a vent or any other obstacle they need to duck under, which would provide a more fluid progression through a level, where the player will not need to press a key to "crouch", rather, their character would do it automatically when they approach an obstacle that would require them to do so, and then return them to their "normal" standing height once they've cleared that obstacle and have come out on the other side.

5. The ability to adjust the player's height dynamically via scripting would allow a player who is "severely injured" to lose some of their height as if they were crouching over slightly while walking, as if they were holding their body in pain (accompany this with slower movement speed or preventing the player from running altogether when severely injured for example, for full effect).

6. Any other in-game scenario where the player's height needs to be reduced while in transition, such as getting into vehicle, or ducking slightly to enter a slightly-lower-than-average door or bulkhead, OR for use while creating in-game cinematics to take into account a player sitting down, being knocked down to the ground unconcious by an explosion (to a height preset lower than "crouched"), etc.

7. A purely cosmetic option as in some objective cases, an environment may look better in the eyes of the designer if the camera height was just slightly lowered (or raised) by a few inches.

8. Users creating their own levels consisting of nothing but custom assets might find it easier (and a HUGE time saver) to simply lower the height of the player slightly, than to have rescale, readjust and realign 300+ entities they've already exported from their modeling program that make up their map (assuming it's an interior environment with doorways, etc.).

9. The ability to change the scale of objects is already implemented in the engine, as is the camera's field of view, so why not add the ability to raise the camera up or down a bit? I could maybe understand the pushback if it was a request that would add three additional months to the engine's development...but I doubt that would be the case here (then again, I'm not a programmer). In any case, what reasons would there be NOT do it?

10. Unity can do it! (Alright, this last one was a just a troll, I just wanted to have a list of 10 reasons instead of 9.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

mech warrior being inside one of wolfs constructions.
rampage 3d you may want to be king kong in a smash buildings and eat people stomp cars

plenty of scope for different heights, but will it be a harduous task to do?

Well I finally completed the jungle compo map.... are we allowed to post screenshots of our entries here, I think Lee said it was ok.

Yes should be fun, I will actually be uploading a video, however will be doing that only late tomorrow, I don't want to give away my idea I had, it was pretty awesome idea. lol

yeah same here, don't want to give any ideas away, be cool to see your video Trying to do something that is not a usual jungle theme is tricky, I went down a slightly different idea to a "traditional" walk in the jungle, and that's all I will say.

Lol would be funny if we had the same idea.But yes also didn't do the jungle walk traditional thing.Went with some thing a little different.

@WoI - I am intrigued, I am just making a video, but won't upload until the compo is nearing closure time. Good luck to you as well.

Rather busy today with other projects so won't have time to upload later

I will upload mine after work here today.

Nice level, loads of detail in there which is what Lee and TGC were wanting, Nice.

Just got round to firing up this version must say I was surprised by the climbable palm trees. Max seems to be progressing nicely . Well done. All. Now all I need is a keyboard with a working return key.

Here is a screenshot for the Jungle Compo entry I have made, I will post the video here later.

The video for my entry is below, I just added some music to the video and some text, they are NOT in the map I submitted.



Hope you enjoy the video.