The Fiddler
by Fudge Boy

Version 4.0
Friday, March 31st 2000

What is The Fiddler?

The Fiddler is designed to allow you to change options lurking in the murky depths of Worms Armageddon that would otherwise be inaccessible—even after you have completed all the missions. Have you ever wanted to use the super weapons—mail strike, concrete donkey, freeze and so on—in your normal games? Or to have more control over the various game settings? Well, The Fiddler enables you to do this.

The Fiddler 4.0 : what’s new?

There is so much more in v4.0 that I really can’t hope to list it all. I will do my best to produce decent documentation as soon as possible, but I know how many people want me to get v4.0 out the door straight away. To this end, you will have to experiment with the new features!

If you need help, then the first place to go is

  http://wormsmart.net-games.com/

where you will find a message board on which you can post queries.

A few quick pointers:

You can now set thousands more options for weapons by double-clicking on its name and editing it. Be careful: silly settings will crash W:A.

Ammo/delay are now set for each team, rather than for the game as a whole.

Fiddles can be password-protected: see the “security” option on the menu.

Water rise can be fine-tuned. The default is 20.

Auto-exit makes The Fiddler terminate when it’s patched W:A. If you are having trouble, try this and see if it helps.

No animations turns off the animations in the weapons editing screen. It is useful on slow machines.

Skip intro adds a “/nointro” to the command line when using the “Go!” button.

The weapons editing is now much easier: many boxes have been renamed with more useful labels, and some have been moved around so that it’s clearer what’s going on. Double-click on a weapon name to edit it. Also, more things are editable: try the canister, the armageddon, the nuclear test…

Weapons modules can now be used: right-click on a weapon in the list to save it, block a whole group and right-click to save all of them. Load in a module in the same way.

What’s new since The Fiddler v3.1?

Worms with hats! Since the energy of each worm can be set individually, the icon in the Worms Armageddon team selection screen that looks like a health crate crossed out  is redundant. (It used to handicap or help a team by increasing or reducing its energy.) I’ve put it to a good use: if you change this to either a plus  or a minus  then that team will have hats.

But wait: there’s a lot more to it than that.

Normally, when you have allied teams, you have to kill every worm of every team in the group. But you can set teams to be non-participating mission-critical. If a team is in this state, then all its worms will wear hats, and it will never get any goes. In addition, its allied group will be forced to surrender if all the hatted worms die.

So… you each have two teams, allied together. One team of your pair is hatted, one team is not. You'll only get to use your non-hatted worms, but the others can still be blown around as normal. To win the round, you have to kill either all of your opponent's hatted worms or all of his normal worms.

In essence, you play as normal but you're given an extra team of hatted worms that you must protect at all costs.

(For them that want a more precise formulation: if a player has p teams of normal worms and q teams of hatted worms all allied together, with q>0, he will die when either all of all non-hatted worms are dead, or all worms of any one team of hatted worms is dead. For q>1, it becomes rather tricky because there are no names above the hatted worms' heads! So you have to look at the changes in the energy bars to work out which of the q teams any given worm comes from.)

If you don’t understand, experiment and you’ll soon get the hang of it. All you need to remember to start with is that a hatted team can’t play without being allied to a non-hatted team, or else it will surrender straight away.

For some reason, Team17 decided to remove the files controlling water colours other than blue from the US version of Worms Armageddon. The result of this was that selecting any other colour in v3.1 of The Fiddler would cause the game to crash. This has now been rectified: if you are using the US version of the game, the water colour selection is ignored (and a warning is given) when any other colour is chosen.

Owing to popular demand, I have added a button which automatically loads Worms Armageddon with the new settings, rather than requiring the user to load it manually. The “Go!” button does all this; the “Manual load” button waits for you to load the game yourself, and is retained in case you have multiple installations of Worms Armageddon.

Finally, the first time you run The Fiddler you will be asked if you want to join the mailing list. If you answer yes, it will create an email for you to

thefiddler-subscribe@onelist.com 

which will subscribe you to the mailing list.

What’s new since The Fiddler v3.0?

The only additional feature is support for the US version of Worms Armageddon.

What’s new since The Fiddler v2.1?

The following features have been added since version 2.1.

•	“Continue after injury” option, allowing you to keep your turn going when you hurt yourself
•	Fixed wind, setting the wind to a predetermined level for the entire match
•	Changes to the colour of the water
•	Editable gravity settings for worms and for weapons
•	Option to allow strikes in caverns, donkeys on indestructible land and so on
•	You can now have up to forty-eight worms in a match!
•	A full worm-by-worm settings editor!
 
How do I use The Fiddler?

Unzip the contents of the archive to any directory you like, making sure that Fiddler.exe, replcodu.bin, replcodp.bin, wormcodu.bin, wormcodp.bin and default.fsc are all in the same directory. Now run the executable. Set whatever options you wish, and, if you will want to use them again later, save them to a Fiddler file. Click on “Start looking for W:A…”, and then load Worms Armageddon as usual with The Fiddler running in the background. Select your teams and terrain, and play away! You do not need to select a scheme file or change any options, because The Fiddler will override any settings. (You should ensure that one of the “internal” scheme files such as “[Intermediate]” is selected in the scheme files box—but this will happen by default in any case.)

What do I need in order to use The Fiddler?

You need a working copy of Worms Armageddon, either the UK version (with or without the patch) or the US version. (The patch for the UK version is available from the Team17 web site).
 
Not all of my weapons have appeared. What’s going on?

