Archive for January 21st, 2016

OpenClonk 7.0 Spotlight – Controls and UI

Posted in Development on January 21st, 2016 by Newton – 2 Comments

For a long time now, a new control schematic was under development. Countless testing rounds have left us with a dissatisfaction about the two-handed approach (one item on left mouse, one on right mouse). While there were advantages, the disadvantages were more severe: people tended to not use the second item effectively, sometimes even forget about the selection at all. In the heat of a quick melee scenario it was easy to get confused and a better choice was always to hit the number key of a weapon you wanted to use and do so with the left mouse button. It became apparent that we left a major key (right button) to degenerate into a minor feature. That was unacceptable.

Thus, the new control scheme is a more conservative approach. Just one item is selected at a time. For quick item combinations, there is a quick switch to the last selected item on Q. Also, the mouse wheel will now serve to scroll through your inventory. A natural solution when you have played any other game. Zooming is now done by holding Ctrl and using the mouse wheel. Because zooming is less frequently used, this is no harsh impediment.

Just to clear things up, here are some pictures to fully explain the controls in Open Clonk. Included are even controls that were left unchanged, just for the sake of completeness.

Clonk Controls around WASDCC0 from https://pixabay.com/de/tastatur-layout-tasten-computer-156077/CC0 http://www.freestockphotos.biz/stockphoto/15220

You did not check out the new version yet?
Download it here!