During the last week, the OpenClonk homepage moved to another server. Nearly everything should be working again – only the master server, that shows you all the running online games, still has some problems. Creating and joining online games is possible, but the web interface won’t show these games.

This move does not only finally give us HTTPS support for the homepage, but is also done in preparation for the new mod database for user-created content!

We hope that the master server will be fully functional again in a few days!

Download here!

The changes and fixes can be viewed here, with most importantly the fixed editor mode under Windows. The new editor really allows content creators to easily design scenarios and we are looking forward to many inspiring creations!

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.

Hi folks,

Since the 7.0 release quite a number of new scenarios have been seen in online play. I would like to present five of them to you:

Lets start with Knüppeln by Kenny:

 

Then we have Melting Castle by Sven2:

 

 

Next is Clonk Volley by Kenny:

 

Also there is Jump Off by Maikel:

 

But literally all the current rage is about the Hot Ice explosive extension made by Sven2 and Luchs:

If you want to join us playing, there’s usually a few games going in the European evening hours. If you cannot join because the game is advertised as “version 8.0”, you can usually join by downloading the latest development snapshot. It’s a zip file with everything contained to run the latest development version; just unzip it to a new folder and run the contained openclonk executable.

Stay tuned for the next overview of new scenarios – coming soon! 😉

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!

Heyo folks,

I’m involved in the music and sound design of Open Clonk – and there has been quite some progress lately.

As you might recall we introduced an ambience-system in an earlier blog. Along with that we started to extend the audio content of the Clonk world bit by bit which could already be experienced in the 7.0 release. The biggest change there was the inclusion of voice tracks for the individual Clonk-skins. Also the new animals got quite some amount of sounds, but we are far from being done yet.

I made a teaser with upcoming sounds – so with some imagination you can already dream about the acoustics of the next major release.

Since the sound folders grew in size and number they had to be structured which was possible thanks to the effort of Zapper and Sven2: .ocg files can now contain sound sub-folders. Everything now is categorized, making it a lot easier for content developers to access and use sounds.

 

Music wise there is still demand for coverage of the more distant and eerie places of the Clonk world. Here is the first of a new set of compositions as a teaser, stay tuned 🙂

In the last release a few new animals have seen the light of day, also somewhat due to the the Milestone Project. There are some old, familiar animals that were re-imagined for OpenClonk and some animals completely new to the world of Clonk. I will start with the ones that old Clonk veterans will surely know.

The Wipf

The Wipf is a very iconic necessity for a Clonk title and it was a pitty that we had to do without it for a few years. But, hooray, those sad days are over now. The Wipf is mainly known for running and jumping around in the landscape and ruining your mine by digging tunnels straight into the closest lava basin.

The Wipf was first introduced with Clonk A.P.E. in 1995 and had since then been in every Clonk title during the past 20 years.

The Chippie

Known from Hazard in Clonk Planet, the chippie returns to suck your blood while looking surprisingly cute and innocent. Unlike back in the days, where you would find the chippie when looking for equipment in crates, it can be found in eggs in the underground now – similar to how zaps could be found in the earlier Clonk titles.

Chippies will be freed from their eggs either after some time when the egg is not covered with earth or by flinging the egg on the ground – for example by shooting it into the enemy base with a catapult. The chippie will jump at unsuspecting Clonks and suck their blood, slowly draining their life.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=VGkMcvqyPOg

Underwater World

The underwater fauna has been extended by a squid (in both peaceful and aggressive versions) and by a new type of piranha. In addition to the new animals, the navigation of the fishes has been slightly tweaked to better handle smaller lakes.

The squids are generally just peaceful and curious creatures that love to follow and inspect other things and creatures. Shrouding themselves in ink in order to flee when hurt, they are harmless to Clonks.

However, the bright red version of the squid is everything but harmless. Lacking teeth and claws, they will follow Clonks to surround them in a thick cloud of ink which drains the Clonk’s breath pretty fast. Yes, this is physically accurate. I looked it up.

This makes diving pretty dangerous when around red squid as long as you don’t pack extra air.

 

The following short video shows the two piranha skins and some red squids. The bright red piranhas are a bit smaller and like to hunt in packs while the bigger ones generally hunt alone.

 

Flies, Fireflies and Zaps

Zaps are back as well! Zaps are small, stingy beings that you should not infuriate. Unlike previous Clonk titles where you would find zap nests buried in earth, they now hang on trees. As you have probably expected, they do not like when you try to chop down their home.

The flies are just decorative little things that love to be around water or corpses – well, who doesn’t!

Even more decorative are the new fireflies. They come out at night to create quite a romantic atmosphere.

 

Bats and Puka

These are two more new inhabitants of the world of which one had previously never been in a Clonk game.

Bats populate caves and do not like to be disturbed by Clonks. In case you happen to find yourself among bats, be prepared that they will want to defend their territory!

The Puka is an animal without a counterpart in the real world – feeling at home around water, it will generally just lie around sleeping. When it finds itself troubled by a Clonk it has the unique ability to teleport away to a safer location – and I would try not to stand directly next to it when it disappears!

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!

As all longtime fans of the Clonk series know, our favorite character the clonk can be witty and nimble, though only if skillfully controlled. With the upcoming release we are aiming to make the clonk even more nimble. Moreover, the player can use various tools to construct different solutions to the same problem.

For example the rope bridge is now an object which can be used by the clonk. Before it was only available for scenario designers as a decorative object. The clonk can place both ends of the bridge at solid ground to form it. Then walk over it for as long as needed and then retract it again at either end of the bridge.

Also the rope ladder has become more useful as you can now jump off the rope ladder with more strength, like the wall jump with solid materials. Using this the clonk can now jump from rope ladder to rope ladder, making it a fast way to traverse dangerous lakes for example. But also to perform mining activities as shown in the video.

Last but not least in this blog post there is a new feature for the lorry, which can now be tilted up to 55 degrees to dump its contents. While holding the lorry pressing the left mouse key tilts the lorry to the direction of the mouse cursor and if tilted more than 45 degrees its contents will start falling out. This feature can be useful for massive bombardments in combination with the airship. More situations will probably come to mind, for example setting up traps along a large cliff or just dumping the lorry’s contents into a mine.

Together with all the rope fine-tuning the scripts also have been partially optimized which has lead to a slight reduction of the lag of objects using the rope library. Please report any suggestions, bugs and excessive amounts of lag in the bugtracker while testing these new features using the snapshots.