Recently some new structures were added to the settlement content of OpenClonk. Together with the fact that there are no challenging scenarios with dynamic landscapes yet and that a settlement design contest was organized, I decided to create a scenario for this void. Krakatoa is a large and active volcano on which players have to construct and expand their settlement, the goal is to expand the settlement across the whole volcano. Moreover the player has to drain the volcano or find another way to its core, where gold can be found and should be mined.

A typical settlement consists of the usual production buildings for producing the necessary tools and mining explosives. Pumps are needed to drain the ever rising lava inside the volcano. These need a large and continuous power supply, provided by numerous wind mills combined with a steam engine. Opposed to Clonk Rage where the combination of wind mills and the power plant only led to frustration and the loss of all you fuel, in OpenClonk both work very well together and will get you though the annoying calms.

The scenario has been reviewed by our friends from clonkspot in their Let’s Play series, for which many thanks. The scenario can be played after downloading a recent development snapshot.

In the Controls rework, we also revisited the Carry Heavy system to fit in better. Additionally we changed how constructing building works. It’s awesome now. I mean, *awesome*.

The biggest change here is that Carry Heavy Objects don’t require inventory space anymore. You can always pick up a Carry Heavy Object (if you’re not already carryingone), and it’ll be displayed in an extra-slot next to your inventory. On the downside, you can’t use your inventory items while carrying a Carry Heavy Object. You can pick up and drop stuff, but you can’t select them into your hands, as they’re full. Carry Heavy Object can now be dropped via the ActionBar now, and also support the Contents-Menu. This means that they can be put into and taken out of containers.

OpenClonk now has updated Controls and a new UI! The aim of these changes is to provide comfortable and easy access to everything, while maintaining speed. For that reason nearly every action has multiple controls now. But I’m getting ahead of myself, take a look for yourself!

Behold, the new UI:

UI & Contents Menu

The New

As you’ll probably have noticed, most of the UI is gone. So is the Backpack! It got replaced by a general inventory, displayed at the left side. With a unified inventory, the separation of hands and items in the backpack also is gone. You simply select which inventory-slot should be in your left/right hand.

The content-menu now also features fellow Crewmembers. That means you can trade items with your own clonks directly!

The health- and breath-tube have been removed completely. So have the two hand-fields.

The Old

The actionbar at the bottom, used for interacting with structures and vehicles, stays the same. However it has a fixed order now, as opposed to sorting the selected object to the beginning.
The crew-selector also stayed the same, and doubles as the only health and breath-information now. Some fancy features are planned though.

The Keys

About everything is doable by clicking on stuff, but as mentioned above, quite a few new keys have been added for the Pros.

• The Hotkeys 1-9 select the corresponding slot into the left hand now. Holding a hotkey + Mouseclick also selects the slot into the corresponding hand.
• Shift is the Inventory-key now. Shift + Mouseclick throws the corresponding hand-item, Shift + Number drops the corresponding slot.
• Ctrl is the Crew-key. Ctrl + Number quickly selects the corresponding crew member.
• Space is the Interaction-key. Space + Number interacts with the corresponding Actionbar-Item. Releasing Space without pressing a number interacts with the first one.
• Also, so far the Q-Key doesn’t have a function now. But I’m sure we’ll find something for that. 😉

The Plan

Quite a few more features are planned. Many things will be implemented as experimental solutions. We will see how many survive. 🙂

A Toolbar to the right, for using Tools in your inventory directly. (Construction menu, chopping trees, etc.)
Indicator for usable stuff.
A Keyboard-Layout for left-handed players.
A way to select the right-hand item comfortably.
…and many more

A complete overview over the current iteration can be found here: https://wiki.openclonk.org/w/Controls

You escape on emergency boompacks, just as the plane is crashing into the mountains.

After some of the basic settlement concepts have been ironed out, we noticed just playing Gold Mine all day got a bit boring. So we decided to create our first real, challenging settlement scenario. It’s called Crash Landing, and it features some adventure-ish elements and an intro!

