OpenClonk 5 has been released, with lots of new stuff to enjoy, so download it here!

So, what’s new?

On top of Iron Peak

Finally, music has been added! K-Pone has contributed three exciting pieces which you can hear in the game if music is enabled (Press F3 to toggle music). Under the hood, our sound system has been migrated to OpenAL and big plans are in progress to improve the music even more.

The league has opened. Compete online for ranks and play against the best of the best. Just press the league button when hosting a game to sign it up to the league server, then use your forum username and password to join. If you prefer cooperative play, the settlement and adventure league are also soon to be opened.

For those who rather play offline, achievements have been added. Achievements are little icons beside the scenarios which you can earn by playing through scenarios. In some worlds, you can get special symbols for finishing them in harder difficulty and some missions contain special icons unlocked by finding secrets.

We have also added new scenarios: The Raid, Deep Sea Mining and Treasure Hunt are beautifully designed new missions especially targeted at new players. Chine and Flooded Veins are two new worlds which can provide a challenge for the more experienced Clonkers. Finally, Fight for Gidl is an action-packed, cooperative scenario where you defend against waves of attackers.

Some new objects can be found in the scenarios: Underwater you can now find corals as well as fish both peaceful and evil. To secure your settlements, you can now also build basements available in all scenarios in the worlds folder.

And a lot of improvements

We’ve started a big overhaul of the missions folder by connecting the scenarios with a thrilling storyline. The hero is sent all over the world of Openclonk in a great endeavour to kill the evil king. So far, the first five missions have been integrated into the story but more are yet to come.

Bombing in the Raid mission

The worlds folder has also been reworked significantly. Most worlds got parameters to adjust difficulty and map size before the game so both rookies and experienced players can enjoy these scenarios. Maps have been improved using better dynamic map generation and features such as regrowing gems in the Gem Grabbers scenario. Short intro sequences have been added to introduce the game goals. Goals have been made more interesting in Gold Rush and Iron Peak. Finally, player knowledge and base material have been improved in all the worlds.

Additional gameplay improvement has been targeted especially at settlement players. For example: You should no longer be afraid of solid, single pixels as they’re now removed before you can get stuck on them. Acid now corrodes coal and firestone. Snow and ice can be used to melt loam. Pumping pipe heads shouldn’t get stuck any more. And many more stuff you have reported in the bugtracker, which we hope you continue to do.

Attentive players will also notice some work on cosmetics. For example, ice and gem sounds have been tweaked and smoke graphics reworked. If the cool graphics run slow for you, there’s a new option to skip graphics frames if the game is lagging especially useful in internet games.

… and of course, as usual we have done lots and lots of smaller changes and fixes.

Stars are scenario achievements, selection boxes in the bottom right show scenario parameters.

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.

Designing an interesting landscape is one of the most crucial steps in designing a good scenario in Clonk. There are basically two kinds of landscapes in OpenClonk. Static ones and dynamic ones.

Static landscapes are defined by a simple bitmap in the scenario file. They are easy to create and can be really beautiful if they are done right. But one drawback can be that the landscape will always look the same every time you play the round.

If you look for more variety and a high replay value in your scenario you’ll probably choose to use dynamic landscapes. And Mape is the tool you want to use when it comes to creating dynamic landscapes for clonk. While you are editing the code that will generate the landscape Mape shows a little preview of the map in realtime in the bottom right corner. It also features syntax highlighting and reports eventual errors in the code.

Download Mape (Latest Snapshot)

Mape supports new map scripts to create even more complex maps.

The classic way to create dynamic landscapes is to define it with a special syntax in  the Landscape.txt. This offers a limited amount of freedom in the creation of your landscape because there is a certain number of patterns you could use for composing the landscape and you gotta stick with those.
Starting with OpenClonk 4.0, Sven2 enabled users to create even more complex and interesting maps, using a simple C4Script in the Map.c. C4Script gives you full control and freedom over the dynamic landscape generation. If a certain pattern is not predefined, you can just define your own functions and do all sorts of crazy stuff that wasn’t possible before! For example, put a dynamically generated castle with rooms and corridors at a fixed (or also dynamic) position on top of a mountain.

The next logical step was to make this new way to generate landscape work with Mape, so users have a fast comfortable way of editing these scripts. Thanks to Clonk-Karl, Mape is now “insanely useful again”, as he implemented support for the new map scripts generator.
We are looking forward to see which great new maps these new features will give us.