Some weapons are by default incompatible with certain options. If this happens, Worms Armageddon will not let you use the incompatible weapons. You cannot use, for instance, a concrete donkey with indestructible land, or any of the strikes in a cavern.  In addition, if you deselect the “Super weapons” box then none of the super weapons will be available in the game. However, selecting “Allow all weapons” overrides all of this and lets you keep your strikes in caverns and so on.

What’s the “explosion bias” setting (e.g. bazooka, dynamite)?

The purpose of the explosion bias is to give the explosive force more of an upward thrust, sending worms skyward. However, this is implemented in Worms Armageddon by simply moving the explosion downwards a bit… This allows you to create the rather odd effect of causing an explosion quite some distance underneath the point where the weapon detonates. If you set the explosion bias on a dynamite to 255 and then place it on a solid bit of land, you will find that it makes a nice, round hole underneath the point where the dynamite was placed!

What’s the “remembered” setting?

It determines whether you need to reselect the weapon in order to use it for a second time. Its effect is most pronounced when you are playing with “weapons don’t end turn”—if you set the “remembered” of, say, a grenade, then you will be able to lob twenty grenades in quick succession; but if you turn it off, you will need to select the grenade each time you want to fire one.

Why can’t I have anti-gravity for worms?

Because you can’t use a worm unless it’s sitting on the terrain! You can have anti-gravity for weapons, but worms must always be able to fall downwards onto the land. (If you set worm gravity to zero, it will in fact give you a very small amount of gravity to solve this problem. But it’s not recommended to play with worm gravity on zero!) 

I don’t understand the worm editor box.

You can set different options for each worm involved in the game. For each worm, you can set

•	the starting energy;
•	the starting disease points;
•	whether the worm is “vital”, that is, whether you lose the round as soon as this worm dies;
•	whether the worm is in artillery mode;
•	where to put the worm (by setting X/Y co-ordinates);
•	whether the player can place the worm by clicking with the mouse.

This is why the “worm energy”, “artillery mode” and “place worms at startup” settings have disappeared from the main screen. They’re now obsolete, because you can set them for each worm.

If you select something in the “worm parameters” box on the right hand side of the worm editor, you’ll see the setting for each worm displayed in the grid. You can select a group of cells with the mouse, and then click on “Modify selected cells” to change the different settings for each worm.

In the “Modify selected cells” dialog, check the boxes on the right-hand side to indicate which settings you want to edit for the selected worms, and then enter the new values and click OK. So, for example, to change the first worm for each team to have a starting energy of 5,000 and make it “vital”, but leave all other settings unchanged, you would:

1.	select the first worm of each team by dragging across the top of the worm editor grid with the mouse;
2.	click “Modify the selected cells”;
3.	check the top and third check-boxes in the dialog box to indicate that you want to make changes to these options;
4.	put “5000” in the energy box;
5.	select the “vital” check-box;
6.	click OK.

It’s brilliant. How can I ever thank you enough?

If you like The Fiddler, please email me at jheather@dcs.rhbnc.ac.uk and tell me. I spent weeks working on this, and knowing that my effort was appreciated would make me happy. You should also register: see below. If you want to write to me with a quill and parchment, try

James Heather
Narnia
2 Airlie Road
Winchester
Hants.
SO22 4NQ
United Kingdom

It doesn’t work, does it? How can I abuse you?

Same address.

It’s very good, but I want to be able to change the blah blah blah…

If I’ve missed out something that you feel should be editable, email me and tell me about it. I’ll have a look, and if I can work out how to include it, I’ll put it in the next version.

I changed the blah blah blah and then Worms crashed!

The Fiddler mucks about with thousands of internal settings for Worms Armageddon, and some of these might well upset it! You need a modicum of common sense when you’re changing settings, although you should be aware that a crash and a reboot is the worst case scenario, so you have very little to lose.

Forty-eight worms, for instance, is often pushing its luck because the game can’t place them all without lots drowning; and if an entire team drowns then the game crashes within a few turns. If you’re using this many worms then you need some of them to have the “Player places worm?” setting turned on. (This is the equivalent of the “Place worms at startup” global setting of version 2.1.)

Having said that, the game is remarkably resilient to being hacked about. It copes with donkeys on indestructible land, more worms than it was designed for, and much higher settings for most parameters than Team17 ever intended you to use.

But if you come across particular settings that cause consistent problems, then please let me know and I’ll investigate.

Do you have a mailing list for The Fiddler?

Yes. The web page is accessible from the main window of The Fiddler; else go to http://www.onelist.com/subscribe/thefiddler/

Do I need to register your program?

I’m afraid so. I spent many weeks writing this program when I should have been writing a PhD or earning some money to enable me to write a PhD, and I don’t think that a fiver is too much to ask as a thank you.

The program is fully functional and will never expire or nag you to register—it’s up to you to make the effort.

You are welcome to download and try out The Fiddler, but if you use it a lot, you must register by sending a cheque for a paltry £5.00 to

James Heather
Narnia
2 Airlie Road
Winchester
Hants.
SO22 4NQ
United Kingdom

If you’re from foreign parts then send a cheque to an equivalent value. There is a list in the program under About/Registering…
Anything else?

If you discover any interesting effects of weird settings, then please upload them to http://wormsmart.net-games.com/ along with any Fiddler files you create. Mr Flump (mrflump@hotmail.com) is king of the castle.

Worms Armageddon and associated intellectual properties are Copyright © 1999 Team17 Software Ltd. All rights reserved.