Our heroes are taking an airplane flight over the local volcanoes, when suddenly things get ugly and the plane starts tumbling towards the volcano. Fortunately, all Clonks are able to escape safely using emergency Boompacks that every plane in Clonk has to carry.

Now the Clonks sit on one side of the volcano. The plane is on the other. How will they get it back? A tough challenge awaits them, as the local population is not too eager to give away their secrets…

Unfortunately, there aren’t too many interesting elements to build yet, so we had to improvise a bit and make do with unfinished objects. Still we already have the foundry and tools workshop production chains, water barrels, loam, some vehicles, loam and earth constructions as well as an unfinished pump. This should be enough to create a little challenge 🙂

The local village population offers us a deal we cannot refuse.

From the cliff, you can almost see the airplane. Now how do you get there?

Electricity in Clonk has always meant taking a power producer, for example a windmill, and linking it to a power consumer with a power line.
While that sometimes led to interesting-looking bases that had the appearance of spiderwebs, those electric lines were not much more than a ressource. The player had to place them in a certain way – usually without a lot of playing room.

In OpenClonk we now have the definition of a base: the area covered by your flags.
The approach for the power is now to throw lines out and have consumers/producers in the same base automatically be linked. Producers increase the power balance of your base and consumers reduce it. Power balance above zero is good, power balance below zero not so much and means one consumer has to be turned off.
Sounds pretty straightforward, huh?

The advantage is now that we can use the concept of “weird lines running through your base” for something more interesting than power lines and something the player hopefully has some fun constructing – (because, hey, weird lines running through the landscape are actually pretty cool).

Two wind generators and a workshop

This is a bug fix release. Most importantly, the game should now work correctly on 64 bit Windows. There are also windows installer improvements regarding firewall and “Games Explorer” integration. A couple of cross-platform crash fixes are in there as well. A more complete list is available from our repository web interface.

Downloads are at the usual place.

Next up will probably be a 5.3 beta with some settlement scenarios. If you want to help with testing those before then, check out the development snapshots.

After we already have a progress report on what the settlement development has reached so far, I wanted to give you all a quick overview about what is planned. Because a picture says more than 1000 words, I tried to make a little something showing the production-lines-to-be.

This is heavy work in progress though!

Click! ->

The nightly builds and development snapshots have been unavailable for some time now. Partly they were obsolete due to the new autobuild system, however we lacked the option to obtain a snapshot of the current game state which runs out-of-the-box. This gap has been filled now by the revamped development snapshots. Instead of being only built once a week they now become available a few minutes after a developer makes a change to the game.

This means, that you can always playtest the current state of development without checking out the repository or building the engine yourself!

Also, check out the revamped archive for downloading old versions of the game.

After a relative silence since the 2.1 release, progress on developing settlement content has increased on the recent openclonk meeting. The first multiplayer settlement rounds have been played successfully. The landscape of Gold Rush, known in CR as the classical Gold Mine, looks like this after completing the goal:

A network round of Gold Rush

The gold, located at the bottom, has been mined with dynamite and transported with a lorry. It can be sold at the flag, or processed at the foundry into gold bars which are more valuable. The foundry can also produce metal, which is very useful in Iron Peak, a scenario with lots of iron ore. The foundry at work in Iron Peak:

The foundry at work in Iron Peak

On this screenshot we also see the tool workshop, where items can be produced, and the sawmill:

The biggest changes are however not content related, but on content and production menus. Although the recently implemented drag&drop menus are not finished and may not even be the final implementation, they are a big improvement over the old menus. They are the reason that settlement may go into the direction of fun rather than frustration. The content menu is shown in the next screenshot:

With the content menu (open with E) the player can exchange contents between all containers behind the clonk, either by clicking the item or by dragging the item. Since the development snapshots are currently broken, this can only be tested if one is able to use our repository. But do feel free to share your opinion here or in the forum and stay tuned for more!

c’t, a well-known German computer magazine added us to their software DVD for the new issue of Mac & i.

For all those who are able to speak German, you can look it up here, page 166-167 🙂