Hyperion's aborted Amiga port of Worms Armageddon

[squirminator2k]

Way back in 1999, not long after Worms Armageddon was released on the PC, an Amiga port was announced to be in the works. The plan was for it to be based on the same codebase as the Windows version, with cross-platform play between the two online.


The port was announced by Hyperion. I remember intervewing one of the devs at the time (I was 13 and asked a ton of very, very stupid questions). But the game never materialized - I don't think it was ever officially canceled, but there's no mention of it now on Hyperion's website.


To that end, I'm trying to learn more about this aborted port of WA on behalf of the Worms community, who have expressed an interest. Does anybody know what may have happened with it? Was there ever a working build?

[coldacid]

I wonder if it ever had even been actually started. This could have been just a Ben Hermans spray-and-pray special.

[Biscuit]

You can still see the info on their old site.
http://www.hyperion-software.com/worms_features.html

The last official reference I've seen about it was to say:
"Development was delayed because of lack of development resources. We are still targeting an early beta-version for the end of Q2." (from April 2000)
http://web.archive.org/web/200404100...ws_000417.html

Sounds like it stalled early.

[squirminator2k]

That's unfortunate.

[Galahad/FLT]

Taking a resource hogging Windows version, and then trying to convert that to anything other than a PowerPC Amiga would be mental.

1. Not even owners to make it financially viable
2. 68000 Amiga games market was dead by then

[squirminator2k]

I imagine it would've been a PPC release if it had happened, yeah.

[Daedalus]

Hyperion and others did manage to release several ports of relatively modern games from the PC around then, all aimed at high end 68k or PPC, so I expect that would have been the aim with this too.

[nikosidis]

First Worms is the best. No point with any Worms version after that.

[mirthturtle]

Originally Posted by nikosidis

First Worms is the best. No point with any Worms version after that.

Worms: TDC was the pinnacle surely.

[Daedalus]

Yeah, the Director's Cut is the peak for me, taking the original game and improving it in nearly every way.

[Dunny]

Once they went higher resolution than the old 320x256 Worms went right downhill. The PC versions are just awful.

[squirminator2k]

Worms Armageddon is still beloved, and rightfully so - it builds on a lot of the stuff in WormsDC. It's still supported, too, which you can't always say about PC games from the 90s.

The problem the newer games game is they lack the pace of the older ones. Everything up to WA and World Party has a fantastic sense of pace and progress to it. The newer games have too many long pauses between turns, sluggish movement (or seemingly-sluggish thanks to slow animations). A lot of that came about as a result of Worms 3D, and they never quite managed to roll back from there.

[d4rk3lf]

Well, what wrong with the Worms World Party?
I think of it, as an (quality) updated Armageddon version, and within the 2D franchise, the real pinnacle of the series.

Yeah, I've played Amiga versions and they were great, but I don't see any problem with their (2D) PC sequels, and believe me, I don't fancy seeing anything from Amiga to PC, but this just seems right.

Originally Posted by Biscuit

You can still see the info on their old site.
http://www.hyperion-software.com/worms_features.html

Jesus!
68060 or PPC .

Why so high requirements for the 2D game? Is it because of the resolution?
I thought that reasonable port on Amiga for Armagedon would be something like 030/8-16MB (or fast 020/8-16MB).
If we lower down the res a bit, would the above config work?

[squirminator2k]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Well, what wrong with the Worms World Party?
I think of it, as an (quality) updated Armageddon version, and within the 2D franchise, the real pinnacle of the series.

WWP was essentially an expansion pack released at full-price, and while you could arguably make the same argument about Worms Armageddon (which uses the same game engine as Worms 2) there just wasn't as big of a leap between the two games. Plus it was waay more of a resource hog compared to WA, and they actively broke the physics in WWP, too - a lot of stuff feels "wrong" in WWP that doesn't in WA.


These days, the majority of the PC Worms community plays Armageddon. WWP is mostly forgotten, and even Team17 have stopped supporting their Remastered release of WWP (which shipped with a ton of bugs)... but WA is still being supported.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Jesus!
68060 or PPC .

Why so high requirements for the 2D game? Is it because of the resolution?
I thought that reasonable port on Amiga for Armagedon would be something like 030/8-16MB (or fast 020/8-16MB).
If we lower down the res a bit, would the above config work?

Because the original is written for fast CPUs and fast graphics cards (relatively speaking). Adapting it to leverage the Amiga's native chipset would essentially be a rewrite, not a port, and the compromises needed would mean you end up with a lesser game. Reducing the resolution for example will dramatically change the game, since either the view distance would be reduced, or all the assets would be scaled down, resulting in it losing its look.

2D can be deceptively complex, with particles, lighting effects, transparency etc. all needing to be calculated at 50/60FPS. The graphics card requirement can help with some of that, meaning the blitter would no longer be a bottleneck, but most of it has to be handled on the CPU.

Look at Earth 2140, which is also 2D, but struggles on anything below a 68060.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Well, what wrong with the Worms World Party?
I think of it, as an (quality) updated Armageddon version, and within the 2D franchise, the real pinnacle of the series.

It was a bit unstable for me, I generally had to restart it at least once in a day's playsession (of about an hour) because it crashed. It was quite fun nonetheless, but to me from Worms 2 and up it starts to get a little too easy to instakill multiple worms. Keeping the speed up is a good thing, but to get to the point where you probably lose half your team in the first turn just because of how they're placed...

Hence I will always prefer the original, aiming skill goes a longer way in that game.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Because the original is written for fast CPUs and fast graphics cards (relatively speaking). Adapting it to leverage the Amiga's native chipset would essentially be a rewrite, not a port, and the compromises needed would mean you end up with a lesser game. Reducing the resolution for example will dramatically change the game, since either the view distance would be reduced, or all the assets would be scaled down, resulting in it losing its look.

2D can be deceptively complex, with particles, lighting effects, transparency etc. all needing to be calculated at 50/60FPS. The graphics card requirement can help with some of that, meaning the blitter would no longer be a bottleneck, but most of it has to be handled on the CPU.

Look at Earth 2140, which is also 2D, but struggles on anything below a 68060.

Worms is actually a different case.

For one, Worms generates the entire level in memory, meaning that on Amiga, there is no blitting into the borders, it simply updates the bitplane pointers to scroll left and right, because the level is there already, so any Amiga version is already off to a great start.

But starting off with the actual Windows code version is just mental, a complete rewrite would be the only way on Amiga to get it at its best.

[th4t1guy]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

a complete rewrite would be the only way on Amiga to get it at its best.

A rewrite of the graphics code at least. IMO, core gameplay is defined by the games physics code. But I think all of the PC Worms games were Visual C++/Studio, so either way it sounds like a huge pain.