Will it be possible create survival type games with Max?
Like farming wood, stone, ore etc, crafting food, building bases etc?

I think they will get (and probably already have long ago) gotten tired of me asking
why not script spawn some assets? So... yeah I shouldn't do that any more.
Now if you want to do it 2D- no prob at all. Sprites already script spawn.

It's possible, but as GubbyBlips mentions, the ability to spawn entities is a bit of an issue. You would basically have to include every item you ever need to craft placed in the level at the start. So possible, but a little limited if you want to make unlimited items of any kind. From what I can see, there are no plans to add a way to add new objects in game, so Max is not really suited to survival games.

Simply re-use the entities!

I helped Slaur3n with Lua scripts for his western game and it has endlessly respawning entities for mining, food collection, ammo etc.

Sure, sounds great, but is a bit of a headache, even for someone who can script. Recycling objects is the way to go, but even then, you still need them to be placed on the map to start with. Like I say, sort of possible, but GG is nothing like suited to this sort of game.

Yeah, "This is the way". And it's the GC MAX requirement. I was hoping to see MAXimized spawn
potential @ 64 bits. There's a video somewhere on the net where the Wicked engine creator
spawns a few soldiers to throw a big test at the engine. 3yrs ago...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyoUzYvt75E

Seems to me as a humble amateur, who has played with several engines in the past, that spawning objects, be they 3D or 2D is not a big issue. Game Guru is the first engine I have ever encountered that does not have this ability. I have never quite understood why. There must be something specific, that makes this impossible without a lot of work but it seems a big weakness in any game engine to me. The engine should not be restricted by the editor.

I recall doing something like this times ago. I have re-use soldiers, with the same 5 soldiers I make a demo, rather than killing them, they just change position when "Death", and stay there hidden and standby, for later use. There would be some vid somewhere.

Nope definitely possible, I've done it in the old GG code base - used it to create pickup items once loot chests opened, when enemies died, create rockfall landslides, procedural generation of rocks and trees etc. The caveats Amen listed in other threads about this apply - e.g. I didn't recreate navigation obstacles from the in-game generated objects, so spawning mountains would work but not for AI navigation.

Cheers.

"so spawning mountains would work but not for AI navigation."

So I heard... But it always gets me gruffed up a little here- when there is a constraint placed on engine features because of assumed use of the engine across the board. Everyone gets GG for only one reason! because everyone automatically wants to use stock AI- right?! Yeah, Youtube them reviews! For those users, they probably never script spawn objects. No, I have no plans to use any GG AI characters in any of the foreseeable future projects. That may change at some point, at which time when I move an object around on the map, supposedly that will throw AI completely off. Well that's irrelevant when AI is not on the map, or then it's my responsibility to take that into consideration @ project ....shrug.... Anyhow, it's one of those work- arounds we settle for.

In Broadcast 28 --
( Lee's words may not be exact but I think I caught meaning of it..)

Lee said in response to a Question about spawning objects from script..

Yes it is a good idea and we thought about it and it is going into our design
but it is not called Spawning Objects..
It will be an [ Object Generator ] that will Spit out objects on demand..
This will be controlled by Visual Logic Tools so you never have to use script..

( Now I would hope that scripters would be given access to the commands that the visual
Tools are using to create there objects form logic.)

There we go then, object generator it is and as with all features they have pros/cons and you use them as you want, take the benefits and watch out for the 'cost'.

Probably still need a fair bit of scripting to make a survival game, but I think all games of any complexity/uniqueness will need some amount of scripting, visual or otherwise.

Cheers.

Spawning objects via script is only half the battle. Really, you also need to be streaming in texture data on-the-fly too, otherwise you'll run out of VRAM pretty quickly before a single polygon has even been drawn. You'd think texture streaming would be something of a necessity given Max's proposed nodal terrain system, which will theoretically make it possible to create huge maps compared to what we have now, yet Lee has been pretty tight-lipped about this sort of functionality so far.

AE

Every time you add some entity to your map, GG/GGMax has to re-calculate collisions, on the fly, it might be a performance high cost.

It seems spawning entities has become the latest and most popular request for Classic/Max. Even I'm finding myself wishing we had such an ability. As DVader mentioned, I'm left hiding duplicate entities on my map and calling them in when needed. This also means I have a maximum for each type of object I am bringing into the scene.

Years ago when I did the Asteroids thingy I had 26 differently shaped asteroids (.x files iow) and about 15 different textures.

So I had 390 different asteroids and on the map I had 5 of each so almost 2000 in all.

They were all hidden and initially positioned off to the side of the map well out of the way, then at runtime simply moved to where they were needed and shown.

As they get destroyed by the player they are hidden again and positioned back in the 'pool' area ready for the next time they are needed.

It takes a while to set up something like that but you only need to do it once!

Yes, but you must consider it a pain in the backside to have to manually place every potential object somewhere off map! Fine for a simple game, but hardly a great solution.
Take this little bit of code from something like AGK.

This would make a bunch of cubes and position them in a grid. If I wanted to experiment with how many I can safely use I just need to change gridmax to a higher number. Once the code is in it's super simple to experiment. As it stands at the second I would have to add them all in manually and if it's too much, delete them again manually. There really is no substitute for code for this sort of thing.

Edit - Oh Thanks Cybernesence for clarifying it is more a choice than a overall problem with the design. I've been asking on and off since Reloaded was first released for a feature like this.