Last Sunday, we hosted a twitch stream showcasing the new features of the editor and demonstrated how to build a scenario in multiplayer!

The scenario is a simple settlement adventure and can be downloaded here: FindTheDiamond.ocs.

You can also watch the Record on Youtube.

One of the main strengths of Clonk has always been its easy script interface and its openness for user content. Unfortunately, players often don’t realize how much they can do in the game because we don’t ship an editor and few players will dig into the game folders to realize they can create their own content.

Fortunately, this is changing now! We are reworking the old “console mode” to be a full-fledged standalone editor capable of creating a variety of interesting scenarios.

First, the editor will be easily accessible from the main menu of the game. No more tedious navigation to developer pages hidden on our website is required.

Second, the editor has been streamlined to be easy to understand and throws you right into the action. There is now a “new” button directly on the welcome page of the editor which allows you to set a name and basic parameters for a new scenario. The new map is automatically created and loaded into the editor for you. Recently edited scenarios can also be re-opened directly from the startup page. In the future, we also seek to add quick tutorial links onto this page.

The editor itself has been written in Qt, a state-of-the-art and cross-platform user interface toolkit that contains all the little things like dockable toolboxes and native user interface widgets which make the program easy and fun to use. Many new features have been introduced:

• Less cluttered user interface: All tools and viewports are arranged into dockable dialogues so there will be no more floating “object property” dialogues that got lost behind the viewport somehow. Of course if you want you can still undock elements such as viewports and e.g. move them off to a second screen. All tools (player/object/landscape cursors, brush modes, etc.) have been combined into the command bar on top.


New editor main interface

• Easy-to-use object properties: When selecting an object, its basic categories can be set directly in a property list on the right. With properties, you can connect switches with doors, create enemy AI clonks, configure goal and rule objects, etc. Properties can use custom delegates for each type. For example, the shape delegate can be used to mark a region in the map such as trigger regions for enemy AI clonks. Colors can be chosen from a color dialogue box, numbers can be set in a spin box, etc. More complex types such as arrays of IDs can be defined in script.


Connecting a spin wheel to a stone door is very easy. Targets are listed by distance and the hovered element is highlighted in the viewport (left door in the example screenshot).

• The object creator shows a list of all loaded definitions. Simply select a definition from the list and use a single click into the landscape to place the object. Object placement has a preview and allows rapid placement of many objects.


Simply select an object in the list and left-click to place it.

• Selected objects can be rotated and scaled by dragging a scaler and rotator knob. Rotation in multiple of 45 degrees es possible by holding Shift.


Drag the pink round knob to scale and rotate the selected object.

• Obscured or lost objects can be found in the object list. The list is organized by containment so objects in chests can also be found. Effects are also shown and can be edited.
• Landscape painting has been improved: Instead of the brush preview in a hidden toolbox (that showed the wrong size anyway), you can now see the projected brush size as an overlay while painting materials. For static maps, the landscape can be switched to a “flat chunks” mode that makes it easier to draw e.g. vertical tunnels for stone doors or find any remaining sky pixels underground.


Shows the new brush preview (white circle) and the new “flat chunks” mode, in which it’s easier to see errors in the map. Flat chunks mode can be enabled and disabled at runtime.

• Start positions and start properties such as wealth, materials and construction plans can now be set easily through a “player start” object. Player start objects can be placed anywhere to denote a possible starting position. Multiple start positions can be defined for each team in melees or simply as random possible starting points. To make things easier for newbies, scenarios created through the “new” command already contain a centered player start object.


The player start object (here: One start object for each team in a team melee) can be used to determine player start positions and conditions.

The editor has not made it into the master game branch yet. However, if you are comfortable with git and compiling your own engine, you can check out the qteditor branch. German speaker can also follow the editor development blog on clonkspot.

Note that this is a newbie-friendly editor for creating simple scenarios only. To do advanced scripting, build objects or contribute to the original game, you can either look at Windmill or follow the guidelines on our development page.

If you have additional ideas or suggestions for the new editor, please leave a comment here or in the forum thread!

Are you bored during the holiday season and need some fresh OpenClonk content? Just in time for Christmas, two player-made addon scenarios have been released.

Warning: Both scenarios need the current preview version of OpenClonk 7.0, which you can get from the Nightly Build page.

The first scenario is a remake of Shîre, a classic adventure from the times of Clonk 4. Originally developed by Jan Gauczinski, a remake for OC has been built by Marky (Download Scenario + Download Adventure Library). The scenario includes all the dialogues and quests, converted music, individually painted skins for every character.

The second is a much simpler, short defense scenario called Save the XMas Tree by Sven2. It’s roughly based on Fight for Gidl, but you defend a Christmas tree from several waves of attackers. Download here.

Happy holidays to all OpenClonk players and developers.

 

P.S.: If you’re an ancient Clonk Rage player, you may also want to look at the newly released Codename: Modern Combat R1.8.

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 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 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!

Two new simple, but very important features have been added recently: Scenario parameters and scenario achievements.

Finding the proper settings for your scenario is often hard. If you make it too easy, veterans get bored or finish it in two minutes. If it’s too hard, it’s frustrating or impossible for newbies. Now, scenario parameters have been introduced to help scenario designers offer their work to a broader audience. Scenario parameters are custom settings each scenario can define and players can select before the round. Examples in the worlds folder are map difficulty or size. But of course scenario designers can choose any parameters they want and have relaunches, team modes, etc. defined by the player before the round.

Can you imagine you’ve finished the insane version of Acid Gold Mine but have nothing to show for it? That’s where achievements come into play. In addition to parameters, each scenario can define small symbols which are unlocked and displayed in the scenario selection after successfully finishing the round. For example in the worlds folder, bronze, silver and gold stars are given for completing a round on normal, hard or insane mode respectively. Scenarios may also define additional symbols such as special marks you gain after finding a secret in the missions.

