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Worms Armageddon 3.8

worms2d.info

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Re: Worms Armageddon 3.8

#141

Post by Haegin »

folknor wrote: post #138
CyberShadow wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be right. For what it's worth, we are continuously looking for members of the community who have the skills and desire to contribute positively, and empower them to do so as much as we can. There is certainly no lacking in things to improve even outside of the game itself, such as infrastructure, network services, and third-party software such as tools or game extensions. The situation about cheats is not tha…

This might sound a bit harsh and overly dramatic, but frankly you're better off not worrying about it and going the route that Super Mario speed running has taken. They require, in the harshest of cases, (1) a full-length video of you actually playing the session, with input methods visible in frame, hosted on a publicly accessible site such as YT or Twitch, (2) game audio must be audible and undistorted, and (3) har…

That seems fairly reasonable for speed running - most speed runners are doing countless practice runs and the time spent running is dwarfed by the relatively small amount of time I imagine is required to start a keylogger and hit record on a camera. Additionally if the speedrunner sets a new record there are probably a good number of people happy to check the video and if no record is set then it's not really relevant.

With a multiplayer game that lots of people are playing online in multiple rounds that's a lot less feasible. Would you ever want to watch a bunch of videos of people playing a turn based strategy game to make sure they're not cheating? Even if you did put these requirements in place, if you suspect someone you're playing against is cheating and ask for the video proof that they're not what motive do they have to hand anything over? For the hypothetical speed runner they need to prove their record so they can lay claim to something which takes a lot of time and effort to pull off. For the Worms player they get to confirm that they didn't cheat when playing some stranger on the internet? Then they have to do this again next game in 10 minutes time? It's just not practical.

Re: Worms Armageddon 3.8

#142

Post by CyberShadow »

grawprog wrote: post #136
kristofferR wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? As long as it works flawlessly and performant it shouldn't matter.

Not in regards to worms specifically, but, because at that point I'm paying the same price for a product that will always be treated as second class in regards to support and just about everything else. At any point the deveoper could decide to stop supporting proton and unlike with a native linux port, like with rocket league recently, if that happens I'm shit out of luck, at least with a native port, there's a chan…

Speaking as Worms Armageddon maintainer: Yes, of course we want to port the game to run natively on more platforms. There's just some really non-trivial technical obstacles in the way. For instance, the game relies on an internal framework called DXMFC for its UI, which is entirely based on MFC, Microsoft's UI toolkit.

Speaking as a full-time Linux users since 2016: I found that getting old (i.e. unmaintained) native Linux games to work again is MUCH harder than running their Windows version. E.g., I spent hours trying to get the Linux port of Unreal Gold to work with no luck, and in the end had to give up and run the Windows version under Wine. There is just so much change on the Linux desktop that old software is just not going to behave well. Not only do you usually need to reproduce the entire userspace from the time the game is released (and of the distro that it was built against), but changes in display APIs (Xinerama, XRandR, SDL versions...) often result in full-screen or resolution problems.

This is a project I wrote to work around exactly issues like this: https://github.com/CyberShadow/hax11

Re: Worms Armageddon 3.8

#143

Post by CyberShadow »

folknor wrote: post #138
CyberShadow wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be right. For what it's worth, we are continuously looking for members of the community who have the skills and desire to contribute positively, and empower them to do so as much as we can. There is certainly no lacking in things to improve even outside of the game itself, such as infrastructure, network services, and third-party software such as tools or game extensions. The situation about cheats is not tha…

This might sound a bit harsh and overly dramatic, but frankly you're better off not worrying about it and going the route that Super Mario speed running has taken. They require, in the harshest of cases, (1) a full-length video of you actually playing the session, with input methods visible in frame, hosted on a publicly accessible site such as YT or Twitch, (2) game audio must be audible and undistorted, and (3) har…

Sorry, but frankly this is unhelpful. The comparison is quite far-fetched.

For one thing, Worms Armageddon is a PC game. By design, PCs can run arbitrary software alongside the game, and the game software can be relatively trivially modified to do whatever the user wants. It is practically impossible to remotely prove that a PC is running exactly the software that the player claims it is running.

