Gusanos
From Liero Wiki
Gusanos is an open source Liero clone started by basara in late 2002. It was at first not very notable, even though it was publicly announced by basara on the LieroNet forum. The breakthrough came with version 0.8 which was distributed first hand to the Liero community at #liero. It was rapidly adopted as favourite clone by AK47, Jonny and Pils. Gliptic was still offically programming LOSP but he also took intrest in Gusanos. One by one the #liero users took Gusanos to their hearts, but not only them. World wide, many sites, unknown to the Liero community, took up an intrest in Gusanos. There are plenty of reviews and comments about Gusanos in even the most unlikely places.
In 2005, in combination with the decision to completely rewrite Gusanos, it was merged with Gliptics LOSP project to combine efforts and ideas into one single clone. The name Gusanos was kept.
Contents |
Release History
| Version | Significant changes |
|---|---|
| 0.5 |
|
| 0.8.0 |
|
| 0.8.1 | |
| 0.9b |
|
| 0.9c |
|
The changelog in the Gusanos Docs has a complete list.
History
Gusanos in Pascal
Ever since finding Liero it was Basara's dream to make a clone of it with the purpose of adding extra features. The reason why Gusanos project didnt start until late 2002 was that Basara lacked any knowledge about programing games. It was in that year he got a copy of Borland Pascal and learned how to use a graphics library. With it the first version of Gusanos was made (Being two worms in a map without being able to shoot).
Gusanos in C
After learning the language well the limitations of it started to seem bigger, the decision to switch language was made. Basara started learning the C programming language, using a very simple games library called Allegro (Which is still being used).
Once Gusanos reached version 0.3 (A barely playable game with no digging and some ugly weapons) basara decided to post about it on the Liero Forums. The response from the community was the obvious one, a few reply posts with no enthusiasm. Despite of being a completely reasonable situation Basara felt it was not enough and got discouraged from continuing with the project. Luckily for him, he had nothing else to waste his time on.
Gusanos reached version 0.5 which was quite playable and included almost all the features of Liero. It also included some of the features Basara had dreamt of implementing since before starting the project (One of those being the console). This time Basara posted about it again on the Liero Forums, this time which lesser expectations he was conformed by the responses, however Gusanos still didnt call the attention of the community.
The Hype
Having done the basics of gameplay Basara started experimenting with those features he had planned to make some day. One of them being flowing water (Being influenced by one of his favourite games WINGS), by this time Basara had started visiting the #liero channel where most of the Liero community members would gather. After the flowing water feature was done he passed the good news to the #liero channel. One of its members, Jonny, insisted basara to show him the development version of Gusanos so that he could see the latest feature. Basara accepted to give him a beta. Jonny was so pleased with the water feature that a hype started to accumulate in the community. This was the first time the community had actually noticed Gusanos.
Jonny became the official Gusanos beta tester. He convinced Basara to try making netplay for Gusanos, which was something Basara also wanted but he had no knowledge on how to do it. Basara managed to hack netplay into Gusanos but having all the previous code made without having that in mind netplay resulted to be unstable and buggy. Some time passed and Gusanos 0.8 was released and this time the responses were plentyful and good. Basara was happy to see his clone being played.
Codename .9
After releasing it Basara started learning some Object Oriented Programming with the help of Gliptic. He tried to change the old Gusanos code to this new structure, but after some weeks of trying he started to see the old code as very bad. Converting it all would have meant more effort and more bugs than actually starting everything from scratch. And so he did, the development of Gusanos 0.9 started. Gliptic became more and more important for basara's decisions (Being the best programmer he knew), most of Gusanos 0.9 code was based on things Gliptic taught Basara.
After some months of work Gliptic proposed the merging the two clones, LOSP and Gusanos. It was something that had already been proposed, but never put into action. This time it was for real, Gliptic and Basara decided to continue with the base Basara had made for gusanos .9, the new project would still be called Gusanos since both authors thought it was a good name and since then the development of gusanos .9 is still active and progressing fast. Flowing water was never finished in .9 and was not available, although code existed for it.
Gusanos 1.0
Gusanos 1.0 is the next version to be released, it is currently in the planning stages with some initial coding.
Programming
Whilst initially the language D was considered, Gusanos 1.0 will be programmed in C++. It will run on a purpose-built virtual machine that Gliptic is currently creating with some, yet unspecified, code written in C++.
Features
Gusanos 1.0 will feature perfect syncing using control lag (There is lag between pressing a key and its action from happening). This will lift the burden of syncing off of mod creators. Water will probably return.
Scripting
Lua is being dropped as a scripting language in favour of using many scripting languages all compiled to the same VM code (The available languages will depend on compilers being written for them). OMFGScript will become more powerful and more integrated with the scripting. Basara has expressed that he wants level rendering and input to be scripted. He said that scripted materials will be possible.
Progress
Gliptic has for use in various projects already coded one library that will be used in Gusanos 1.0, VL (Versatile Library). It contains many generalised functions, containers, data structures, etc for doing various common tasks (String operations, geometry algorithms, light-weight threading to name a few). He plans to integrate an already create Perfect Sync lib with his 1½ years-old Netlib (general networking library) and use that for Gusanos 1.0. Gliptic's virtual machine is currently at a "it translates to SSC form and does basic optimizations and basic register allocation" stage and is on hold.
Basara is currently working on a graphics library for Gusanos 1.0 named Omfgfx.
Gusanos levels
More than 260 maps have been created for Gusanos. Gusanos levels are built in a similar fashion as most clones. Gusanos uses two images (Wurmz used 3 and LOSP 1) which represent the visuals and the materials. In addition, the levels are scriptable with spawnpoints, moving objects, lights and other assorted effects. The material file uses index and supports PNG and BMP, as do the skin file. Support is also present for three other images: background, paralax, and lightmap.
Gusanos also supports the .lev (liero) and .lxl (Liero Xtreme) level formats.
See also
How to install Gusanos 0.8.1 on Linux
Mods list
- Doom by Sindalf
- Gusanos 3 Arena by Guth and WSh
- WH40K by Emu
- UT by TTFTCUTS
- TS (The Specialists) by basara
- COG by Jonny
- Instagib by Jonny
- SorMod by Jerrec
- Gusanos 1.33 by Jerrec
- OMFG by Martin
- BlackWind V3 by BlackWind
- Plabx by Clockust
