What's New: 3ds Max 2025 SDK
This topic describes new items and changes that affect the 3ds Max 2025 C++ SDK.
New Menu System APIs
This feature is a complete re-write of the 3ds Max menu editing system, affecting both regular menus and quad menus. This work provides a foundation for a modern menu editing system, portable menus, and future menu work. These changes will affect any plug-in or script that creates or customizes menus, and we will provide some migration guidance on how to update your code.
Benefits of the new system
This new feature offers several benefits to third party plug-in developers:
- Menus can now be created with the updated 3ds Max Menu Editor and shipped in the Application Plugin Package. This approach greatly simplifies the creation and management of menus.
- The system also provides C++ and MAXScript/Python exposure for completeness.
- The new menu system uses a transformation approach, where each plug-in adds its menus at startup, so menus always correctly reflect the currently loaded plug-ins. In the previous system, menu customizations were not as tightly coupled with plug-in loading and could be incorrect when plug-ins were missing or failed to load.
- For end users and administrators, menu customizations are now portable between 3ds Max versions, so they do not need to be re-created after each upgrade.
- The new system offers an enhanced resource ID-based localization workflow.
See the Menu System topic for more information about how to use this system to create and modify menus.