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.

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.

You did not check out the new version yet?
Download it here!

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.

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 #2, Milestone #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.

Do you want to learn some German? Then, watch and listen to this let’s play video (embedded below) with some OC-developers commenting the alpha version of the upcoming 7.0 release, available as a development snapshot here. Feedback very appreciated!

If you do not understand German, you can instead marvel at the newly added textures and the new cotton plants. 🙂 Have fun!

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 🙂

For anybody that missed the OpenClonk streaming night on scaba’s twitch channel yesterday, he uploaded the video on YouTube. Enjoy!

Here is a short teaser video about whats going on in the so-called “lights” branch of our repository, soon to be merged in master and included in the next release.

We are currently sorting out some bugs still and checking whether all the maps are still playable with this change. One thing we discovered so far (see the video): All underground maps got much more challenging.

We just released the first update for OpenClonk 4. It contains almost exclusively bugfixes.

Download here

Notably, the dependency issues with our Linux binaries (freetype and glew) have been resolved. Also, the 4.0 release inadvertently included the development test scenario folders Issues.ocf and Experimental.ocf which will be deleted on update again. Though, as the latter includes unfinished and experimental scenarios, it is still included in the development snapshots.
Also, OpenClonk works on Mac again now.

OpenClonk 4.1 changes
=====================
+ Fix game does not initialize when OS runs for longer than 30 days or so
+ Delete Issues.ocf, Experimental.ocf and Experimental.ocd on install (#1029)
+ Fix Mac builds
+ Fix DarkCastle null pointers and intro (#1034)
+ Fix selecting the clonks via hotkey (#1031)
+ Fix possible block in tutorial 2 (#1036)
+ Fix boomshire's door solidmasks (#1035)
+ Add option to link Boost dynamically (#1025)
+ Use pkg-config over CMake to find Freetype (#1024)
+ Make acid corrode coal and firestone (#1032)
+ Fix the pickaxe creating huge amounts of earth (#1030)
+ Fix update via *.ocu on Windows 7 (#870)
+ Fix issues with Crash.ocs intro (#951)
+ Fix statistics in player selection dialogues ignore linebreaks (#1027)
+ Change a LogFatal() to Log() when loading of a player failed (related to #693)
+ Fix a typo in English translation
+ Move Dialogue to Helpers.ocd to avoid copies
+ Fix save as scenario for Dialogue
+ Removed double Title1.png from Arena.ocf

As announced, we released OpenClonk 4.0 on schedule.

Download here
for Windows, Linux

So, whats new?

Content, content, content:

The main new feature in this release is the new Missions scenario folder.
The folder contains 9 settlement challenges, most of which have been created by the hands of the the very master of settlement: Sven2. Clonk-Karl and Maikel also contributed notably to the creation of this folder.

Other than the Worlds folder (renamed from Settlement.ocf) which contains mostly peaceful settlement rounds focusing on simple goals and an open world, the Missions folder contains settlement challenges, often with a story, where all players work together and need to find solutions or engineer technical constructions to solve to reach the scenario goals.

Below, let me spotlight a few of the new scenarios:

Dark Castle

Kill the evil tyrant King Horax in this combat oriented settlement round, featuring a rudimentary AI to oppose the cooperating players. The scenario was announced in this blog before, read the article here!

Acid Drilling

You will have to pump an acid deposit from the other side of a volcano to a basin into your home base here. For the lack of other power options in this scenario, you will have to use pumps to generate energy to power the pumps transferring the acid… wait, what?
Yeah, Sven2 and Newton reworked the pump to be able to generate power: If you pump liquids upwards, you need power, if you pump them downwards, power is generated. The bigger the height difference, the more energy is consumed / generated. Here, you can put this to the test.

The other new scenarios are: Crash Landing, Ruby Cave, Deadly Grotto, Mine Rescue, Frosty Summit, Mount Brame, Acid Gold Mine, Skylands and Golden Mountain

The Parkour and Arena folder has also been extended by a total of four scenarios: Hot Ice, Volcano Escape, Volcano Escape EXTREME and Heart of the Mountain.

The first two have already been introduced in this blog, read the article here. Volcano Escape EXTREME is the same as Volcano Escape, only that the volcano is erupting while you escape, uh oh!

