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*.

 

CarryHeavy 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.

 

Construction Sites Constructing buildings has changed quite a bit. We made it more comfortable and easier, and you’ll never have to stand in front of a construction site and wait till it’s done again!

After selecting a building in the construction menu, you can now place them with the mouse in the vicinity of your Clonk. You can move around while doing so, in case the wanted position is just a bit too far away. Some buildings, like the elevator, can also be flipped during placement. Freedom!

The construction site itself now is displayed as a fancy wireframe-model. At placement, it looks for building material in the clonk, nearby containers and on the ground. To put construction material into site, just use the Contents-Menu or interact with the site. It’s also possible to remove construction sites. Building material will be refunded in that case.

When you’ve put all required materials into the site, the construction starts building itself. No standing there, holding down a mouse button! That’s it!

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: http://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! ->