Second, competitive gameplay in a multiplayer game is very different than speed-running. Though similar variations exist (e.g. time-trial rope races, where contestants can take as many tries as they want to beat a map off-line and then submit their best replay), mostly we're talking about actual online tournaments (often with community-pooled cash prizes). Forcing every contestant to set up video recording and other proof as you describe would make competing impractical for most players.

Third, cheating massively hurts the game even for non-competitive play. In situations such as what I described above, when an easy-to-use cheat program becomes easily available and before we patch it out, many groups of players will download and will use the program. It is very demoralizing when players run into one cheater after another when they're just trying to enjoy a casual but fair game. You can find plentiful evidence of this in other games, which were bombarded by complaints and negative ratings after the developers' lenience to take action against cheaters in multiplayer games.

Re: Worms Armageddon 3.8

#144

Post by CyberShadow »

folknor wrote: post #139
CyberShadow wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s wonderful! Is the code open source{,able}? 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…

While I agree that opensourcing would be unlikely to solve any big problems, you frankly can't know. Someone might come along, especially when we're talking in timespans of decades. Probably not. But maybe. 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…

> While I agree that opensourcing would be unlikely to solve any big problems, you frankly can't know. Someone might come along, especially when we're talking in timespans of decades. Probably not. But maybe.

For as long as the game has an active community and a competitive multiplayer scene, this is not a risk worth taking.

> 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.

That is not what I said.

Since this is getting into strawman territory, I will need to stop this discussion here. I recognize that you have very strong ideals about open-source, which I respect, but my priority is the interests of the game's community, so we will just have to agree to disagree.

Re: Worms Armageddon 3.8

#145

Post by CyberShadow »

zVirtu wrote: post #134
CyberShadow wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask us, "Do you want to improve X?", of course we will say yes. 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 combin…

Couldn't agree more. A Project X-like framework for scripting is capable of extending a game's lifetime in proportion to the involvement of its community, which is fortunately abundant in W:A's case. In the same vein, the new schema format with Rubberworm capabilities was definitely a game changer. There's something so exciting about user-generated content officially making it into a base game. Thank you for making t…

Unfortunately I'm not at liberty to discuss details of our communication with Team17, but from my perspective, the outlook is pretty good!

Re: Worms Armageddon 3.8

#146

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

CyberShadow wrote: post #60
rambojazz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is WA open source?? Sorry but I've never heard using the word "maintainer" on a proprietary software, only with open source projects. Usually people call themselves " developer" instead.

Our situation is a little unusual in that we didn't participate in the game's creation; Instead, years after the fact, we were entrusted with the source code by the developer company (Team17) so that we could continue maintaining it. The updates are still published by Team17, but almost all programming is done by us. So, I can't think of a more appropriate word.

Is it a paid position?

Re: Worms Armageddon 3.8

#147

Post by 2ion »

StavrosK wrote: post #105
2ion wrote: post #54

After looking for something similar I have been playing Hedgewars https://www.hedgewars.org/ which is Hogs instead of Worms, an interesting code base and play mode addons based on Lua. Not looking back to Worms. There's a nice European userbase and if you tune in at hedgehog hour (8pm time in CEST/CET) you'll have some fine company. My favourite mod is Monarchy: https://www.hedgewars.org/node/6718#comment-34937 .

I just tried that but the movement feels markedly worse than Worms, and the game feels much less polished overall. Is it still fun despite that?

For me it is? But take that as coming from a guy who literally has been playing 3 games (Xonotic/Nexuiz, tome4 and Hedgewars) in the past 5 years on and off, and nothing else.

Re: Worms Armageddon 3.8

#148

Post by CyberShadow »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #146
CyberShadow wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our situation is a little unusual in that we didn't participate in the game's creation; Instead, years after the fact, we were entrusted with the source code by the developer company (Team17) so that we could continue maintaining it. The updates are still published by Team17, but almost all programming is done by us. So, I can't think of a more appropriate word.

Is it a paid position?

No, and hardly a "position" at that!
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