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.

Just recently the Open Clonk Milestone Project offered the opportunity to finally finish what has begun years ago.

We filled the gaps and finished the production chains that involve farming, harvesting plants and processing the crop. In this very modest approach we now have two plants that yield basic production materials. Other plants do offer material as well but the difference here is you can also use the seeds to plant new plants and enlarge your field.

Wheat

Wheat has been around for quite some time in the objects pack. Fully grown, it can be harvested using a sickle to get seeds. Those can either be sown or ground into flour in the windmill. The flour is then used to bake bread in the kitchen. Bread is the best option to regain life.

Cotton

We decided to not have ‘cotton’ look like what are you are used to from real life. Instead, we made something that hopefully looks interesting but behaves very different from other plants. The cotton plant will sprout its fruit that look like big balloons. If let undisturbed, the fruit will soon detach and fly off, drifting wherever the wind blows. At some point, the fruit pops open, spilling its contents. If you want to catch the price before that, you better get a sword or a bow and stop the fruit before it takes off. Cotton can also be sown or has to be processed using the loom to get cloth. Many objects formerly unbuildable are now available: the airship, the balloon, the windbag!

You got me excited, where can I see this?

Bugger! Scenario development has not caught up yet. All the objects will be included in the next release (hopefully early January 2016) but no scenarios really feature these. I will be working on this, I promise! But feel free to include these objects into any self-made scenarios. Use it either to aid the gameplay, adding a new variety of things to manage in a successful settlement or create scenario goals around it. Can you feed a starving city with your bread? Or help to bring forward the local cloth manufacturing?

This is the name of one of our branches (look here for shortlog) and I currently spend my much too short Clonk working time on this. Judging from the positive feedback I got so far, the project is popular among the devs and those people reading the forum (look here for feedback thread). This might very well become the standard in the next release and that is big enough to me for writing an article about it.

Heavy resources utilise the already existent ‘carry heavy’ library that you might or might not know from objects like the boompack or the barrel. In short: These are big and heavy objects that a clonk needs to carry with both hands, effectively blocking access to the regular inventory. Carrying such in melees is a tactical choice, in settlements it is slowing you down. With the heavy resource branch in effect, it will slow you even more, rendering the transport of resources more of a challenge than it is now (with a large space of 5 slots, the inventory is quite effective). Designing your transport routes will be a task to consider.

This clonk is carrying a heavy rock.

The first change with big impact is to prevent the clonk from scaling and brachiating while carrying a heavy object. The landscape, especially the shape you gave it, becomes an obstacles again. In addition, all material objects (rock, ore, coal, …) are replaced by a carry heavy version. Trees can be cut into logs which are also carry heavy. Refined materials (metal, planks) also get carry heavy.

What are planks you ask? Planks are obtained from the sawmill by cutting logs. Planks will serve as high tier construction material. The sawmill will change from a must-have to a nice-to-have building, giving you more freedom to choose the first steps into a settlement game.

My next steps will be to iron out all the small flaws that make handling the heavy objects weird right now. Also, I need to remotivate the graphics department because as you can see, the heavy objects lack proper graphics right now.  Testing is already possible for those who have downloaded the repository; just switch to the ‘heavy resources’ branch. I haven’t done any engine changes yet, so using an autobuild is possible. I will also see to upload a ready-to-go package with all game files necessary to play.

After that, me and hopefully everyone else will think about new ways to make transportation more exciting. Ideas are welcome. How can we make changing the landscape more comfortable? Do we need new buildings or vehicles to ease movement of the big chunks? Especially a whole lot of them?

After we already have a progress report on what the settlement development has reached so far, I wanted to give you all a quick overview about what is planned. Because a picture says more than 1000 words, I tried to make a little something showing the production-lines-to-be.

This is heavy work in progress though!

Click! ->