W:A Fiddler
How to use - Introduction
History of Fiddler and WormsMart
In February 1999 the Worms: Armageditor website was launched, designed as a simple website for the editor called Armageditor, made by Mr Flump (Allan West), and also Scheme Editor, by Fudge Boy (James Heather). In March the WormsMart website was launched, home of the Worms Armageddon editors, and as yet Fiddler had not been created.
My involvement goes back to the days of Worms 2. Some of you may remember me for making the Ed's Levels pack, of which some parts involved the use of the popular editors. In Worms Armageddon I was sad to find that I couldn't make the new game schemes that I was hoping for, and was angry at Team17 for restricting the options.
Around the same time in March, I found an option hidden in the Worms Armageddon demo which allowed the option to fire weapons without ending the turn, which I called "Multifire", and talked to Sniper about it, who then published screenshots on what was The Allotment. In April I found there was a new editor called The Fiddler, and discovered that the same option was available, but this time for Worms Armageddon and not the demo. I was overjoyed, and e-mailed Fudge Boy about the option, and later joined the newsletter that he had made.
Over time I enquired how much could be done using the editor, and had a large amount of ideas waiting to be made for the game. Though I knew that Team17 had their reasons to restrict the options in W:A, I felt that the option for people to make their own games should still be there, and so I worked with him to advance the program to become more powerful.
In July 1999 the WormsMart website moved on to Freeserve, which was still a long way from what it has evolved into, and Fudge Boy had released Fiddler 3.2, with many of the features that had been in Worms 2, plus some that he had found along the way. It was until August when the Fiddler v4 would begin, and it would take eight months before the final version was released.
During this time, Fudge Boy, Mr Flump, AGi, Ben "Combatter" Kennish and myself were working out what the new options were in the game, such as the 14 boxes that were the key to the weapon editor. (We worked out 10 of them, good enough to find everything. The four left can still be seen when you open a weapon. :)
In October the first public release of the program, Fiddler 4 beta 1, was shown to the public. Needless to say the reception was superb, though at this stage the program was far from complete. Some people helped along the way in pointing out which option didwhat, and every day I worked on decrypting the hidden options, this in itself well worth the money to register the program.
November saw the release of the new WormsMart website, now starting to become the website that exists now. By beta 3 of the program, we were fast on the track to finding out what everything did, and the files section was starting to grow. In December I started to post news on the website and took on the role as files administrator, and the Fiddler was now close to being completed. One of the proudest achievements of the website now was we had a community of our own, which has been continuing ever since.