Music

The many additions done within the Milestone Project also include an overhaul of the acoustic ambience. The biggest change is probably a new music pack by David Oerther (a.k.a. ‘ala’). The new music pack contains 20 novel, beautifully composed pieces which the composer released to be used for free by all OpenClonk and related projects. The pack will be offered for download by the installer in the next OpenClonk release, but you can already get it from our download page or listen to some of the pieces below:

The dawning night is accompanied by chary chimes of the Celesta.

The game has been adapted to the new content by providing an ambience controller, which selects music depending on the player’s current situation. This means different music is played depending on whether the player is overground, in a cave, swimming deeply underwater or chilling under the night sky. As you walk through the various places in the world of OpenClonk, fitting music is turned on or off automatically and fades smoothly between tracks if needed. The two pieces by K-Pone, already known in the past release, have been integrated into the controller as well.

Developers will find access to the new fading and playlist options in the developer documentation here.

Sound

The hum of the rotor echoes from the cave walls as it dives into the volcano.

The improvements in ambience have also been extended to sounds emitted from other objects in the game world. In addition to a generally richer number of different sounds for almost all moving objects, OpenClonk now supports fine-tuning by changing effects such as pitch, reverb or echo for each sound effect individually. For example when the engine of an airplane is started, the sound now begins low-pitched and pitches up as the engine speed increases. When players are in a cave, all surrounding sounds are effected by reverb coming back from surrounding cave walls.

For developers: Check out the documentation of new sound modifiers here.

In sum, the many small improvements help a lot in making the worlds of OpenClonk more vivid and engaging to the player and we’re excited to shows the newly designed acoustics in the upcoming 7.0 release!

A wind of change has been blowing lately in the Clonk community: A team around ala recently formed the so-called Milestone Project for OpenClonk. About a dozen people regularly participate, some of them are also recruited from the classic Clonk Community. The most important and valuable characteristic of this project is that it is organized. ala gets the developers to stick their heads together and work on a common goal.

The Milestone Project wants to put some pioneer spirit back into the Clonk content development. They prototype and experiment with new ideas, concepts and game elements and their main goal – at least for the first few milestones – is to enrich the game world of OpenClonk so that it looks and plays more like a polished, finished game.

What does that mean exactly? Well, I hope we will cover more frequently and more in detail what interesting stuff they are working on in the future. For now, I will just show you a few pictures:

In search for a more uniform graphics style, away from the textures taken from photographs towards something painted (with love ;-)), Nachtfalter initated a rework of the material textures. Goal: Make worthless materials (rock, earth, sand, granite,…) stand out less. Generally make materials flatter and less photorealistic to make it easier for plants, items, livings etc. to be prominent on the screen.

Also, this is the first proper attempt to create nice normal maps that work together well with the new lighting system (since 6.0) for the textures. You see this very nicely with the granite rocks from Matthi there.

And here is a feature that Sven2 already implemented years ago but now it finally gets to be used. The shape texture:

If such a shape texture is defined for a material, any material placed during landscape generation will have this shape, i.e. there will only be whole rocks. This one is by Clonkonaut.

Furthermore, mainly Nachtfalter has been experimenting with other styles for vegetation to put some greenery into the world….

… and Randrian experimented with weather effects like more beautiful rain. But what would the world of Clonk be without…

…animals! Like Matthi’s sea creatures here and best of all Clonk animals, the Wipf (by pluto).

Some of the work presented here is already included in the upcoming 7.0 release. So, stay tuned 🙂