Seeing WA being run in a web browser was the real surprise

I watched this last night - nice use of WA! Love the evil scientist... I reckon he might have a gadget to survive drowning somehow.

A classic. Soon it shall be time to go beyond.

I believe it's postponed until next month, but definitely happening eventually. I'm looking forward to it. Well, not the time specifically. I plan to be sleeping at that hour. I can watch it later. Silly timezones.

Well, it pays not to get one's hopes up as then you get pleasantly surprised once in a while. I lean towards realising that happiness comes from within, rather than being dependent on what my parents or anyone else think of me. Perhaps partly because I have labyrinthine ideas of emotions & philosophy that I struggle to express, so people are lacking the info to really know what to think until I've typed up 100+ pages. Then what they ought to think is that I'm silly for spending so much time writing about life rather than living it.

I don't know if WA can solve what bothers a dad, but the fact it's even possible to try says everything about this Worms universe. Maybe it's actually a shared moment of questioning the nature of reality that achieves something, and Worms is merely the scenery. My dad's biggest 'point of irritation' is probably that my sister's been either vegetarian or vegan since she was a teen. Sort of like he takes it as a personal insult because he enjoys eating and cooking meat so much. I don't doubt there's a convoluted path via a WA scheme to solve that one, but I won't be seeking it out.

I dreamt of some WA challenges where you had to do some battle racing/walking & jumping to get into the right position to attack. Then one challenge had a family of worms where each worm used different sprites of a different colour. The blue Bloopy was probably the kid of the family.

When I was interviewed I put forward the idea of making WA weirder. Yet even I struggle to wrap my mind around what's going on here (but I like it). An improvised story streamed from your consciousness is the opposite of what I'd post. I'd spend hours restructuring and whittling sentences until they're just the way I want them down to each punctuation mark. That plus procrastination is why I haven't tried to type up my current philosophy yet. It evolves faster than I can get around to it.

I may kinda get it... there's a parallel with humans being so caught up in their conflicts that they forget there's even a universe to ponder out there. People who appreciate the bigger picture will just walk out if they can. In the Worms universe we perhaps have more control over making it a chilled environment. Even worms killing other worms can be a bit stressful. Maybe that's why I like race schemes the most: the war is enjoyable, but sport even more so.

Each Worms community is just one metropolis in the whole Worms universe, which has the infinite potential for different communities and servers to suit everyone. Reminds me of a guy I know who said his fav city is New Orleans and listed one of the reasons as 'the threat of danger'. Pretty much the opposite of what I'd expect anyone to want out of a city unless they're the ones eager to use their shiny weapon (battle axe or explosive livestock or...). So do the worms who crave conflict get together and make their... Newormleans so we can see how 'cool' it is? Is the music as good as that of Mos Eisley?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwRhhc8rvIE

Thar 'tis. Not sure when the Wormnet ranks went away, but I didn't mention I built up to the elite ranking via WormsLeaguePro a 2nd time under my Bloopy nick, so maybe that can narrow down when I made the name change.

In a weird way, having more of an interest in WA again kinda helps me refresh my philosophy of what I wish to create in life.

I would've played more of whichever games I could get the satisfaction of creating stuff for. My main example is that I created 8 or so tracks for Trackmania games. Other games I only created 1 or 2 things for. I did have lots of coasters/tracks for Roller Coaster Tycoon on my website, but downloading other people's coasters for that game was kinda pointless.

I'm not sure other games could totally live up to Worms in that regard though. I would've spent more time programming, creating websites and weird audio and everything else too.

Was good fun! Here's a few bonus details we didn't get around to:

Mole shopper - The task of darksiding/building the best network of tunnels to attract crates makes it a nice unique scheme. I think the mole bomb is my fav WA weapon now. Just too cute the way it squeaks as it bounces along, and works in harmony with the worms here. When it digs it sounds like me attacking a bowl of potato crisps. It's clever that the mole is overpowered so the hole made by its explosion is big enough for a crate. Probably nothing else needed to be overpowered and some other settings could be tweaked (5 mins before SD seems too short), but then we viewed it as a party scheme. TerribleOne/diG was probably the first to put any pre-made holes in a map (3 large ovals), so then I ran with the idea and made the first map that was all pre-made holes. I liked how that avoided the jumps you sometimes had to do to get back onto the girders. One of my unfinished maps from 2007 is actually a mole shopper since I wanted to experiment with different proportions and spend more time on the art. So I'll try and finish that.

Some schemes I actually came up with - Shotgun race, bungee fight and (sort of) parachute race. You'll just have to read about them on WKB, with thanks to FoxHound for entering many of the details! The shotgun race map I posted recently is the first WA map I finished in over 16 years. It plays sort of like a build-your-own battle race course, although it gets quite repetitive. I have more varied ideas for another map for the scheme.

I had a go at counting how many Worms maps I've released and arrived at 244. Including collaborations, TCB challenge and WWP mission maps, but not multiple versions of the same map nor other people's remixes of my maps. And not counting this thing made in K^2's editor.


More on a few things we did mention:

The first ever Worms map I made looked like this. I need to put Worms files on my website again sometime.



The petrol backflip which I may've stumbled onto inventing just because Dario's Grey Matter No. 2 challenge was too confusing/evil for me:



This video is of the same tornado I mentioned that went through my workplace, but it looked a lot less violent by the time it got to us (photo by a colleague): https://i.imgur.com/IQBvGHo.jpeg. Not a regular occurrence here thankfully!

I'm very late to this, but I figured it out. They recommend 12kHz because the game plays sounds at 15kHz, so it'll make the voices more squeaky. I suggest just making your .wav files 15kHz and exactly as you want them to sound.

There are actually 2 utilities. Convert should be used as follows for each individual file. -8 forces it to 8-bit and -1 forces it to mono. This will create bungee.raw for example:

convert bungee.wav -RAW -8 -1

The 2nd utility is bankedit, which has a mouse-based interface and is the one you use to put your 66-ish .raw files into one .sfx file. There isn't an easy way provided to separate the .sfx file back into its individual .raw files as far as I can see. Perhaps it's time to create another utility!

Quote from: TheWalrus on May 04, 2024, 12:35 AM
Bloopy is a wild individual

7 daysssss. All invited to enter into world of Bloopy.

I hardly played WA at all in the last 15 years, and I can say it felt good to do other stuff and even find time to try more other games than what I had been doing. And now after such a break it also feels good to be inspired into playing a bit again and creating WA maps - mostly thanks to this upcoming interview. Hopefully someone can step in to help run more interviews because they've been awesome so far.

I won't write too much here as living out the possibilities of the universe is surely relevant to what I have to say about Worms. I'm looking forward to being asked those million questions.

I stumbled onto this random birthday thread / map combo in just the right week. So err, happy b-day Ryan!