Anachronox modding

Several years ago now, I bought a budget release of an old RPG called Anachronox. After playing it through, something of an odyssey given the large amount of gameplay it provides, for some reason I ended up wanting to decompile the game logic scripts which were used to implement the gameplay. Actually, now that I think about it, it is more likely that I wanted to bypass a part of the game I just couldn't work out how to complete. In any case, one thing led to another and I ended up looking at Species' Java APE decompiler.

Now I could have easily extended his decompiler but there was no documentation about all the eccentricities of the compiled format and in order to learn enough about them to understand why his decompiler worked the way it did, I would need to have written it. So I ended up writing my own decompiler from the ground up in Python. It worked well enough, it seemed to handle all the APE constructs I could locate in all the forms I could think of and definitely handled things Species' decompiler didn't. Like nested if statements.

Having something which "worked enough", I released the source code to what served as the Anachronox modding community. By this time, several years after the game's acclaimed (but not as popular as it should have been) release, the community was pretty subdued.

But a fellow New Zealander called Laguna (who was still in high school) popped up. He did a lot of work towards making Anachronox more approachable for modders, including pushing me to look into various things. Then he faded away having graduated high school (most likely to a more thankful productive life) working a burger doodad at McDonalds from what I hear. A pity as he was an extremely skilled game modder and Anachronox wasn't the only project he worked on, another was an impressive looking Half-Life mod by the name of Battlegrounds.

Now thankfully someone else, called Creaper, is working to move the Anachronox modding support forward. Initially he started by fleshing out the modding documentation which the original game developers released and now he is submitting bug reports for the APE decompiler! In the past couple of weeks, with his help, it has been getting much more polished.

While I am focused on the decompiler, I have decided to take advantage of the impetus and release my Anachronox modding scripts and other related projects to Google project hosting:

http://code.google.com/p/anachronox-modding/

Empirical evidence dictates that only Creaper and I will use them, but maybe eventually his efforts will bear fruit and someone might find them useful in helping develop their own modded game based on Anachronox.

Help wanted: Creaper needs hosting for the Anachrodox website (currently comes to around 5 gigabytes of space) so if you know anyone who is willing to host a game modding website for free please sing out.