August 2025 Update

Since our June release, development on MAX has been busier than ever — a flood of new features, dozens of updated and new behaviors, and a long list of stability improvements. This cycle saw an especially heavy focus on expanding the behavior system, giving creators more built-in gameplay mechanics, UI controls, and visual feedback options right out of the box. Alongside this, the editor gained several usability upgrades and optimizations aimed at making large projects faster and smoother to work with.

Here’s a round-up of what’s now part of today’s release:

Major Features & Additions

Behavior System Expansion

• New Behaviors: Booster, Particle Toggler, XP Monitor, Objective Monitor, Freefall Object — plus many new icons (life/health, hand, disk, trade, switch, progress bar) for clearer in-game feedback.

• Enhanced Existing Behaviors: Huge sweep of updates to quest, vehicle, door, switch, HUD, stealth, NPC, environmental, and combat behaviors — including fixes, optimizations, and new highlight/icon support.

• Gameplay Mechanics: Improvements to object interaction (carry, break, destroy, hack, search, climb, etc.), better stacked object handling for destructible items, and refined flashlight logic (battery drain, auto turn-off, and specific use cases).

Lua Command Additions

• SetPlayerRun(v) — toggle player sprint ability.

• Include(file) — load external Lua scripts into your logic.

• MoveDown(e,v) — quickly shift entities in the world.

• Multiple new player, HUD, and weapon animation control commands, including ForceGunUnderWater, SetGunAnimationSpeed, and full control of gun animation frames.

• Added new g_UserGlobal entries for ammo, health, and lives tracking.

Editor & UI Enhancements

• New Global Behaviors system centralizes common scripts for easier reuse.

• Status bar and highlight colors now independently configurable.

• Modern Dark theme refinements, plus re-addition of Darker Style.

• Faster storyboard thumbnail and .fpe loading.

• “Empty Level” grid controls with adjustable floor height.

• Expanded editor menus for project management, toolbar layouts, and icon selection.

• Improved import of remote projects and custom fonts.

Visuals & Effects

• Added gun tracers for aircraft and below-barrel tracer options.

• Optimized decal rendering for smoother animation.

• New particle emitter rotation support and trigger types for more dynamic effects.

• Improved handling of custom materials in standalone builds.

Bug Fixes & Stability

Gameplay & Logic

• Fixed numerous behavior logic issues (quest progression, stealth zones, objective visibility, NPC state changes, underwater detection, particle toggling, and more).

• Resolved fog setting restoration after test games, weapon ammo handling, and custom material activation problems.

• Fixed font loading, WPE resource validation, and workshop subscription edge cases.

Editor & Standalone

• Prevented freezes when saving/loading large levels.

• Improved validation of duplicated entities in standalones.

• Fixed missing skybank handling, crash cases from collection saves, and hot-loading object issues.

• Enhanced VRAM management between levels for smoother transitions.

Performance & Optimization

• DDS conversion and compression options to reduce texture memory use.

• Freed VRAM between level loads, optimized material handling, and reduced “not responding” waits for big levels.

• Faster decal, storyboard, and .fpe loads.

New Swimming Arms in Global Behaviours

• Thanks to the awesome community contributions, you now have access to a new global behavior that, when selected, will employ animated swimming arms when underwater

• You can find this behavior in the new Global Behavior feature titled "swimming.lua"

General Observations

This has been one of the broadest updates we’ve done for MAX in terms of scope — from deep gameplay scripting tools to quality-of-life tweaks in the editor. The Global Behaviors push, the massive wave of behavior updates, and the addition of powerful Lua commands give creators more freedom than ever to build complex, interactive worlds without starting from scratch each time.

As always, the best way to see these changes in action is to join our community on Discord — share your creations, test the new features, and help guide where MAX goes next.