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APRIL 2001 NEWS

 Bad+Good News  27.april.01
I've been, and will be, quite busy at school. It's not going too well so I won't be able to work as much at my projects as I used (or want) to. Some holiday-time now, but after that you can expect me to be quite busy. Bluh :(
I did do some programming today though. Fixed even more bugs; with a lot of thanks to Willyslice for his betatesting. He's also working on a levelpack (woowoo! more levels!! ;)

 Who the Wormy?  20.april.01
The singleplayer modes are now multiplayer as well. Ie. names are saved with hiscores to see who got it. To prevent Wormy from becoming as big as Megaman, it'll only save the first three chars; but this shouldn't be a big problem since that's enough for identifying purposes. Now gaze upon the beautiful game over screen on the right with the new hiscore implemented.

 Transfer finally, hopefully  18.april.01
If all goes well, my domain should be transferred to my new host shortly. It will then take me a while to PHP-ize all pages, but I'll let you know as soon as it's all done.
In somewhat related news, I've just gotten my 25,000th visitor! Last months stats showed 750MB transfer, with most hits on the TI-83 archives (must be 'cause of the search-engines.) This main page was third, but this month (so far) it is again the most visited (as it should be.)

 Wormy features new Features  13.april.01
Did some more programming. A lot of changes. The Tron gamemode has become singleplayer-only (with hiscore for each level.) The multiplayer gamemodes are now deathmatch, foodmatch, timematch, race and ctf. In the new timematch you'll get points for the time you're alive (just Tron basically, if growth is set to continuous.) It replaces Linkmatch, because you can now set link for any mode (though it doesn't always work right; yet...) A cool new feature is the winner indicator (on request): at the game-over screen you can easily see which player(s) have won. Also some more minor changes. Just too bad all these additions do add in program size: Wormy's now over 6200 bytes. But since most of you don't mind how big it's gonna be, I'll just keep adding whatever I come up with.

 Customizable Wormy Worx  12.april.01
(...continued) It took me some more time to get everything working just right (as always one annoying bug didn't want to get fixed. I still did so, but only after hours of searching and debugging =( bah!) The screeny should be enough to show you all of the options you now can change in Wormy. Of course these settings can only be changed in multiplayer games; e.g. no singleplayer, peaworm and tron modes (since you would then be able to get much better hiscores.)

 Extremely customizable Wormy  11.april.01
As if you couldn't configure Wormy enough already, I just added a second menu with a whole bunch of level options. Pressing 2nd or enter at the level selector brings up this sub-menu. For any multiplayer level, you can now alter both the score- and death-limit (lives), as well as the game speed and the speed your wormy turns around. A new feature is the Growth, which, if set, will automatically grow your worm at a specified rate (very cool in deathmatch games!) It took me quite some time, but it was worth it, and Wormy has gotten even closer to perfection! I'll grab a screeny for y'all tomorrow.

 Link!  9.april.01
At last I had the opportunity to test Wormy's new link routines. I told you it worked on VTI, but this is very different from real calcs. But, to my astonishment, it worked. It just... worked! And even more surprising: it worked even better than emulated; it was much faster. Seems most of my problems are over. Still quite some work to do. The levels and settings have to be sent over the link, pickups should be at the same positions, and >2 players would be cool too. But the fact that it works at all is just great.

 Presenting: the wormies  3.april.01
Not much exciting Wormy-news (still haven't tested linkplay on two real calcs) so I'll just tell you I've decided upon the official default wormy names :)

• Wormy -- player one is, of course, our hero Wormy what the entire game's named after.
• Viper -- I've named the second player after Vipers, my old Nibbles-clone for the PC.
• Nibbler -- In memory of the original Nibbles, although the players in Nibbles were named Jake and Sammy ;)  Nibbler is the name of that "cute" pet in Futurama, which sounds better and is less plural :-)
• Jim -- The last worm is actually the hero Earthworm Jim without his suit on :P

 April Foolz  1.april.01
Sorry, no aprilfoolstuff here. Not necessary either, since the TI-community already seems saturated by pranks. My april_fools award goes to calc.org, check 'em out!! Twilight-HP is cool as well! If it were any other date, I would've believed Ticalc.org's. By the time I got to TI-News I didn't believe anything anymore...