A complex maze generated by the dynamic landscape generator. Can you spot the clonk? 🙂

Both rubies and amethysts are required on this construction site.

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.

Using dynamite to mine rubies deep below the ocean.

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.

The gems are surrounded by both peaceful and aggressive fish.

Finally some activity on the youtube channel again. We played Acid Gold Mine for the nth time and decided to capture the round since it is always very stressful and hard, luckily we succeeded!

The music in this video is made by K-Pone (Island Dreams, Motorway). We are very grateful for his contributions and the music will appear ingame for the next release.

And another video covering melee gameplay!

Thanks for everyone who joined in these many network games and Arnaud Condé for a nice music piece.

This is the name of one of our branches (look here for shortlog) and I currently spend my much too short Clonk working time on this. Judging from the positive feedback I got so far, the project is popular among the devs and those people reading the forum (look here for feedback thread). This might very well become the standard in the next release and that is big enough to me for writing an article about it.

Heavy resources utilise the already existent ‘carry heavy’ library that you might or might not know from objects like the boompack or the barrel. In short: These are big and heavy objects that a clonk needs to carry with both hands, effectively blocking access to the regular inventory. Carrying such in melees is a tactical choice, in settlements it is slowing you down. With the heavy resource branch in effect, it will slow you even more, rendering the transport of resources more of a challenge than it is now (with a large space of 5 slots, the inventory is quite effective). Designing your transport routes will be a task to consider.

This clonk is carrying a heavy rock.

The first change with big impact is to prevent the clonk from scaling and brachiating while carrying a heavy object. The landscape, especially the shape you gave it, becomes an obstacles again. In addition, all material objects (rock, ore, coal, …) are replaced by a carry heavy version. Trees can be cut into logs which are also carry heavy. Refined materials (metal, planks) also get carry heavy.

What are planks you ask? Planks are obtained from the sawmill by cutting logs. Planks will serve as high tier construction material. The sawmill will change from a must-have to a nice-to-have building, giving you more freedom to choose the first steps into a settlement game.

My next steps will be to iron out all the small flaws that make handling the heavy objects weird right now. Also, I need to remotivate the graphics department because as you can see, the heavy objects lack proper graphics right now.  Testing is already possible for those who have downloaded the repository; just switch to the ‘heavy resources’ branch. I haven’t done any engine changes yet, so using an autobuild is possible. I will also see to upload a ready-to-go package with all game files necessary to play.

After that, me and hopefully everyone else will think about new ways to make transportation more exciting. Ideas are welcome. How can we make changing the landscape more comfortable? Do we need new buildings or vehicles to ease movement of the big chunks? Especially a whole lot of them?

Even more great news after the 4.0 release, OpenClonk has been nominated for Project of the Month by the Linux Game Awards initiative!

Being nominated is one thing, winning is another … So we need votes, your vote to be exact!

You can vote here by either making a new account on the website, or by using your Google, Facebook or Twitter account. Many thanks for voting and increasing the popularity of our favorite game.

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! 🙂

Finally, it is time for a new major release! The new 4.0 milestone is scheduled to be released this Sunday.

Therefore, we will have public betatests with the release candidate on this Saturday 25th January, afternoon throughout the evening (UTC+1). We meet at the usual place: #openclonk on irc.euirc.net.

The latest release candidate will be available on the development snapshots page. Please report any bugs or issues you may find back to the bugtracker.

The main new content we can present to you are new settlement challenges and scenarios in the new Missions folder. So of course you can play them through alone in single player, but it is oh so much more fun to join us on Saturday! Probably even some of the developers will be present.
If you want to announce that you are coming beforehand, you can do this here in the forum.

OpenClonk finally has functional screenshots again for the whole map, thanks to JCeasar and Sven2! One can make these screenshots in game in the chat mode (Return) by typing:

/screenshot X

where X can be any real number and determines the zoom level at which the screenshot can be taken. It is advisable to keep X between 0.1 and 10. This new feature can very well be used to view full landscapes and here is a teaser for a new World yet to come.

A full screenshot for a new scenario “Spiral” which is yet to come.

However, a lot of new settlement scenarios can already be played in the snapshots, among them Gem Grabbers where you need to collect gems from a series of sky islands. But there is many more to be discovered, so be sure to check the snapshots or stay tuned for the next release!

Grab gems from sky islands.