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.

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?