Over at Planet Anachronox they have word of a new tools release for ION Storm's RPG. The 6.8mb package contains updated editing tools along with tutorials.

For those interested in editing the ION Storm RPG Anachronox, there is a new model converter tool on Planet Anachronox. This allows you to transfer Lightwave models to Anachronox's MD2 format.

As promised, the Anachronox editing tools have been released (6.6mb download). Planet Anachronox has all the info you need to get started.

ION Storm's Joey Liaw updated his .plan file with the news that a new Anachronox patch is being tested at Eidos. Joey also created this tech support FAQ to address the common tech-related issues people have with the game. Some tools for scripting along with documentation will be released as well, when it's done it will be announced on the Planet Anachronox forums.

Planet Anachronox has posted another interview with an ex-ION Storm employee. This time Will Nevins has been interviewed. He was the director of audio. Thanks Blues News.

PlanetAnox has an interview with ex-Ion guy Travis Dogget. Maarten read this interview yesterday and said it was interesting. Apparently so interesting he forgot to post it. Isnt he cute!? Travis talks about the close of Ion Dallas and the Anox patch.

As noted in Joey Liaw's .plan file, a topic on Forum Planet has details on a new patch for Anachronox. Even though ION Storm Dallas is no more, a few guys are working during the last few days of rent fixing additional problems and making some improvements. Pretty cool.

There's a partial walkthrough of the Hephaestus section of Anachronox on Planet Anachronox. Gwog actually got stuck himself which is why it's not a full walkthrough hehe.

If you're stuck in Anachronox maybe the updated 1walkthroughs/FAQs at GameFAQs can help you. Saw that on Blues News.

The PlanetAnachronox Anachronox walkthrough has been updated. They added walkthroughs for the for Sunder, Votowne, and the Verilent Hive sections. The walkthrough for part 1 of the Sender Station has been updated as well.

If you downloaded the Anachronox demo and got stuck in the game, maybe this walkthrough on Planet Anachronox will help you out.

A demo of ION Storm's RPG Anachronox has been released and is available on the Eidos FTP. There's a mirror available at 3D Gamers. It's pretty hefty demo at 92.3mb. As of yet there's no word on the content of the demo. update: Carried this story over to the morning and here is a list of mirrors that will (hopefully) grow a bit. Some people have been grabbing corrupted files so you may wish to check the comments first to see who got a good copy from where:

- Eidos FTP
- 3DGamers
- FilePlanet
- Gaming Elite

For people who have a habit of never actually looking at a game until the demo comes out, here's a bunch of screenshots.

Eidos has released the 1.01 patch for Anachronox as promised. You can download it from their FTP. It's a 4.1mb download fixing several gameplay related issues and also fixing a Windows 2000 compatibility problem (see all the changes here). Blues News has a mirror up. And even though Eidos hates us, here is our mirror.

Word in this little .plan update from Tom Hall at Ion Storm is that we may be seeing the Anachronox demo as soon as next week. Monday even?

We're in da middle of finishing demo stuff... Likely Monday before Eidos can test and approve it... so it's a-comin'... Once that's out, we'll take a well-earned vacation... then get back at it! BTW, thanks for all the nice comments on the forums. Hope we've been helpful with our answers! We love the Anachronox universe, so we want to help folks anyway we can. :)

Gonna pick up a copy when I get back home.. how has everyone who got the game been enjoying it so far?

Word on the official Anachronox site is that the promised patch is still in Eidos QA, which is why it didn't get released yesterday. Guess we have to wait a few more days. Thanks Blues News.

To follow up on the stories yesterday (here and here) about Anachronox and Windows 2000 compabitility, ION Storm programmer Brian Eiserloh updated his .plan file again saying the bug has been caught but it turns out all OSs will benefit from the fix.

QA is beating on the patch now. It takes them a while to do a complete playthrough. The instability was being caused by an extremely subtle and devious buffer overrun in the filesystem code. Win2k tends to be more sensitive about this, which is why the bug was more apparent on that OS. This means users of ALL OSes should download the 1.01 patch when it becomes available (probably no sooner than friday night):

Also updating his .plan is Jake Hughes who says the team is trying to ready a demo for release tomorrow, for those wanting to try before buying.

Planet Anachronox has posted the first section of their walkthrough section, showing you how to get from the Bricks to Sender Station and how to get through that Sender Station.

ION Storm programmer Brian "Squirrel" Eiserloh updated his .plan file with an update on Anachronox and Windows 2000 compatibility (see story). He's been able to reproduce a crashing bug, and is working on a fix for it which should hopefully find its way into the 1.01 patch. This patch should be out "friday-ish", at this location.

... Note that the patch will weigh in at around 5 MB, so downloading it shouldn't cause anyone undue stress. The patch also fixes several minor issues and improves load times considerably.

Note also that several people have written me with various workarounds which have fixed the win2k crash for them. The ones most frequently suggested have been:

- disable 3d sound / EAX
- change win2k user logins (non-admin, etc)

Well it was made official by Eidos earlier today. Anachronox which started development many many moons ago has finally shipped. The game will be on shelves as early as this Friday. Here's a little feature list of sorts that we can expect

Anachronox is a 3rd person, 3D role-playing game (RPG) using the heavily-modified Quake 2 engine (32-bit graphics, particle system, spline-based camera scriptor, APE programming language). The player controls up to three characters at a time, from an eventual cast of seven, exploring the galaxy. Gameplay is exploration and interaction of the environment, melee with various galactic foes, and discovery of unique weapons and items that aid you on your quest. You can choose different characters to play and different ways to do things, leading you to different events and areas in the game. Each character has different Battle Skills with unique effects, and World Skills they can use to access places and info the other characters can't.

Also, a little problem.. Win2K having issues and Eidos doesnt feel that the OS is worth supporting. However Squirrel doesnt agree and the Ion guys are working to fix things. Here's word from Blues:

We're getting reports of various problems running the game under Win2k. Officially that OS is unsupported (by mandate of Eidos' tech support), however we (the anox coders) think that's kinda weak and are therefore looking into the problem right now.

The problem is that all three of us run Win2k on our development stations and none have had any issues with the game. This is a problem because we're still looking for an easily reproducible case

Gotta agree with Squirrel, that's a whole lot of suck. Over one third of the visitors here use Win2K these days and it's been growing pretty steadily.

The Anachronox website is now featuring a new trailer for ION Storm's Quake2 engine powered RPG. There are versions ranging from 10.9 to 69mb, and the movie itself runs for about 2 minutes.