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Up Topic General / Help and Questions / How to keep working?
- - By nerdnils [de] Date 2017-09-25 10:35
Is there any way to make a clonk keep doing a task when changing my clonk? Like "Chop that tree" or "walk to the right".
Possible in the original but in openclonk it seems like the clonk always stops doing anything when stopping to press the key
or changing the clonk.

Greetings
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Parent - - By Zapper [de] Date 2017-09-25 10:53
Not in general, no

I think walking works if you hold left or right while pressing the crew-change button (R/T, I think)
Parent - - By nerdnils [de] Date 2017-09-25 11:12
Too bad, I always found this very helpful. Chopping down a tree lasts a few seconds where you can do something else. Same thing for some other actions.
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Parent - - By ala [de] Date 2017-09-25 13:54
I agree that it is quite tedious waiting for those trees among other actions. But since every action lasts as long as you click, but will stop immediately on release, continues actions would be counter intuitive to the new controls.

So somebody would have to come up with a way to incorporate that into the controls fluently.
Parent - By nerdnils [de] Date 2017-09-25 15:01
What about simply not releasing the button? Releasing is stop. Not release and change the clonk means keep on doing this?
Having more buttons for changing the clonk with keep on doing this would be too complicated I guess.
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Parent - By Clonkonaut Date 2017-09-25 15:12
As opposed to older Clonk titles, we have much less things that require your clonk to be present. You don't to stand around to construct buildings, you don't need to be inside a building and construct an item and so on. Chopping down trees really is the only thing that consumes (little) time. It takes you roughly 4 seconds to chop down a tree. Hardly enough time to do something meaningful with another clonk. But of course, we could make chopping trees even faster.
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Parent - - By Zapper [de] Date 2017-09-25 17:49
To complement Clonkonaut:
The reason why we don't (fully) allow switching Clonks and continuing action is that one of the design goals of OC was that you should have to wait a lot less than in CR for things (researching, constructing, chopping, building, etc. all took one Clonk in CR and are (semi-)automatic in OC).

Imagine the following: You find chopping trees boring and want to do something else in the meantime. But there are probably also scenarios (or situations) where you only have one Clonk! The solution to the problem (boredom) should ideally handle all the situations ingame. At least from a game design perspective. So it should also work if you only have one Clonk!

And that's what Clonkonaut meant: If waiting for your Clonk to chop a tree is boring, we should make it not-boring! Speeding it up, making a minigame out of it, idk.

Again: You are completely right! Waiting 4 seconds for a tree to be chopped is boring. But I think the solution to this might not be to allow switching Clonks in the meantime but something else
Parent - - By nerdnils [de] Date 2017-09-26 07:18
My point is not about boredom. My point is: Why having multiple clonks if they are all standing there doing nothing and only one clonk is doing something?
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Parent - - By Zapper [de] Date 2017-09-26 08:34
Mostly to be able to act on different places on the map:
You can send one Clonk down the mine with the elevator and one in your settlement to repair the wind generators when a meteor hits. Or you can catapult one Clonk to a sky island and still have one at home

It's not so much about parallel work in one place but more about working in several places
Parent - - By nerdnils [de] Date 2017-09-26 09:05 Edited 2017-09-26 09:56
Yeah, I get that... it still feels kind of useless to me, though. It's my opinion. Maybe this should be more of a survey. It would be nice to know if more players think like me or if most think being at multiple places without commanding multiple clonks at once/doing multiple things at once is enough.
My way could also be seen as confusing or disadvantage for new players I guess.
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Parent - - By Zapper [de] Date 2017-09-26 11:17
You are right it is useless :)

But it's a tradeoff. If we would let the Clonk continue actions that involve the mouse we have the following problem:
If you switch back to the Clonk, you probably are not holding down the mouse button anymore. What would happen? Would you stop the action right when switching back (because the button is no longer held down) or would you continue? If you would continue, how could you manually stop? Click and release again?
If you would 'stop' the action, which coordinates would you give the 'release' event (for example for shooting a bow)? The current mouse coordinates? That would feel wrong. Probably the last mouse coordinates that you had before switching from the Clonk - but then you would shoot at a different location from where your cursor is now.

Because the mouse would be tricky, we could probably just do that for actions that are started on a key-release (e.g. interactions on [space]). But then we would have chopping a tree on [space] and harvesting grain on [left-mouse] but both would be item-actions!
That would also feel inconsistent.

