FOSSwire

Back in December, I looked at Wormux, a crazy turn-based battle game where you pitch (FOSS-inspired) animated characters against each other to find the last man standing.

Recently, the team announced the release of the new 0.8 version of the game. The new release boasts a new network play feature as well as loads of new maps, several additional weapons and other upgrades.

The new network multiplayer option allows you to play online, as well as on a local network. A game such as Wormux really is most fun when you are playing a human opponent, although a quick match vs the computer is good too. If geographical distance isn't an issue, it was always possible, and still is, to play hot-seat at a single machine.

This new feature though eliminates that requirement, however. As with any network game, firewalls might be an issue, but as the game runs off a single TCP port, it should be trivial to add exceptions.

Anyway, the point is that these new additions make an already highly entertaining game a lot more fun. Blasting the characters belonging to someone across the other side of the world is now as possible and satisfying as a real-life opponent in the same room.

It's worth noting right now that for Linux users, the static binary download is still only at version 0.7.9, and doesn't benefit from these new features. However, you can download the latest source and compile yourself.

If you still haven't given Wormux a try, I'd highly recommend it. Downloads for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X are available.

Today I'm going to do something a bit different. For once, the tables are turned and I'm asking a question, rather than providing an answer.

You may or may not know that since our 2.0 relaunch back in October last year, we've supported video to accompany posts. You might have seen this one I did about Moodle, or Jacob's excellent look at PiTiVi.

One of the things I've learnt is that producing videos on a Linux system is, well, tough. The set-up I personally use at the moment isn't a very good one, and (bad Peter) it involves some non-free software as part of the process too.

Let me explain. First of all, I use Istanbul to record the screen and dump it to an Ogg Theora video file. After that, it is transcoded to MPEG through ffmpeg and moved over to my Mac, where I edit and record the audio separately in iMovie 06. Once the editing and audio is done, I export it out through iMovie to H.264, and then use ffmpeg to transcode it back to the final versions - Ogg Theora and Flash Video for the embedded player.

As you can see, that workflow is seriously flawed in a number of ways. It involves too much needless transcoding, which hurts video quality badly. On top of that, it's a bit ridiculous to have to cart the files around between two different machines and two different platforms to get the process done.

I'd like to replace this way of doing things with a new workflow, based on free and open source software if at all possible, and ideally cutting the Mac out of the picture entirely so everything can be dealt with swiftly and easily on one Linux machine.

So here I throw it out to you. Has anyone out there had experience with FOSS-based Linux screen capture and does anyone have any ideas on how I could rework the way I do things to make this better? Even if it involves radically changing the set of tools I am using, I am open to any ideas that could solve the problem.

For a quick reference, all we need is the ability to:

• Record 640x480 screen capture at a reasonable frame rate (15 fps or so).
• Edit the video after production to cut out unnecessary parts etc.
• Record audio separately and splice in at the post-production stage.
• Export out to 640x480 Ogg Theora with Vorbis audio and 320x240 FLV/64kbps MP3 audio.

Thanks in advance for any comments and suggestions!

You'll have to forgive me, this is the second game review I've done in the past two days, after yesterday's look at Battle Tanks. After discovering this gem though, I simply couldn't not share.

The game is Wormux - and it is basically a clone of the Worms series of games originally by Team17. For those who aren't in the know, Wormux (and the Worms game) put you in control of a team of worms armed to the teeth with an arsenal of weapons. The aim of the game is to use those weapons against worms of the enemy team. Each worm has a set amount of energy, and being shot at, blown up etc. will reduce that energy until that worm dies (or if you can get a worm to go for a swim or fly off the edge of the map, it's instant death). The last team standing wins. It is turn-based, so while your team is in control, everyone else stands still for you to take a potshot at.

Wormux makes a formidable clone of the original series. It has an impressive set of weapons 'inspired' by the series, plus some extra ones that you won't have seen before. It doesn't copy directly in every way, however, and has a distinct free software spin to it. Instead of the same old plain worms, for example, the different teams that ship with the game are themed - so there are Tux penguins, PHP elephants, KDE dragons and so forth. This adds a unique Linux and free software spin to it, and keeps things interesting.

Gameplay is spot on. It manages to be simple, yet almost endlessly fun. The game is best played hot-seat with other human players, where you each pick a team and take it in turns to blow each other's worms up.

The game is very stable and seems to work very well, although again it does need 3D acceleration, so without it you might struggle to get it at playable framerates. Also, the screen scrolling system, where you move the mouse to the edges of the screen to move the camera around can be a slight problem if you 'get lost' and can't find the currently active worm.

Despite these minor issues, I am absolutely in love with Wormux right now. If you can't play the real Worms games, then this is, in my opinion, the absolute next best thing. Highly recommended.

Wormux is cross-platform and can binaries for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and FreeBSD as well as source code downloaded from the download page. The Linux static binary can be downloaded from there, but install using your package manager if you can for the easiest installation.