Archive for January, 2016

The Music of OpenClonk

Posted in Development on January 29th, 2016 by Newton – Be the first to comment

Thanks to David Oerther (ala) and Martin Strohmeier (K-Pone), OpenClonk now has a quite extensive athmospheric soundtrack!

You can listen to it right here on the blog (or use the Popup player)

… or, simply download the game and enjoy it while you play. As previously teasered it is dynamically chosen which song is to be played depending on your situation in the game – the time of day, if you are underground or underwater etc.

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!

OpenClonk 7 released

Posted in Announcements on January 15th, 2016 by Newton – 2 Comments

Another year passed, and here is another release, version 7!

Download here

Though, this year’s version is quite special because it so much larger than the previous updates. The new release is focused on making the game more playable, better looking and giving it an overall nicer athmosphere: New controls, new GUI, more ambience, life, game content and bazillion of bugfixes.

Recent Screenshot from the game

A recent round of Gem Grabbers, showing you the new material textures and the new cotton plant.

Previously I wrote about the Milestone Project and I am safe to say that without the people that organized themself in this project, version 7 wouldn’t be half as extensive or awesome as it has become because not only did they make the game more beautiful and added a good deal of new game content, they also provided everyone else with a huge motivational boost with their organized effort – core developers and occasional contributors alike.

Let me use this oppurtunity to thank all the many people who did their part in the Milestone Project and still are, especially David Oerther (ala), Martin Adam (Win), Armin Schäfer and Florian Graier (Nachtfalter).

Let’s look forward to the next milestones, which are already in planning. Check them out, especially if you are interested to contribute something in the future (German content): Milestone #2Milestone #3.

And now, for the long list of major enhancements done for this version:

New Controls and GUI

  • By initiative from David Dormagen (Zapper), OpenClonk has new controls again. The biggest change is a switch from two usable items (one on each mouse button) to just one while freeing the other mouse button. See above for more details.
  • Again by initiative from David Dormagen, the whole ingame GUI has been remade. Script creation of GUI elements and menus is not only easier but a lot more flexible. Also, these GUI elements run asynchronously among clients, freeing network capacities. For more information, check the documentation. Based on this system, Felix Wagner (Clonkonaut) streamlined the ingame HUD. For a detailed description, have a look at the feedback thread.
  • Fitting to the new control scheme, Maikel created completely new tutorial scenarios. The idea is that the players are slowly led into “normal” missions rather than having just a few “learning rounds” and that’s it. Please mind that not all tutorials are finished yet but the very basic ones are.

More Ambience

  • David Oerther (ala) composed a completely new soundtrack. For licensing reason, it is not included in the default OpenClonk download but the Windows installer will ask you whether it should be automatically downloaded. Others can get it from the download page. Furthermore, songs have been added to the included soundtrack by Martin Strohmeier (K-Pone).
  • To celebrate the new soundtrack, Sven2 implemented an ambient music system which tries to play the fitting music depending on your situation and surroundings in the game. Speaking of sound, Sven2 also extended the sound system to be able to add effects such as reverb, echo or pitch to sound effects. For example, now every sound in a cave has a little echo and underwater, all sounds are damped.
  • Also greatly adding to the ambience in the game are the huge amount of new sound effects that have been added to the game, mainly from David Oerther (ala). After all, the more sound effects there are, the more noise you can make in caves and underwater. A cumulative bonus.
  • Thanks to the initiative from several people from the Milestone project, most notably Matthias Rottländer and Florian Graier (Nachtfalter), almost all material textures were recreated. This has a huge impact on the visuals of the game, giving Open Clonk a whole new and tidy look. All materials got normal maps, which makes the landscape appear quite three-dimensional!
  • The dynamic lighting system that had been introduced in version 6 has been greatly enhanced. Most notably are the addition of colored lights by Mark Haßelbusch, more usage of shaders (glowing lava, shiny gold, …), more usage of ambient light (i.e. for day-night cycle) and making it easier to implement custom shaders. Armin Burgmeier (Clonk-Karl) and Peter Wortmann were the masterminds in this. The Clonk is now also not the only source of light, but we have torches and lanterns now – plus certain objects add colored lights for effects, i.e. the teleglove.

More Life

  • Plant life! There are more trees now than the one coniferous tree we had for a long time, there are flowers, ferns,  mushrooms, seaweed, … . This is a big contrast to the otherwise quite brown world of OpenClonk (what can we do? Earth is brown!) and adds big time to a nicer ambience. There are not only decorative plants but also plants like “cotton” and wheat that can be crafted into useful things! All covered in this blog article about farming.
  • Animal life! It was time to repopulate the world of Clonk with some wildlife, and hell we did a thorough job with that – the Zaps and the Chippies from Clonk Rage made it back into the game. And of course, our dearest furry friend, the Wipf, is back! But there is much more now – bats, moskitos, fireflies, piranhas, squids, other fishes, a “puka” and more. And, there is more in the pipeline! Both the animal and plant life is mainly thanks to the initiative from the people from the Milestone project again, but in the end most of our content developers were involved.