You can try out these new features in the latest nightly builds.

On your long journey to the Golden Mountain, you got stranded on a lonely island amidst the vast ocean. Surrounded by nothing but palm trees, coconuts and colorful fish, is there anyway to escape this paradise?

Your only hope is to build a long range communication device and call for help. But the device needs rare materials to construct which won’t be easy to obtain in the middle of nowhere. Both rubies and amethyst are required to finish construction.

Fortunately, the ocean hides many treasures. Precious gems and other resources can be found buried deeply below the surface. However, your breath is limited and aggressive piranha are waiting for careless clonks to swim by. Can you overcome these dangers and obtain the demanded material from the deep waters?

To test this new scenario, just download, unpack and launch the latest development snapshot and start the scenario from the Experimental folder.

Life was way too simple in the world of OpenClonk, especially for those interested in peaceful cooperative play. So I’ve made a couple of volcano-themed scenarios available in the experimental branch.

The first scenario is Volcano Escape, a cooperative parkour scenario in which you have to get out of the bottom of a volcano. But unlike other race scenarios, you better work together in this one. The lava in this volcano is much hotter and submerging in it means instant death for your Clonk. Since you cannot hope for much help from outside in this dangerous area, there are no relaunches. Also be careful when digging into ashes, as they are unstable and crumble, away, potentially opening a path for lava flow onto your Clonks. Situations can become tricky and you might need to do some well-planned detonations to reroute lava lakes to reach the checkpoints. The scenario has a dynamic map for re-playability and can also be soloed quite nicely.

The second scenario is Hot Ice, loosely inspired by an equally named Clonk Rage map by Diddy. It’s a simple, fast-paced melee on some icy shards on top of an active volcano. Naturally, the ice won’t last very long and you better get rid of your enemies quickly. You can use the newly improved club to throw chunks of ice and firestones at your enemy, or you can wait for some of the chests placed on floating islands on top of you to fall down and pick up contained weapons. The game mode is Last Man Standing without relaunches, so a round can end pretty quickly.

The third and by far hardest challenge is called Acid Gold Mine. It’s a cooperative gold mine scenario in desolate lands where deadly acid rains from the sky. All you have to do to win is to mine a small amount of gold. However, the valuable mineral is buried deep in a volcano which is haunted by spontaneous eruptions and earthquakes. Especially the earthquakes, coupled with the big lakes of acid accumulating on top of you and some odd meteorites dropping here and there, can lead to unwanted, fatal leaks of acid into the mine. To help you secure tunnels and close gaps, very durable metal bridges can be built from special wall construction kits. It’s highly recommended that you approach this scenario cooperatively, because the task is definitely not easy.

As usual with scenarios that aren’t approved for the main pack yet, you can play them in the development version only. To test them, just download the latest nightly build zip file from the development snapshot download page, unpack the contents to a new folder, run openclonk(.exe) and select your scenario of choice from the Experimental folder. Remember that all players in network need the same nightly build version to play together.

Oh no! King Horax, the evil tyrant, has raided a nearby village again. This madness must stop!

In this upcoming mission, one or more sturdy adventurers will build up a small stack of weapons, storm the monarch’s castle and liberate the people from the evil king. However, the castle is not easy to reach, as it is protected by sturdy rocks and hot lava lakes. And even once you got there, the sovereign has quite a few loyal servants who won’t give up their home easily.

This experimental mission features a rudimentary AI to oppose the player Clonks. The AI works similar to that of Dragon Rock, which veterans might know from CR. You can try out the current version from a nightly build or by checking out the current state of our repository. The scenario is called “Dark Castle” and is found in the experimental folder. There is still a lot of work to be done on the AI, castle furniture, intro, outro and general balancing. But for the adventurous, the scenario should already be quite playable.

Zapper’s new mushrooms will also make their first appearance in this mission. They have been reinforced with a deadly poison should you dare to come near unprepared. But they are guarding a chest full of weapons that might prove useful in the battle against Horax.

Sky island scenarios have always been among my favorites in the classic Clonk series because of both the freedom and the challenge they offer to the players. Now that basic settlement got a bit boring, it’s time for OpenClonk to get its first cooperative aerial scenario. In this scenario, you need to collect five parts of an airplane spread out among several of the distant sky islands and bring them back to the construction site.

That will be a tough challenge though, as a new feature has been added for this map. It’s storming and the storm is certainly strong enough to blow poor Clonks off the islands if they aren’t careful!

Wind is simulated to flow around obstacles, so it can be blocked with wooden constructions (see screenshots). But be careful not to block the windmill, or your buildings will be out of power. Also, the more you block the wind off, the stronger it will blow above and below your obstacle.

Those who are daring to try out the alpha version can checkout the current development branch and find Skylands in the experimental scenario folder.

After some of the basic settlement concepts have been ironed out, we noticed just playing Gold Mine all day got a bit boring. So we decided to create our first real, challenging settlement scenario. It’s called Crash Landing, and it features some adventure-ish elements and an intro!

Our heroes are taking an airplane flight over the local volcanoes, when suddenly things get ugly and the plane starts tumbling towards the volcano. Fortunately, all Clonks are able to escape safely using emergency Boompacks that every plane in Clonk has to carry.

Now the Clonks sit on one side of the volcano. The plane is on the other. How will they get it back? A tough challenge awaits them, as the local population is not too eager to give away their secrets…

Unfortunately, there aren’t too many interesting elements to build yet, so we had to improvise a bit and make do with unfinished objects. Still we already have the foundry and tools workshop production chains, water barrels, loam, some vehicles, loam and earth constructions as well as an unfinished pump. This should be enough to create a little challenge 🙂