Wait, so a player using hardware (a keyboard) that grants them an unfair advantage is not considered cheating in competitive games?  Anyone who thinks that this isn't cheating doesn't understand what cheating is.  Anyone who uses such a device in competitive games without announcing it first and having it agreed, is by definition a cheater.  And there's absolutely no difference at all between hardware and software performing the same 'cheat function' in this context.

Resorting to what is and isn't sanctioned in the competition rules as a defense is either a ploy to make a cheater feel better about their cheating, or it's just highlighting that the rules aren't sufficient to ensure fair play.

If people really want to get serious about fair play in a competitive game, all non-standard software and hardware in use should be declared at the start of the game.  That includes fancy keyboards, macros, all Wormkit Modules (including wkRempKeys) and any other external software.

I saw this on that WA 4chan page - I know Silkworm was Deadcode's cheat program back in the day, I'm not sure about this "Silkworm 2" though ?

https://i.4cdn.org/vm/1737530372982769.webm

It's an interesting topic but it feels a bit like screaming into the void. 

Sadly, cheating is always going to be a concern that everyone has to accept and move on.  Using tools that give a big advantage obviously isn't fair, but the person who uses them is kidding themselves; they know that they cheated and if they're serious about playing, their victory won't feel the same.  I like to think this puts prolific cheaters in the minority.

I suppose the elephant in the room is modules or loaders that hook the game's code.  The cheating possibilities here dwarf the concerns mentioned about roping.  Even anti cheat code in future updates could be patched out.  But it's not all bad; without gifted coders inspired to hack up WA and create dedicated cheat programs for fun we might not have Deadcode doing the great work he's doing with the game now.  Deadcode could have all manner of cheats running in his build during competitive games but I don't believe for a second that he does.

Quote from: TheKomodo on December 13, 2024, 01:33 PMYeah I've done that, any map I save just says "Error opening map file".

Odd! Can you post a couple of the PNGs from MapGen that are failing to load?

Quote from: FoxHound on December 12, 2024, 11:50 PMThen I don't know what I did that now I can't make it work again.

The images are in .bmp, they need to be .png for MapGen.

I'll be doing Urban Invasion next.  Meadow and Chocolate are finished.

Quote from: TheKomodo on December 13, 2024, 10:10 AMWhenever I save a map, it comes up failed to load in WA. Is there something you have to do for it to save properly?

I've not come across that issue.  I would maybe try deleting the "%appdata%\MapGen" folder, then firing up the latest version of MapGen.  Colours should be set to 96 (this is the default).

Quote from: FoxHound on December 11, 2024, 07:32 PMNot sure if I understood everything well, but if this update will allow the program to use custom terrains and make those terrains with doubled size, I will work right now on my scheme project Intermediate to the Power of 2 (Intermediate²). I would make a huge mappack on TUS and MonkeyIsland would probably suffer from headache when I do this.

All terrains still need converting to work with MapGen.  MapGen places objects and grass differently compared to the game so some stuff does need tweaking as part of the process.

MapGen themes live in the '..\data\generic\themes' folder.  All assets are PNG files.  You can use the "SpriteEddy" or "Sprite Editor" utilities to extract images from terrain files (level.dir) if anyone wants to do their own conversions.

Those links should work now Sensei.

Big thanks to Plutonic for the work on this.  Custom terrains will now display pixel-perfect. I'm working on converting most of my terrains across, or at least my favorite ones, to be included in a future release but I'll also drop them here when they're done.

In the 'settings.txt' file (for each theme) I notice there is a 'skytop' and 'skybottom' parameter - do these have any influence on the palette?  I know that with all stock terrains (and almost all custom terrains) a maximum of 96 colours are used for all foreground assets so that the game can always at least draw a full sky gradient in PNG map mode even if it can't draw the background mountains (due to lack of palette space).  The stock sky gradients are always 16 colours but can obviously change depending on the theme set when loading the map.

