Archive for December 27th, 2015

Witty and nimble if skillfully controlled

Posted in Development on December 27th, 2015 by Maikel – Be the first to comment

As all longtime fans of the Clonk series know, our favorite character the clonk can be witty and nimble, though only if skillfully controlled. With the upcoming release we are aiming to make the clonk even more nimble. Moreover, the player can use various tools to construct different solutions to the same problem.

For example the rope bridge is now an object which can be used by the clonk. Before it was only available for scenario designers as a decorative object. The clonk can place both ends of the bridge at solid ground to form it. Then walk over it for as long as needed and then retract it again at either end of the bridge.

The temporary rope bridge is connected between an airship and solid ground.

The temporary rope bridge is connected between an airship and solid ground.

Also the rope ladder has become more useful as you can now jump off the rope ladder with more strength, like the wall jump with solid materials. Using this the clonk can now jump from rope ladder to rope ladder, making it a fast way to traverse dangerous lakes for example. But also to perform mining activities as shown in the video.

Last but not least in this blog post there is a new feature for the lorry, which can now be tilted up to 55 degrees to dump its contents. While holding the lorry pressing the left mouse key tilts the lorry to the direction of the mouse cursor and if tilted more than 45 degrees its contents will start falling out. This feature can be useful for massive bombardments in combination with the airship. More situations will probably come to mind, for example setting up traps along a large cliff or just dumping the lorry’s contents into a mine.

The contents of the lorry can be dumped by tilting it.

The contents of the lorry can be dumped by tilting it.

Together with all the rope fine-tuning the scripts also have been partially optimized which has lead to a slight reduction of the lag of objects using the rope library. Please report any suggestions, bugs and excessive amounts of lag in the bugtracker while testing these new features using the snapshots.