View local teams’ weapon panels

Posted June 27th, 2010 by CyberShadow in Sneak previews | 3 Comments »

Previously, it was not possible to view the weapon panel during other players’ turns if there were multiple players on the same computer with different team colours. Now, a menu of team colours is displayed at the bottom of the panel in these cases, allowing the inventory of any local team to be viewed by clicking the team’s colour swatch. Similarly, it is now possible to view the weapon panel during playback of a recorded game. A menu of team colours is displayed at the bottom of the panel, allowing any team’s inventory to be viewed by clicking the team’s colour swatch.

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Fast and simple way to encode replays

Posted June 23rd, 2010 by CyberShadow in Uncategorized | No Comments »

If you’ve ever created a Worms movie, you probably had to import the exported PNG frames into VirtualDub and use it to create an AVI file (as described here), which you later imported into your video editing application and encoded to something you can put online. (Or you could have taken the lazy path and used a screen capturing application, which is simpler and has sound at the expense of visual quality.) Anyway, both of these methods involve a lot of work if you just want to convert a replay (or a part of it) and put it online.

Here’s a simple method to get a file streamable by Flash Player in three steps, using AviSynth and x264:

  1. Export the replay to PNG frames as usual;
  2. Create a video.avs file in the directory with the exported frames, with the following line:
    ImageSource("video_%06d.png", start=0, end=1000, fps=50, pixel_type = "rgb32")
    Set the end parameter with the number of the last frame. Similarly, set the fps parameter correspondingly to the Frame skip option you specified in step 1 (50 FPS for frame skip=1, 25 FPS for frame skip=2, etc.).
  3. From the command-line, run:
    x264 video.avs -o video.mp4
    Add x264 options by preference. For example, use --crf to control quality (lower is better) and --preset veryslow to improve compression.

That’s it – the resulting video.mp4 file will contain the encoded video, ready to stream!

As an additional bonus, if your video editing software supports H.264 and any of the output container formats supported by x264, you can use this together with --crf 0 for lossless H.264 compression. Keep in mind that x264 doesn’t support the RGB colorspace though, and will convert the video to YUV 4:2:0.

P.S. We plan to add the possibility to directly extract video from replays (using DirectShow) to W:A, together with sound. The biggest obstacle is that it looks like we need to write our own software mixer to mix W:A’s sound samples to the output.

Mountain Sheep

Posted June 22nd, 2010 by CyberShadow in Experiments | 1 Comment »


(09:02:23) [Mablak] It's more like, there's something wrong with my assumption that an animal has to jump when there's 4 pixels of nothing below its front
(09:02:51) [CyberShadow] that depends on the animal
(09:03:18) [CyberShadow] hmm, it looks like you can make an animal that can climb incredibly steep slopes
(09:03:43) [Mablak] mountain goat, would be a good one

Welcome!

Posted June 22nd, 2010 by CyberShadow in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

This is our little Worms Armageddon Beta Update Development Blog. We’ll be using it to share details about our development process, post previews of upcoming features, and share other news of our Wormiverse!

In case you’re new around here – Worms Armageddon is an artillery / turn-based strategy game released by Team17 in 1999, and we (Deadcode and CyberShadow) are writing Beta updates for it.

Highlights, clickable links, indented line wrapping, and colored Help

Posted June 20th, 2010 by CyberShadow in Sneak previews | 6 Comments »
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Chat panel minimal height

Posted June 13th, 2010 by CyberShadow in Sneak previews | 2 Comments »

Low-resolution users rejoice! As requested here.

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Community news

Posted June 6th, 2010 by CyberShadow in Sneak previews | No Comments »
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Tool-assisted Worms Armageddon

Posted November 5th, 2009 by CyberShadow in Tool-assist | No Comments »

Lex posted this thread on the TASvideos.org forums a while ago. I have recently revived it and restored the links. An interesting read if you’re curious about the tool-assist versions of W:A, and possible future plans in that direction.

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