Here is a somewhat more nicely formatted list of highlights: https://worms2d.info/Worms_Armageddon_3.8_Features
Slightly offtopic: I haven't played Armageddon for a long time, but I assume the pace of Worms Armageddon is similar to Worms W.M.D. (which I'm playing on Switch), and it seems like there is a lot of waiting involved - just a few seconds here and there, but overall, it feels like the game could move at a much faster pace, especially when playing single player.
Do you know if this is a conscious decision (e.g. to keep people from burning through the available content through fast) or due to technical limitations (e.g. the AI actually has to think), or just happens to be that way?
A few seconds before the damage count shows up, a few seconds before the next enemy worm gets selected, the five-second countdown before the bot worm starts moving, a few seconds after the turn ends, a few seconds between the "machine gun destroyed" and the explosion etc. - would it be possible to add a "faster" mode? (Sorry if Armageddon has that, as I said, it's been a while.)
(For W.M.D. on the Switch, the long loading screens add to the waiting, but those sound a lot harder to avoid than the in-game delays.)
I haven't played W.M.D., but from what I've seen from the streams, pacing definitely feels different. The delays are a part of it, and they do subjectively seem less forced in Armageddon. For another thing, W.M.D. introduces crafting, giving players at least something to do between turns - in Armageddon you've nothing to do but follow the action and mock your opponents' mistakes :D
That’s just how Worms was originally (eg the DOS game) because that’s how turn based games were originally paced. A large part of that will obviously be due to the capabilities of systems back in the day but it was also that a lot of games weren’t so fast paced as they are now.
You see a similar thing with beat em ups too. Take Street Fighter 2 on the SNES then look at Capcom games on every console each generation after and there is a noticeable difference in how the pace increases with each new release. Same is true for a lot of other genres too.
>Worms Armageddon now runs well under Wine or Proton on Linux.
Was wondering if there would ever be a chance of a true native linux port? I've got one of the later worms games natively on linux, but it sort of pales in comparison to worms Armageddon and while I appreciate the efforts of the proton maintainers and Devs like yourself that work hard to make their games compatible with proton, but I'd still prefer to buy a game that runs natively on the os I use.
why would it matter?
Yes, for the game and its community. After so many years of playing the game and being part of the community, it is now an inextricable part of ourselves.
> Did you work on the "original" codebase before becoming a maintainer?
No; I started playing Worms World Party maybe around 2004. In 2006 I started writing third-party add-ons for the game, and I had been given a copy of the source code so I could continue maintaining it alongside Deadcode (David Ellsworth, the first maintainer).
I found them on YouTube now that I started looking for them, but I've been missing them from my Worms game (on steam) :-)
For anyone wondering: here they are: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wV5AFxEnuBo
I think I first saw them in 1998 or something.
Is the game still for sale, and does it still sell enough copies to employ someone fulltime to do this kind of work?
Yes, the game is still for sale; I know it's available on Steam, GOG, and Humble Bundle. I don't know any sales numbers, sorry.
Is there something like a "roadmap", which things you want to tackle for future updates? (if there are any planed at all, since this is done in your free-time and the last patch was 2013)
Because my oldschool and nostalgic memories are about worms world party i always wondered if it could be possible to get the two games together. It's a little bit sad, that the online-community of wwp is nearly dead, and the remastered version did not get too much momentum.
I always liked the theme/ui of wwp more, because wa's UI feeld a little bit clunky to me. (e.g. the selection of worm-pots does a neat integration of this features) Do you also do/plan some work on the UI?
I think Project X (a powerful but sadly unmaintained third-party scripting mod for the game) has shown us a glimpse of what the culmination of the game's development might look like, so that's the direction that we want to go. Games with powerful modding capabilities (Garry's Mod, Skyrim) very often outlive the more static linear games, and combined with Armageddon's existing configurability and random map generation, I think it is something with a lot of potential.
Worms 2 introduced the "Danish Pyrus" voice bank, and it might have been voiced by Jan Linnebjerg, who played Pyrus, but it isn't written down anywhere in the manual or credits.
wa.team17.com
Also curiously, when covering the release announcement, a lot of news websites referred to our unofficial website (worms2d.info) as the official one, possibly due to the same reason!
Edit: I've been told that the removal of 32-bit support in the latest OS versions makes macOS support unlikely. The game uses some old proprietary DLLs (for some file formats) that are 32-bit only. Sorry :(
IIRC you were also working on a D port of the engine. Did that make it into this release or is it planned for later / not at all?
(Thank you!!)
My favourite mod is Monarchy: https://www.hedgewars.org/node/6718#comment-34937.
Though reading up apparently it didn't have LAN play, so maybe we just did splitscreen?
"The Worms Armageddon Political Simulation Machine is too strong. No person should have this much power. I'm smashing it as soon as I get home, before it does more damage."[0]
So I guess that video series won't be getting a sequel in time for November.
[0] https://twitter.com/manyatruenerd/status/1205250275117862913
EDIT: Well you got it, maybe Linux with the next patch? :)
Not even a hello world supports Windows 95 when compiled by MSVC 2005, and it's just because of a call to IsDebuggerPresent() in the standard library's startup code. To work around this, I overrode the definition of that function in one of WA's .cpp modules, to delay-load the real function, and return FALSE if it doesn't exist:
extern "C" __declspec(noinline) BOOL WINAPI _imp__IsDebuggerPresent(VOID)
{
typedef BOOL (WINAPI *IsDebuggerPresent_t)(VOID);
if (HMODULE lib = GetModuleHandle("KERNEL32.dll"))
if (IsDebuggerPresent_t proc = (IsDebuggerPresent_t)GetProcAddress(lib, "IsDebuggerPresent"))
return proc();
return FALSE;
}
Other than that, it was just a matter of identifying all the API calls requiring Windows 98 or later and replacing them with their Windows 95 equivalents. In cases where this would mean sacrificing functionality, that meant delay-loading the Windows 98-or-later version and falling back to the Windows 95 version if necessary, such as with GetDiskFreeSpaceEx() vs. GetDiskFreeSpace().
You could even turn websites themselves into arenas to battle in. :) Imagine blowing up a hacker news comment.
I built just the basic skeleton of a game engine, and stupidly handed over the code to the client before they paid me. They went on to find another contractor to dupe and turned it into a game called "Fat Super Heroes" which was online for a while on some sleazy website where you could gamble real money on the outcome of the game.
The original (horrible, terrible, hacky) engine I wrote is here:
https://github.com/emezeske/museum-of-ancient-artifacts/tree...
I don't think it ever got much real popularity; I was not a fan of the theme and the second contractor added a bunch of bloat that made it load slowly, etc. But it was quite a fun learning experience.
I'll have to make Worms-as-a-Service, to keep up.
https://www.ciaranmccann.me/worms-armageddon-html5-clone/
https://github.com/CiaranMcCann/Worms-Armageddon-HTML5-Clone
I reinstalled Windows XP and gave the computers to the homestay family I live with: Anna (9 years old) and Karen (6 years old).
Karen REALLY likes playing Worms Armageddon, just like I did when I was her age. I'm also having a lot of fun playing it again.
Got age of empires II the same way.
It’s exciting to see this game is still worked on, I’ll have to dust off the old PC and try it out again!
I noticed there is a version for iOS—will iOS also get the update?