I think that if we allow every action on switching (e.g. aiming), we would run into problems. If we would allow only certain actions (e.g. chopping), we should make clear which work and which don't (e.g. all actions on [space] work). But then again, is it worth putting much effort into that if the only action currently ingame is chopping a tree? :)
I'd honestly just double the speed of chopping a tree :)
Parent - - By nerdnils [de] Date 2017-09-26 12:12 Edited 2017-09-26 12:27
Chopping a tree was only an example this is not only about tree chopping.

In all other points I agree and will post if I can think of something reasonable. I would exclude all actions involving aiming with the mouse(digging perhaps only into one direction). Stopping the action could be down(or up for climbing at the top) like it is in Rage maybe. Was there a reason to always hold down the key to continue the action and not let the player decide if he wants to hold the button or press it again to stop the action(like it was in rage)?
I know some developers may be bugged that some people keep talking/comparing to rage but I would like to know the reasons and by talking about it maybe some good ideas come up to make openclonk better. That is one point this forum is about, right?

[Edit]Maybe better for when to stop the action I would suggest to stop when you switch to the clonk. You are back in control and can do anything, do it again, make him do something else, whatever makes most sense. And there would be no conflict with any controls.[/Edit]
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Parent - - By Zapper [de] Date 2017-09-26 12:57

>Chopping a tree was only an example this is not only about tree chopping.


What are examples of other actions?

>Stopping the action could be down(or up for climbing at the top) like it is in Rage maybe. Was there a reason to always hold down the key to continue the action and not let the player decide if he wants to hold the button or press it again to stop the action(like it was in rage)?


Yes, because it's more intuitive for new players because other games usually handle it like that - and we specifically want to make the game intuitive for new players. Not for ClonkRage veterans.
Even in ClonkRage matthes thought that was a problem and created the "new control scheme" which will only let you walk and dig as long as you hold down the key.

The "do something by pressing towards the ground", like you suggest, was in OC for collecting stuff (until last release). And back then you couldn't collect stuff when swimming because no movement key would be free.

>I know some developers may be bugged that some people keep talking/comparing to rage but I would like to know the reasons and by talking about it maybe some good ideas come up to make openclonk better. That is one point this forum is about, right?


I'm not bugged at all, I think it's good that you wrote about the things that annoy you here :)
Parent - - By nerdnils [de] Date 2017-09-26 13:28 Edited 2017-09-26 13:38

> What are examples of other actions?


Digging, walking, climbing, pushing objects, flying an airship.
Walking/Climbing is helpful when you want to move multiple clonks at once or have long ways(obvious disadvantage: you have to look after them or they will go too far and perhaps die but I never had a problem and always see it as my mistake if this happens).

I have not tried this yet but for the part with the airship i am thinking about something else:

In old/classic clonk when wind came up you had to "push" against it to not fly away. So I used one clonk to steer the ship and another one to throw flintstones, shoot weapons etc. If the ship flies away and the other clonk stops steering when I switch, such attacks are no longer possible(unless you have a second player as an ally obviously). Is this an issue?

I have only tried the airship once, it stayed in the air after I fell down. How to get it back? Was in the tutorial. Only way was to die and respawn. Bad. In the old clonk classics the ship fell down when nobody was in it. In the tutorial a NPC is in it. Is he the reason the ship does not fall? He is very annoying, was talking to him at least a dozen times when I wanted to grab the ship.
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Parent - - By Zapper [de] Date 2017-09-26 13:41

>Digging, walking, climbing, pushing objects, flying an airship.


So mainly moving and not really using objects (like the axe)

> Is this an issue?


Probably not - if it is, we should fix it

>In the tutorial a NPC is in it. Is he the reason the ship does not fall?


Yes, probably. I think the ship falls down in normal games :/
Parent - By Clonkonaut Date 2017-09-26 16:04
It's unfortunately still a bug, the NPC doesn't pick you up when you fall down. Should have some kind of AI.
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Parent - - By Fulgen [at] Date 2017-10-01 16:29

>If the ship flies away and the other clonk stops steering when I switch, such attacks are no longer possible(unless you have a second player as an ally obviously)


You still can, there is a small time window where, if you stop pressing the button, the airships doesn't stop moving. Also works with the elevator.
Parent - By K-Pone [de] Date 2017-10-02 14:00
Regarding the Elevator, this works by pressing up or down while grabbing it (to move it up or down) and then pressing space (or whatever you put "use" on) without prior releasing the up or down key. The Clonk will then let the elevator go. I think this might work for the airship as well.
Up Topic General / Help and Questions / How to keep working?

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