Hey, Sensei asked me to reply here with what I can see.  I may be using an old version of MapGen? It's 0.8.7 Beta

With this version I notice the following:

- Even if the generated map uses few colours, the full palette space is filled which is where I can see lots of other colours (reds etc) - example here : https://i.ibb.co/p2TqsTm/Palette.png.

- MapGen generates and maps a new palette regardless of the total number of source colours.  Even if there is plenty of space in the target palette it will map colours in a way that changes the objects. For example, with a terrain where all objects share the same 96 colours, even when using the 112 colour option in MapGen, assets have a reduction or change in colours and objects appear slightly differently.

- The 96 colour option generates a 96-colour palette instead of 97 (unlike the 112 colour option which correctly generates 113 to account for transparency)

Ideally, it would be great if MapGen defaulted to the 96 colour option (and generated a 97-colour palette to include the transparency).  This would be compatible with all stock Team 17 terrains and almost all custom terrains.  If MapGen could then aggregate and de-dupe the colours for all source objects to calculate the final palette it would display perfectly, assuming they didn't go over 96 colours.  If the source objects go over the 96 colours then a colour reduction/remapping algorithm could be applied. If it's under 96 colours, MapGen should only add the colours used so the game has more room to potentially draw the background mountains in PNG map mode.

Quote from: FoxHound on September 02, 2024, 09:37 AMConsider adding a cockroach. I think it would fit well on this terrain.

I think that might work

haha that video is class! I think the kid screaming would work tbh   Is ARTemych on this site or Discord?

I made a short preview video of a terrain I'm currently working on, Urban Invasion, so I thought I'd share here as well as on Discord. There are still a few more objects to add but all feedback / suggestions welcome.  This will probably be the last terrain I do for a while so I've spent quite a bit of time on it.  It'll hopefully be released this month.

For me it was from the beginning.  As little kids, a friend and I would play on my dad's Amiga 1200 (which was pimped out with a 64MB!! internal hard drive).  One of the games we loved to play was an old artillery game called Scorched Tanks. It had randomly generated terrains, dozens of weird weapons and utilities and it had a buy/sell mechanic where you had to choose which weapons to buy to take into battle.  We found the whole 'set trajectory, set power and fire' mechanic really addictive.  Looking back it was clunky as hell.

Fast forward a year or so... My dad would get Amiga Format magazine now and again.  One month it had a big write up of Andy Davidson's "Worms" game and a demo disk on the front. You could only play a few levels but we were addicted.  This was Scorched Tanks on a whole new hilarious level.  The full game was out that month and we picked it up and never looked back. We burned so many hours on it. At one point I remember we started betting our pocket money on matches ... not recommended, that was intense!   At one point I really got into the 'dark side' style of playing; digging tunnels and using girders, which was really helped by mines that you could drop that didn't have a fuse (I hope this option is added into WA at some point).  Scorched Tanks was never played again.  Eventually, "Worms the Director's Cut" (Worms DC) came out which was Andy's farewell to the Amiga but it debuted a lot of the new weapons which still exist today.  It had a couple of bugs but a patch disk became available. I remember you had to write to Team 17 headquarters and they would send you out the patch disk in the post.  Worms DC came bundled with a small program that allowed you to create your own terrains (.DIY files), which I remember having fun with. Terrains in Worms DC natively had gravity and friction parameters embedded in them and each terrain could have a different 'water' type too; water, gloop or fire, and you could set the colour for each.

Andy coded the game in Amiga's Blitz Basic program.  Amiga Format had given away the full version of Blitz Basic on a cover disk a couple of years before. I believe it was this giveaway that he used to create what became "Total Wormage" which he later submitted in an Amiga Format Blitz Basic game competition (that got nowhere, surprisingly). It would be great to see an interview with Andy Davidson to get his perspective on the franchise and where he thinks the game could go.

It's just finding the time to do it.  I've got a new terrain that's a work in progress so I'd prefer to work on that with any spare time.  I'm happy to drop all of the original files here though if anyone wants to work on an alternate version?