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).
https://worms2d.info/WA_vs_WWP
There is also Worms W.M.D., which we understand is based on Armageddon's source code, but that came out much later, and is still very different in terms of gameplay and style.
I used to play an old game called Underlight. When they shut it down, the owner sent me a CD with the codebase. To my eternal shame, I lost the code. It was so neat seeing the old hacks; it even overwrote the ebp register in an inner graphics loop, because apparently in the early 90’s that sort of thing made a big difference.
Would love to get a glimpse at how worms’ ninja rope physics is implemented...
Unfortunately no. And, saying this as a big open source enthusiast (see profile), it would not do the game's community much good to be open-sourced right now (as the game relies almost entirely on security by obscurity to deal with multiplayer cheating). Open sourcing also would be unlikely to solve any big problems - e.g. native Linux / macOS support is not due to lack of motivation, but simply due to how much the game depends right now on Windows and other Microsoft APIs and libraries. We are however trying to move the codebase into a direction where as many of the same benefits can be achieved, such as refactoring the game logic into a portable core, and add scripting support to allow arbitrary customizations.
The question of whether the source code is open sourceable has also been raised, and unfortunately the answer is also no - my understanding is that parts of the code were written by a party under an agreement that precludes the source code being released.
(Also, don’t underestimate the power of people wanting to play worms on MacOS — it’s the type of thing I’d rewrite out of pure joy. But that’s not in the cards.)
On the second point: Please have the powers-that-be consider doing a partial release of the parts that are not under that agreement. Some code is better than no code at all.
The argument you're using here about the game depending on MS APIs and such is simply not an argument against releasing, and you know that perfectly. It is in fact an argument for releasing it open source. There's no point at which it's ideal to release the code - it can always be cleaner, more optimized, saner, and so forth.
Here[1] is an example of someone using that argument and delaying the release by first a decade, and then saying it probably won't happen at all. It's just complete nonsense - if they were afraid to release their code because it was "ugly" or "not modern", again, that's not an argument.
But obviously I have little to say about your last paragraph, except to reiterate what someone else said and asking if the code could be released without those parts :-)
1: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Lightwor...
Out of general curiosity, is there anything you can tell us about the source code? What languages are used? How many LOC? Did they use any sort of version control? Whats the build process like?
Were you surprised by any of the ways they were doing things when you first got to see the code?
All those people helped to profoundly shape my childhood, of which ~7 years was spent playing this game.
I really am grateful you posted this link. Thank you again. :)
This brought back waves of nostalgia I haven’t felt for like a decade.
