Chronon

What is this?

This is an open-source reimplementation of Anachronox, built on top of the Quake 2 engine (which funnily enough is the same engine Anachronox was developed upon).

It's important to note that this project is operating to reimplement the game through publicly available documentation and observation, rather than dissassembly, which should hopefully be fine from a legal standpoint.

Project Goals

• Reimplement Anachronox (duh)
• Support for multiple platforms; linux, android and more
• Make the game easier to modify
• Improved visuals

Immediate Roadmap

• Modernise renderer w/ modern OpenGL (i.e. 3.3)
• Finalise MD2 loader
  • Multiple skin support
  • Vertex key morphing (for facial animation)
  • MDA specification - ensure all features are supported
• Virtual machine for APE scripts

Features

It's still in a very early stage of development, so nothing is playable yet. Below is a list of what's been done thus far.

• Loading from Anachronox's DAT packages
• Engine can initialise itself from the Anachronox game directory
• Some preliminary work on loading Anachronox's models
• Supports the various texture formats Anachronox uses (e.g. PNG, BMP and TGA)
• Respects custom texture surface flags, inc. alpha effects for textures
• Extended limits, which is necessary for some maps to load

Extras

These are additional enhancements introduced here that the original game didn't necessarily feature.

• Can target x86, x64 and ARM64 architectures
• Support for both Microsoft Windows and Linux
• Overbrights via r_overbrights (just be wary Anachronox's art was not designed for it!)
• Higher-resolution texture replacements can be loaded in
  • Replacement textures need to be placed under a hd directory located under anoxdata
  • Can be enabled/disabled via hd_override cvar
• Replaced QGL with GLEW
• Code is compiled as C++, as opposed to C

Wow, neat! How can I help?

If you have experience with either C/C++, have a passion for programming and familiarity with the Anachronox game, then feel free to get in touch via our Discord server in the #anachronox channel.

Alternatively, feel free to ping me an email at hogsy@oldtimes-software.com.

Building

(these instructions aren't necessarily up-to-date)

Windows

Visual Studio

1. Use vcpkg_setup_msvc.bat; this will fetch vcpkg and install the dependencies
2. Now use cmake_generate_vs2022-x64.bat which will generate the Visual Studio solution for you under a new build directory

MinGW-w64

You can download MinGW-w64 from here and of course will require CMake as well which can be found here.

For now a copy of SDL2 is retained in the repo specifically for compiling against MinGW-w64, as the one included in vcpkg currently doesn't compile.

macOS w/ Apple Silicon

No plans to support "legacy" x86/x64 based devices right now unless someone else steps in to do it. macOS support is generally going to be at the bottom of my priority list for supported platforms.

1. If you don't have vcpkg installed already, use vcpkg_setup_apple.sh; this will fetch vcpkg and install the dependencies
2. Use CMake as usual, but pass -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake as an argument so it can find packages provided by vcpkg

Resources

• Anachrodox