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!