Archive for March 21st, 2012

Shiny new Controls/UI

Posted in Development on March 21st, 2012 by boni – 10 Comments

OpenClonk now has updated Controls and a new UI! The aim of these changes is to provide comfortable and easy access to everything, while maintaining speed. For that reason nearly every action has multiple controls now. But I’m getting ahead of myself, take a look for yourself!

Behold, the new UI:

The new UI with the contents menu

UI & Contents Menu

The New

As you’ll probably have noticed, most of the UI is gone. So is the Backpack! It got replaced by a general inventory, displayed at the left side. With a unified inventory, the separation of hands and items in the backpack also is gone. You simply select which inventory-slot should be in your left/right hand.

The content-menu now also features fellow Crewmembers. That means you can trade items with your own clonks directly!

The health- and breath-tube have been removed completely. So have the two hand-fields.

The Old

The actionbar at the bottom, used for interacting with structures and vehicles, stays the same. However it has a fixed order now, as opposed to sorting the selected object to the beginning.
The crew-selector also stayed the same, and doubles as the only health and breath-information now. Some fancy features are planned though.

The Keys

About everything is doable by clicking on stuff, but as mentioned above, quite a few new keys have been added for the Pros.

  • The Hotkeys 1-9 select the corresponding slot into the left hand now. Holding a hotkey + Mouseclick also selects the slot into the corresponding hand.
  • Shift is the Inventory-key now. Shift + Mouseclick throws the corresponding hand-item, Shift + Number drops the corresponding slot.
  • Ctrl is the Crew-key. Ctrl + Number quickly selects the corresponding crew member.
  • Space is the Interaction-key. Space + Number interacts with the corresponding Actionbar-Item. Releasing Space without pressing a number interacts with the first one.
  • Also, so far the Q-Key doesn’t have a function now. But I’m sure we’ll find something for that. 😉

The Plan

Quite a few more features are planned. Many things will be implemented as experimental solutions. We will see how many survive. 🙂

A Toolbar to the right, for using Tools in your inventory directly. (Construction menu, chopping trees, etc.)
Indicator for usable stuff.
A Keyboard-Layout for left-handed players.
A way to select the right-hand item comfortably.
…and many more

A complete overview over the current iteration can be found here: https://wiki.openclonk.org/w/Controls