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.

Shîre

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.

Save the XMas tree

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.

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!

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?

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 dawning night is accompanied by chary chimes of the Celesta.

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 hum of the rotor echoes from the cave walls as it dives into the volcano.

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!

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!

An OpenClonk livestream will be hosted today at 8 p.m. (UTC+2). It will be streamed by community member scaba on his twitch channel (http://www.twitch.tv/scabaer), and will be moderated by our well known community members and developers ala and Newton. I’m sure there will be lots of interesting topics to talk about!

You can expect some serious melee action and weird tactics you probably never heard about as we can count our developers Sven2 and Maikel among the players!

We are not set on the scenarios yet – if you have some ideas, be sure to shoot us a quick note!

And in case you can’t watch it live: A link to the uploaded broadcast will be added after the show!

We have released the first bug-fix update for OpenClonk 6. It contains lots of bug fixes and a new fire system, which uses the new particles system to have more realistically looking fires.

Download here

See the Git log for details.

Releasing it took us some time because nobody shares a big excitement to do the maintenance work connected with doing bugfix updates when such exciting stuff as what is currently in our pipeline is waiting to be developed. Finally however, Maikel and Isilkor pushed this through.

For the next release we are working on colored lights based on the new light system, new controls and an improved menu interface and providing more vegetation and animals to add to the atmosphere of the game. Below are some screenshots showing the progress on the colored lights and the new interaction menu.

Colored lights in an underground setting.

The new interaction menu which allows buying items at the flagpole, amongst many other things.

The new OpenClonk light system now sees the light of day! Download here!

The lights system active in a cave.

The main focus of this release is the new light system which casts realistic shadows on objects in the OpenClonk world. Moreover, the landscape’s visibility is greatly reduced while being underground. This really enhances the feeling of exploration in caves, see for example the screenshot on the right. The light system is complete but many more features will be added and the game will make use more and more of the interesting gameplay options it offers.

For example there is a new melee round called Dark Mine, where players are dropped in abandoned mine with lots of explosives. Due to the limited visibility a new strategic element of surprising the opponent has become available. A player can set up traps using explosives and ranged triggers like dynamite boxes or explosive arrows. You can try this out yourself by playing this melee online.

List of Improvements

• New lights system.
• New scenarios: Dark Mine, Acid Rift.
• New objects: fire arrow, explosive arrow, torch.
• Performance improvement for mesh rendering.
• Reworked and improved power system.
• Script function SetLightRange to set illumination of an object.
• Script functions GetPXSCount to count moving material pixels.
• CreateObject has no offset anymore (replaced by CreateObjectAbove)
• Changed to Major.Minor versioning system internally: Current version 6.0
• Various improvements and fixes for existing scenarios and objects and game engine.

Battle in Dark Mine: Explosions and torches illuminate the dark caves.

What’s next?

The next big thing for the upcoming major version 7 is a complete overhaul over the controls and in-game interface which shall finally tackle the problem with the cumbersome menus in settlement mode. Teasers and previews will follow “soon”!
There will also be a bugfix release coming soon where we hope to iron out the last issues of the light system. So be sure to report any bugs in the bugtracker and feedback in the forum.

Happy playing!

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.