It took us more than two years, but waiting is over! OpenClonk 8.0 has arrived and we are of course intending to put out new releases much sooner from now on. Promised!

Download here

Unfortunately, we have been told that the macOS build does not work. However, we have no developers with a Mac who could fix the issue. If you’re a player on macOS, you can get the previous release from here. If you’re a developer on macOS, we’d be happy to receive a fix via the forums or as a pull request on GitHub.

There have been over 2’500 commits (changes) since the last release! Apart from many small improvements and lots of bug fixes, this release includes many major new features.

New Editor

New editor main interface

Clonk has always strived from its community-driven content, and we just made scenario creation a lot easier! Sven2 rewrote the scenario editor mode from scratch to allow easier scenario creation. Now in addition to drawing maps, you can also place switches and doors, dialogs and triggers, set starting options, and much more. You can create melees, parkours and even small adventures using a simple point-and-click-interface.

You can also access the editor directly from the main menu, so give it a try! For more information, see the previous blog post: The New Editor and Twitch Stream editor demo.

Improved Networking

OpenClonk 8 should allow hosting internet games with zero router- or firewall configuration. We achieved this by adding support for IPv6 and implementing UDP hole punching. In a future blog post, we will describe the networking changes in more detail.

If you had difficulties playing OpenClonk over the internet before, be sure to try again with OpenClonk 8!

New Scenarios

I am rich!: A competetive gold mine round, where the richest player after a certain playing time wins.

Aerobatics: A rather chaotic parkour, where you sky island hopping skills are put to the test.

Melting Castle: A team melee where you have to defend an ice castle, but beware: it melts!

King of the Hill: Defend the ruby mine hidden inside the hill from enemy AI waves.

Horrid Highway: A settlement world in which the players need to create a rail road in the skies, while protecting against heavy meteor rain. This screenshot also shows some work in progress which will be in the 9.0 release, namely cable cars.

Rapid Refining: A laid-back settlement round where you need to set up a large oil-pumping operation.

Hot Ice: While not entirely new, Hot Ice now features games with multiple rounds as well as two additional visual themes. The top screenshot shows the “Eci Toh” underground theme. On the bottom, there is “Miami Ice” which also features special music by K-Pone.

Script Improvements

• New proplist prototype and effect syntax. Effects are “dynamic timers with properties that can be attached to objects”. The new syntax makes working with them easier.
• Script-defined dynamic fragment shaders allow special effects in scenarios.
• Regular expression-based functions for matching, splitting, and replacing strings allow advanced text processing from scripts.
• Additional warnings that can be disabled with a directive.

Future Work

Not everything we’ve worked on in the two years since OpenClonk 7 made it into this release. Here’s a preview of stuff we hope to finish for OpenClonk 9:

• Larry is a platform for sharing player-made mods like scenarios and objects. In contrast to previous such websites for Clonk, like CCAN, Larry will be fully integrated into OpenClonk. Finding new scenarios will be possible from within the game.
• OpenClonk can currently only be played with mouse and keyboard. While this decision simplified controls compared to previous Clonk titles, we lost split-screen play in the process. OpenClonk 8 already re-introduces experimental gamepad support, which however is still too limited for most scenarios. We hope to fix this and support proper split-screen play again in the future.
• Cable cars will be added soon to the main content of OpenClonk and will mainly serve as an automated transportation system for resources between producers, mines and other structures. Our hope is that this will make settling more interesting and setting up automated production lines more fun!

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.

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.

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!

So, are you one of those gifted people who can remember all your different registration details from the shareware Clonk community? You know, one login for the German Clonk Forum, one for the English one, one for the League, one for the Bugtracker, one for the CCAN, the Clonk Forge, the Clonk-Center, the Clonk Wiki, the the the… ??!

Well, possibly thousands of forgot-password-mails later, we put this madness to an end! 😉

From now on, you only need to register once in the forum and you will automatically have an account on everything OpenClonk related with the same login credentials. Currently this includes the bugtracker, the blog if you are a developer, the wiki and soon the upcoming league.