The last one, Heart of the Mountain is a huge randomized claustrophobic maze in which you must find a tiny gemstone deposit and be the first to carry one ruby back to the start, without getting killed by the other players who are greedy for it of course. It is easy to get lost, so every player gets a spray can to breadcrumb his way around the cave system.

Other features

• Quadrillions of bugfixes!!! No, honestly, there hasn’t been any other version of OC for which so many long standing bugs have been resolved. Those visible in the bugtracker are only the tip of the iceberg. The biggest bug hunters were Newton, Sven2, Isilkor, Maikel, Clonk-Karl and Mortimer.
• Oliver Schneider, Günther and Newton implemented a feature that makes keyboard input independent of the keyboard layout. So, you are using DVORAK, Neo or perhaps you are French? No problem the keys stay the same.
• Following some interesting discussions about how to make mining more challenging, Newton added the firestone material to replace sulphur. From firestone veins, you can dig out firestones directly, so you have an early access to basic explosives. Be warned however, that explosions on firestone veins could lead to devastating chain reactions.
  Also, Sven2 changed the pickaxe to not be able to go through granite anymore, making it a barrier more difficult to overcome.

There is much more, but I didn’t mention all the changes since there have just been too many minor improvements to existing scenarios and objects to mention them separately. Some new objects like the grenade launcher (play The Cauldron), giant cave mushrooms or the windbag (replaces the jar of winds) were introduced, Clonkonaut added quite a few sound effects and Newton optimized the installation size by about 20%.

Interesting for developers

• A new, more powerful and and faster particle system has been introduced by Zapper. The particles are rendered much more efficiently now, making it possible to use particles much more extensively. Also, now as the particles are defined in C4Script via proplists, the developer gains more control over how the particles behave. See blog post and documentation. The fruits of his work can already be seen in the release, many particles have been reworked while being converted to the new system.
• An even more dynamic way to create randomized landscapes. So far there was the possibility to either define the landscape through a static Map.bmp or through Landscape.txt for randomly generated dynamic landscapes. Now, Sven2 introduced a third method, Map.c which is even more powerful than Landscape.txt because it is executed as a regular C4Script. It can not only be used to create a randomized map but also to modify the maps as defined in Map.bmp or Landscape.txt. See documentation.
• On that topic let me remind you that, Clonk-Karl added mape, a tool for editing and viewing Landscape.txts, to the repository. They are autobuild on each change to it’s source, see downloads page and manual and previous blog post.
• Solid masks have been reworked by Sven2. Now, solid masks are set independently of the graphics. This, amongst others, enables to use solid masks for objects that use meshes instead of sprite graphics. See documentation and forum post.
• Introduced cleaner, more upwards compatible way to save objects for scenarios by Sven2. If a scenario is saved as a scenario, the objects placed in the editor are not saved into a Game.txt but instead, the objects are serialized into Object.c, a regular C4Script file, in which only those properties are saved which are important for scenarios. See documentation and forum post.
• Mortimer made debugging of future network (desync) issues much easier, he turned the DEBUCREC compilation option into a regular option, so anyone can turn this option now on to log huge amounts of internal debugging data for later analysis.
• Many documentation updates (mainly Newton)

As the last content release lies more than one year in the past, remembering and gathering up all the features that were added during that time was quite the detective work. If I forgot anything noteworthy, please comment or write me and I will add it.

If you made it until here, I’ve only one thing left to say to you: What’s wrong with you, download and play already!! 😉

Have fun!

This is the end screenshot of a failed attempt to conquer the new round Acid Gold Mine, included in the upcoming release. The goal is very easy: Mine gold equal to the value of 225 clunkers,… if it weren’t for the active volcano beneath and the constant heavy acid rain from above… Ah, did I mention the explosive meteorite showers?

During the release tests, it turned out that it became hellishly difficult because of the introduction of a highly explosive material: Firestone veins (red in the screenshots). If there is an explosion nearby, these might become unstable and explode in a chain reaction. The scenario has been defused a bit for the upcoming release.

Gameplaywise, the firestone material replaces sulphur and aims to make settlement rounds more… explosive! 🙂