Unofficial patch for Anachronox, released by an ex-ION Storm
programmer. Details:
Speed up the game by holding down the backslash key.
See those animation bugs!
Filesystem code rewritten from scratch. Improvements to
performance and flexibility. Any part of the os filesystem,
a dat file, or a zip file can be mounted anywhere in the
anox virtual file tree. For example, the patch is packaged
in a zip file (anox1.zip) and mounted to root alongside
the actual anoxdata directory. Probably a couple pointer
bugs were fixed in the process, since the old filesystem
code was such complete and utter ass.
If old patch files are detected sitting around when the
game starts for the first time after patching, they will
be deleted. So, if you tooled around with files that were
included in the old patch files, then they will not be automatically
deleted if their contents were changed, in which case you
will have to nuke them manually (or do a clean install).
Ignore all this if you haven't modified any game files yourself.
Command line tool afscmd which allows conversion of dat
files to zip files, and adler checksums of files stored
in compressed files or in the filesystem. Note that the
game will not, by default, load retail dat files which have
been converted to zip.
If you want to speed up load times and are sick of digging
around for CD2, copy the entire cd to some directory on
your hard drive and add +set cddir to your shortcut.
Somewhere along the patching way, minimum and normal install
problems have been fixed. All three installation sizes should
run without any problems.
Completely new savegame generation system implemented.
It is triggered on a map transition every fifteen minutes
or on a map transition before an important cinematic. These
"story saves" do not save any map entities since it takes
place between maps and is much more stable. In many cases
it replaces the very buggy "View Cinematics" menu which
contains code I dare not gaze upon lest my eyes be blinded.
There is no limit to the number of autosaves and story
section saves that can be generated. Load them up by scrolling
in the load game screen, which is improved and displays
more information. Sorry, no pictures.
Fixed a crash bug when loading old patch1 or retail savegames
that were created while a door or elevator was moving somewhere
in the level. Fun with remapping absolute code pointers.
Rewrote entity function mapping code from scratch.
Fixed an evil pointer bug or three. There was a really
fun one that would randomly write a backslash to a random
part of memory every time a model was loaded. Oh, and another
one where free would be called on an invalid pointer, slowly
fragging memory. I don't understand how people were able
to finish the game at all.
Wrote a new afex system from scratch, in perl. Afex was
our poor broken asset crawling tool which would start at
the first map of the game and attempt to find all scripts,
textures, models, etc. references. But being a broken pile
of crap, it missed a lot of important files. So the size
of the patch is bigger to include these missing sounds and
other files.
Lots and lots of little typos and gameflow bugs fixed.
Big thanks to the patch testers for all of these. Important
ones are the Hyrax quest, getting stuck in the bricks elevator
shaft, etc.
Jake and Richie made a nice taxi service so you can get
around the bricks easier.
Fixed copy protection incompatibility problems with certain
new DVD-ROM drives.
Updated libpng to 1.2.4 (less crashing on corrupt input)
and zlib to 1.1.4 (fixed buffer problems).
Rewrote dual parabolic environment mapping back into the
new shader code, also using q coordinate of texture matrix
on newer cards.