More Stuff

  • There are some noteworthy changes on the workings on the landscape which might be especially interesting for developers: First, Armin Burgmeier (Clonk-Karl) made it freely definable by scenario authors what should be “behind” a material after it has been mined. This opens up some interesting possibilities. Also, Julius Michaelis (JCaesar) added the possibility for platforms – things you can jump through from below but stand on from above. Best example: the airship.
  • A lot of new objects, such as the Wooden Bridge (known to players from Clonk Rage), placeable Rope Bridges (those had been in the game for a long time but were not usable by players)
  • New scenarios, also a lot of the old scenarios came to know some attention. A new scenario folder was created, including two Defense type scenarios where one has to fend off numerous waves of attackers.

Bazillion Bugfixes

  • So many bugfixes and improvements that we honestly lost track. And really everyone was involved. To put this into perspective: For version 7, alone through the bugtracker almost 400 bugs were resolved, that’s more than for version 5 and 6 together!

That’s it.

What’s next?

We will continue work with the organization form of the Milestone Project. There are new creatures waiting to be incorporated into the game, to enliven the scenarios. We want to explore improving deep sea gameplay and the Heavy Resources concept.

7.0 – Release Candidate 3

Posted in Announcements on January 9th, 2016 by Clonkonaut – 1 Comment
Guardians of the Windmills has been one of the first scenarios in Open Clonk. Now it's completely overhauled!

Guardians of the Windmills has been one of the first scenarios in Open Clonk. Now it’s completely overhauled!

A new and hopefully final Release Candidate has been build. If you haven’t noticed the other two RCs, that is totally fine since we kept those hidden in the forums.

Be advised that since 6.1 there have been a lot of changes and there is no compiled changes list yet (however, there will be when the release is out for real). I will just list the major ones right here:

  • Complete overhaul of controls. You cannot select two items anymore to the two mouse buttons. Instead, just one item is selected and activated on left mouse, thrown on right mouse button. You can quick switch back to your last selected item with ‘Q’. You pick up items by using Shift now and can use Shift + Left/Right to skip through all the items lying around or use Shift + Up to pick up as many things as your clonk can carry (Shift + Down will abort picking up). To get the contents of any object / clonk  press ‘E’. Interaction (grabbing, using vehicles, …) is still on Space but works similar to picking up things.
  • Completely new HUD and menus. HUD size is linked to font size.
  • Normalmaps and new textures for the landscape.
  • New music and an optional music pack (because it does not use a Creative Commons License, it is not shipped with OC): The Windows installer will automatically query you to download that music separately, everyone else can get it from the Download page (bottom right). Just replace the Music.ocg in your Open Clonk directory.
  • A lot of other cool new things!

Download

If you have not tested the new controls before, we recommend playing the new tutorials first!

Windows 32bit
Windows 64bit
Linux 32bit
Linux 64bit
OS X 64bit

Linux users who want to build OC themselves can do so by checking out the ‘stable-7.0’ branch of the main repository.

Troubleshooting

  • Open Clonk does not start or crashes immediately
    You might want to try and update your graphics driver. Even if Open Clonk 6.1 runs fine, because in the meantime a lot of work has been put into shader development and right now, Open Clonk needs a recent driver. We recommend using AMD or Nvidia Video cards!
  • I am running Open Clonk on a device with an Intel GMA / HD Graphics chipset and have problems running Open Clonk
    If your machine does have a GMA chip, Open Clonk will probably not run at all and there is low chance OC will support your device again, sorry. More recent HD chips should be able to run OC. Always try and get the most recent graphics driver there is. It is known that OC does not run properly on HD 2000 and HD 3000 (Sandy Bridge processors) and currently no support is planned.
  • My Gamepad does not work properly
    Right now, gamepad support is not finished and will probably not be finished for the release, sorry. We are working on getting gamepads working again though. Currently, your only choice of control input is mouse + keyboard.
  • I have troubles using splitscreen / local coop
    The release will not feature local coop / splitscreen support, sorry. We are working on getting this working again though. Currently, your only choice is online coop.
  • No one is playing online!
    Usually, there are people around sundays at evening (CET). Or sometimes other days but evenings are best to catch other players!
  • I have another problem
    Sorry to hear that! Please post your problem in the bugtracker or the forums.