Life was way too simple in the world of OpenClonk, especially for those interested in peaceful cooperative play. So I’ve made a couple of volcano-themed scenarios available in the experimental branch.

We got ourselves into a sticky situation.

The first scenario is Volcano Escape, a cooperative parkour scenario in which you have to get out of the bottom of a volcano. But unlike other race scenarios, you better work together in this one. The lava in this volcano is much hotter and submerging in it means instant death for your Clonk. Since you cannot hope for much help from outside in this dangerous area, there are no relaunches. Also be careful when digging into ashes, as they are unstable and crumble, away, potentially opening a path for lava flow onto your Clonks. Situations can become tricky and you might need to do some well-planned detonations to reroute lava lakes to reach the checkpoints. The scenario has a dynamic map for re-playability and can also be soloed quite nicely.

The ice is melting…

The second scenario is Hot Ice, loosely inspired by an equally named Clonk Rage map by Diddy. It’s a simple, fast-paced melee on some icy shards on top of an active volcano. Naturally, the ice won’t last very long and you better get rid of your enemies quickly. You can use the newly improved club to throw chunks of ice and firestones at your enemy, or you can wait for some of the chests placed on floating islands on top of you to fall down and pick up contained weapons. The game mode is Last Man Standing without relaunches, so a round can end pretty quickly.

We finally reached the gold! Seconds after this screenshot was taken, the whole cave got flooded with poisonous acid 🙁

The third and by far hardest challenge is called Acid Gold Mine. It’s a cooperative gold mine scenario in desolate lands where deadly acid rains from the sky. All you have to do to win is to mine a small amount of gold. However, the valuable mineral is buried deep in a volcano which is haunted by spontaneous eruptions and earthquakes. Especially the earthquakes, coupled with the big lakes of acid accumulating on top of you and some odd meteorites dropping here and there, can lead to unwanted, fatal leaks of acid into the mine. To help you secure tunnels and close gaps, very durable metal bridges can be built from special wall construction kits. It’s highly recommended that you approach this scenario cooperatively, because the task is definitely not easy.

As usual with scenarios that aren’t approved for the main pack yet, you can play them in the development version only. To test them, just download the latest nightly build zip file from the development snapshot download page, unpack the contents to a new folder, run openclonk(.exe) and select your scenario of choice from the Experimental folder. Remember that all players in network need the same nightly build version to play together.

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 🙂

Survivors of the local population beg for help.

Oh no! King Horax, the evil tyrant, has raided a nearby village again. This madness must stop!

In this upcoming mission, one or more sturdy adventurers will build up a small stack of weapons, storm the monarch’s castle and liberate the people from the evil king. However, the castle is not easy to reach, as it is protected by sturdy rocks and hot lava lakes. And even once you got there, the sovereign has quite a few loyal servants who won’t give up their home easily.

Horax’s servants fighting against two invaders.

This experimental mission features a rudimentary AI to oppose the player Clonks. The AI works similar to that of Dragon Rock, which veterans might know from CR. You can try out the current version from a nightly build or by checking out the current state of our repository. The scenario is called “Dark Castle” and is found in the experimental folder. There is still a lot of work to be done on the AI, castle furniture, intro, outro and general balancing. But for the adventurous, the scenario should already be quite playable.

The magical mushroom cave.

Zapper’s new mushrooms will also make their first appearance in this mission. They have been reinforced with a deadly poison should you dare to come near unprepared. But they are guarding a chest full of weapons that might prove useful in the battle against Horax.

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.

Scaffold construction in Skylands

Sky island scenarios have always been among my favorites in the classic Clonk series because of both the freedom and the challenge they offer to the players. Now that basic settlement got a bit boring, it’s time for OpenClonk to get its first cooperative aerial scenario. In this scenario, you need to collect five parts of an airplane spread out among several of the distant sky islands and bring them back to the construction site.

That will be a tough challenge though, as a new feature has been added for this map. It’s storming and the storm is certainly strong enough to blow poor Clonks off the islands if they aren’t careful!

Wind is simulated to flow around obstacles, so it can be blocked with wooden constructions (see screenshots). But be careful not to block the windmill, or your buildings will be out of power. Also, the more you block the wind off, the stronger it will blow above and below your obstacle.

