Vermes is a fork of the popular Liero clone, Gusanos. More specifically, Vermes is based on Gusanos 0.9c, available at: http://gusanos.sourceforge.net/
Liero is a great, fast-paced, 2D action game. With worms. And guns.
In a single word: liberty.
The main reason for Vermes' existance is the use of non-free libraries in Gusanos. Vermes aims to be a completely open and free Liero clone. There are philosophical and esoteric reasons for this, and more practical ones. Philosophically, it's nice to be in control of the software you use. Practically, removing proprietary dependencies means Vermes can be integrated into free software projects, like operating system repositories.
There are also a number of smaller reasons for the fork. A borked scons build system, unfriendly CVS, hard-to-get source releases, and inactive development. At the time Gusanos was forked, there hadn't been a release in a year. Furthermore, the developers had decided to abandon the code base, to redevelop 1.0 from scratch. Vermes decided to avoid Joel Spolsky's idea of a strategic mistake.
That's not to say anything bad about Basra and Gliptic. They've put a lot of work into this game. In fact, for now, 99% of the code in Vermes was written by them. That figure will drop away as we work on the code, but their original work got us here.
Vermes is released under the terms of the GNU Public License Version 2.0. Currently, because we haven't yet removed the Zoidcom dependency, the code doesn't strictly comply with the vanilla GPL - there's an exeception to allow the code to link with Zoidcom. We hope to remove this exception as soon as possible.
There is currently one release for Windows. This is a version of Vermes compatible with Gusanos, but using the new OpenAL sound library. This gives it substantially better performance than Gusanos 0.9c. (This release was previously known as vermes-0.9c-win32.zip)
Until we get our packaging sorted, you'll need to head straight for the source download (or via SVN) if you want to use Vermes on Linux.
0.9.1 is compatible with Boost 1.35. Otherwise, there's little difference between 0.9.1 and 0.9.0.
0.9.0 is pretty well tested, and fairly stable.
If you're not using the source download, Vermes doesn't require installation beyond putting all of its files in a directory somewhere. If you can unpack the files, you're probably all ready to play. You may want to edit default/config.cfg first, though, to set up your nickname and key bindings.
If you are using the source, check the BUILD file in your download.
If you'd like to get developing, check out our TODO - patches welcome! The source for Vermes currently lives at http://home.dubdot.com/vermes/ - that's an SVN repository, so feel free to grab the code. And email dominic@dubdot.com if you'd like karma.
Our SVN hosting is currently quite flakey. If you have any trouble grabbing the latest source, ask for help. We're quite happy to consider a move to SourceForge once we have other devs on board.