Also note that the website has been reworked: We got a new clearer navigation and header now, the download section and the development snapshots page have been redesigned.

Researchers from the Delft University of Technology, in The Netherlands, are using OpenClonk for a project on dynamically adapting game interactions (example: rope gun length) to your play style. The first step of this project is to automatically collect anonymous data on how you play OpenClonk. This also involves analyzing data to figure out how players play the game, which is in turn very relevant for OC development. Therefore, they (and also we) need as much players as they can get, to compile big piles of meaningful data. More information regarding the research can be found on this blog or in this forum thread.

The research server is now up and running!

Interested in participating? The researchers kindly thank you. Just start playing on this server:

Server Name: TU Delft
IP Address: 131.180.123.41
Game Version: Latest release (5.3.3)

We will keep you posted on more developments about this project.

We got a new stable version for OpenClonk 3. It is a pure bugfix release. Below are the fixes and changes relevant for players and creators.

Download

OpenClonk 3.3 changes
=====================

 + map creator: don't crash when using a template within itself (#534)
 + Draw particles with subpixel precision
 + do not pass controls to disabled cursor anymore (i.e. via SetCrewEnabled)
 + Don't crash on Call()
 + Hold a reference to the temporary proplist used in case of script errors
 + update: Log an error message when extracting the update program fails
 + Make dedicated server compile with fmod
 + Script: continue in a do-while loop jumps to test instead of start of loop
 + Fix #including a definition that has local variables with proplists
 + gtk: Make the window fullscreen even when not changing the resolution
 + Fix missing mouse cursor in fullscreen without resolution change
 + Adapted stone door to open for all players if set team == 0
 + Fix walking animation with xdir=0 (#887)
 + Producers: consume required material (#885)
 + Win32: Mark OC "DPI aware" (#891)
 + Abort SimFlight if no more movement can occur (#914)
 + Fix incorrect reloading of animations (#837)
 + Fixed a typo in Tutorial01
 + Fix Call() in global context (required for ScheduleCall)
 + Attached objects with SolidMask (slave elevator case) can carry objects
 + Fix C4Command::Jump, i.e. jumping as part of pathfinder.
 + Fix snow melting in lava/durolava
 + fix material conversion on insertion into converting liquid
 + Fix SolidMasks not moving objects if the top left of the landscape was solid
 + fix typo in catapult script
 + Cleanup main texture map. Remove unused and duplicate entries. Added Earth-earth.
 + Fix crash when INT_MIN/-1 and INT_MIN%-1 in C4Script
 + Fix sound volume when using OpenAL
 + Comment out assertion on cleaning up script engine after a round
 + Fix an assertion in the network lobby

Screenhot of Mape showing the map of Krakatoa

Developers from Clonk Rage might remember Mape, an editor for dynamic landscapes described by a Landscape.txt file. The editor shows a live preview of the generated map while editing the Landscape.txt code, so that the engine does not need to be started to see the generated map.

Mape has been refurbished to work with OpenClonk, and it has been integrated into the OpenClonk source code, so that it is now officially part of OpenClonk. On the Development Snapshots page the current version can be downloaded including all dependencies for the Windows builds such that it runs straight out of the box. There is also a wiki page available which describes it in more detail.

Happy Mapping 🙂

In case you were wondering why there are no more new commits in our Mercurial repository since November:
As most of our developers were not content with Mercurial, we switched from Mercurial to git as our version control system.

The old Mercurial repository will soon be not available anymore, so make sure to check out the new git repository. PeterW updated our tutorials for building OpenClonk on Windows and explained the git workflow to those who are not familiar with git yet (or generally any distributed version control system).

I also adapted the looks of the OpenClonk git web frontend to fit into the rest of the site, it’s linked in our header. I expect that soon the autobuilds will follow and again be directly linked on the shortlog page.