Those who are daring to try out the alpha version can checkout the current development branch and find Skylands in the experimental scenario folder.

This is a bugfix release for 3.0 that we had planned since shortly after the original release.

I believe that elevator just transported a lorry!

As expected, a release always contains bugs that are only found through massive playtesting by a lot of players – and that was exactly what happened for the last weeks (see also OpenClonk gaming night).

Among the fixes can be found:

• you cannot get stuck in sand or snow anymore when digging with a shovel
• the elevator can now properly transport lorries or trees
• the stone doors in Hideout and the CTF flag-capturing work now
• fixed one synchronisation-loss issue when playing successive rounds without restarting OpenClonk
• the coniferous tree now has a nicer texture and the nightly sky is a lot more appealing now 🙂

(Full changelog here!)

..and of course a lot more. But note that this is a bugfix release which does not bring you new features, but improves the old features – and if there are new features in this release, it is because they solve problems with the last release 🙂

And as always: if you find bugs or have suggestions, feel free to put them into our bugtracker or forum.

See you ingame!

Hello World!

This is your chance to play OpenClonk with the developers, since from now on we will “organize” a regular evening to play OpenClonk rounds via internet. The basic ingredients:

• Every Sunday evening from roughly 19:00 till 22:00 CEST.
• Join with a pc which runs the game (current release) smoothly
• Be present in #openclonk on IRC (euIRC network) or just join running games
• Do not forget to record (ingame option) and take screen shots
• Share your feedback with the devs, this is highly appreciated

We’ll play rounds like these

On the first night, which is this Sunday, I will organize things a little and we will mainly play some short arenas/races and will probably end with a nice settlement round. After that the night should become self sustaining and you should see it as a night where you can be sure to find other people playing this wonderful game!

Update: Now that the first night is over, I hope that everyone will also join next Sundays, cause I think we had a lot of fun and also gathered lots of feedback. Soon I will try to gather some material for a small gameplay trailer from these rounds, but more on that later.

So be sure to join next Sunday!

All important tasks finished!

So the OpenClonk release weekend is over now and I would like to thank everybody who participated for coming to Hamburg. I think it has been quite successful and I hope it was as fun for you all as it was for me! I am looking forward to doing these kind of weekends more often. But next time, with more preparation time.

With over 150 commits on and in preparation to the weekend, we made about as much progress this weekend than the last half a year! And, most importantly, we finally released all the work that has been put into the game since 20 months ago.

We actually used this button to release the game. Sven2 had the honor after winning a round of an OpenClonk version of “One tree”

We were altogether eight people: Clonk-Karl, Clonkonaut, Maikel, Matthias Mortimer, Newton, Sven2 and Zapper.

All of us were super productive and also finally got around to do those works which normally nobody is motivated to do alone.
I want to particularly thank Sven2 & Mortimer who spent almost a day on finding desyncs between mac/linux & windows network games and Clonk-Karl who fired a broadside at old long-standing bugs from the bugtracker.

An overview of the immense count of tasks we finished on the weekend is linked in the forum:

OC release weekend: List of finished and unfinished tasks.

As predicted by Zapper, there was a blocking bug in the 3.0 release which Clonkonaut found and fixed, so please update to 3.1.

In 3.0 it was impossible to chop down a tree which is quite important for settlement rounds 😉

The next stable version was released today. It contains not all of the possible buildings and features that we aim for, but the current state of the project. And while some things might still not be very polished, everything should be playable.

Beyond the Rocks

The release contains the first few buildings and production lines, which should let you form an opinion about the direction OpenClonk is heading.

The reason for the release was very simple: The last version that had new content is more than one and a half years old and has so many missing features and bugs that you’d always suggest testing the development version to a player.
Oh, and of course to motivate you to participate in the project in any way you want and can.

There have been so many changes since the last release that listing all of them here would be both boring to read and too much work, so here is a short overview:

– new controls (see blog post) [note that the gamepad controls are currently NOT working]
– changed the ingame HUD
– buildings and items related to them were added
– some production lines and energy support were added, also see this blog post
– some more cooperative scenarios were added
– and of course bug fixes and much more 🙂

I suggest you go straight to the downloads-page and try the release yourself. And don’t forget to rant about any bugs you find in either the forums or the bugtracker. 🙂