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That’s wonderful! Is the code open source{,able}? I used to play an old game called Underlight. When they shut it down, the owner sent me a CD with the codebas

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

gus_massa 6y ago
Is this the code https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/981nmi/underlight_a_20_year_old_mmorpg_has_been/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/981nmi/underlight_a... ?
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Yes! Wow! Thank you so much!! This brought back waves of nostalgia I haven’t felt for like a decade.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  I just hopped into their Discord server and recognized so many people from those days: BuzZz, Drizzt, Ironman, Off Kilter, Star Scream, Windsong, Erasmus, Kelos, Nostradaemon, PAMSWEETS, Tember, Stormy, RavenXR. 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. :)
CyberShadow 6y ago
> 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 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.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  A shame, but understandable. I wish you luck with your code foraging! (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.)
- cycloptic 6y ago
  On the first point: If the assumption is that some community members are interested in developing cheats, would it not also make sense to assume that some community members are instead interested in hardening the netcode and developing anti-cheat systems? 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.
  - CyberShadow 6y ago
    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 that simple. Armageddon's way of modelling the game state is already immune to certain kinds of cheats. The current state essentially is a function of the previous state plus player's inputs; therefore, it is impossible to give yourself infinite ammo or noclip through walls. We've tightened that further by e.g. introducing "Schrödinger's crates", which makes the contents of crates determined when they are opened instead of on creation (thus making their contents impossible to predict). The remaining avenues for cheating can mostly be categorized in "perfect knowledge" cheats (i.e. knowing what weapons are in other players' inventories) and input cheats (creating macros or bots that produce frame-perfect input); these are not solvable generally, and can only be protected against either through "security by obscurity", or very intrusive anti-cheat software which analyse which software runs on users' PCs. We would very much like to avoid having to do the latter, as such software can only be effective if it is more invasive than the cheat software itself, not to mention requiring a lot of effort and resources to implement and maintain. And, yes, unfortunately these concerns are not purely theoretical. Nearly every competitive season we have issues with some players thinking they can get away with using some generic cheat software, or occasionally some curious hackers making some cheats for fun for their friends which then find their way out to general availability.

gus_massa 6y ago

Is this the code https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/981nmi/underlight_a_20_year_old_mmorpg_has_been/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/981nmi/underlight_a... ?

sillysaurusx 6y ago
Yes! Wow! Thank you so much!! This brought back waves of nostalgia I haven’t felt for like a decade.
sillysaurusx 6y ago
I just hopped into their Discord server and recognized so many people from those days: BuzZz, Drizzt, Ironman, Off Kilter, Star Scream, Windsong, Erasmus, Kelos, Nostradaemon, PAMSWEETS, Tember, Stormy, RavenXR. 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. :)

CyberShadow 6y ago

> 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 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.

sillysaurusx 6y ago
A shame, but understandable. I wish you luck with your code foraging! (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.)
cycloptic 6y ago
On the first point: If the assumption is that some community members are interested in developing cheats, would it not also make sense to assume that some community members are instead interested in hardening the netcode and developing anti-cheat systems? 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.
- CyberShadow 6y ago
  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 that simple. Armageddon's way of modelling the game state is already immune to certain kinds of cheats. The current state essentially is a function of the previous state plus player's inputs; therefore, it is impossible to give yourself infinite ammo or noclip through walls. We've tightened that further by e.g. introducing "Schrödinger's crates", which makes the contents of crates determined when they are opened instead of on creation (thus making their contents impossible to predict). The remaining avenues for cheating can mostly be categorized in "perfect knowledge" cheats (i.e. knowing what weapons are in other players' inventories) and input cheats (creating macros or bots that produce frame-perfect input); these are not solvable generally, and can only be protected against either through "security by obscurity", or very intrusive anti-cheat software which analyse which software runs on users' PCs. We would very much like to avoid having to do the latter, as such software can only be effective if it is more invasive than the cheat software itself, not to mention requiring a lot of effort and resources to implement and maintain. And, yes, unfortunately these concerns are not purely theoretical. Nearly every competitive season we have issues with some players thinking they can get away with using some generic cheat software, or occasionally some curious hackers making some cheats for fun for their friends which then find their way out to general availability.