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Up Topic General / Feedback and Ideas / Open Clonk 7: feedback
- - By J. J. [py] Date 2016-01-06 17:06
I must say the improvements that you have already made for the upcoming version 7 release are truly very impressive. The graphics alone have taken a fantastic change for the better, not to mention many other improvements. The clonk team has truly impressed me! Wonderful work everyone! Your work has not gone unnoticed.

NOTE: This may be fixed... but in "guardian of the windmills" the projectiles fly right though the bombs causing no damage. This is true of both the arrows and bullets.
Parent - - By Maikel Date 2016-01-06 17:31

>NOTE: This may be fixed... but in "guardian of the windmills" the projectiles fly right though the bombs causing no damage. This is true of both the arrows and bullets.


This has been fixed, can you try a latest snapshot and confirm?

Thanks for your positive feedback!
Parent - By J. J. [py] Date 2016-01-06 22:45
I tried the new snapshot, and it does look like it is fixed. Thank you Maikel.
Parent - - By Marky [de] Date 2016-01-17 08:21
I'll use this thread for my feedback as well. In the bugtracker I already have an issue #1614 where I requested/suggested some sort of quick-use control. I will talk about this only in short here. Positive feedback will be at the end :)

Negative. When I am talking about "seconds" in this, then it is my impression and maybe slower computer. The game runs fast in editor mode, in player mode it runs fluidly but slow:
- Digging animation. You seem to slow down at the end of the cycle, which makes sense, but it is frustrating to be "frozen in one spot" for about 1 second again and again.
- Hangling animation, same as digging animation. Looks nice, but I am hangling more cautiously than in other clonk games. The "swinging" should be played only when you stop hangling, imo.
- Chopping trees: It is really annoying that I have to hold the mouse button, approx. 5 seconds, in order to keep chopping and actually finish chopping the tree.
- Using the axe: The clonk uses the axe in the direction he is looking. My expection was that he would turn around and swing if I click behind the clonk.
- Contents menu: Every time I use it the GUI completely blocks everything on screen. I would like to see what is going on. This makes the game feel like a platforming game while I gather resources, and like an administration tool that is disconnected from the game when I actually do something with the resources.
- Interaction menu: The interactions in previous releases where more accessible, imo. It is nice that it tells you about more than one interaction, but I want to see all options at once. Now I have to completely cycle through all options to see them, remember which position it was at approximately and cycle there again. The context menu from Clonk Rage was not that bad actually ;) Holding space and displaying the interactions was also good.
- Interaction menu: It seems that the contents menu is also called interaction menu sometimes. This is a little confusing. For example: I open the contents menu so that I can disconnect pipes from the pump. Why (obviously because the display with information is a lot better than the interaction menu)? I cannot connect pipes to the pump in the contents menu, though, instead I have to close it, select the pipe and use it near the pump. Why?

Why does this feedback come so late, even though many things have been like that earlier? This has some reasons that will lead us to the positive feedback:
- Previously the game did not offer good settlement options, which was the main reason for me not to play it too long.
- Previously the game looked very mashed together when it came to graphics, which was not pleasing to look at for longer times.
- The two-hand control of the inventory prevented me from playing the game for longer periods of time.
- Consequently I did not play the game for more than ~5 minutes, so many things were not that noticeable. Digging once, or chopping one tree is interesting, but if I do not have to do this repeatedly, then it is also not annoying.
- There were some non-trivial changes in the scripting interface, so I have to adjust my projects (user created content) repeatedly.
- Mesh graphics of items look too clunky and or sterile in the menus. For example the metal barrel looks strange/ugly in the menu.
- Constructing buildings with mesh graphics looks strange. The wireframe preview makes me think about computer graphics, also the completed building sometimes starts in the half ground and rises up. Looks very very strange.

Finally, the positive feedback:
- The launcher / player mode is really good now. Especially scenario parameters are a good idea. The perfect mix between being able to adjust everything (Clonk Rage) or nothing (previously)
- The launcher music is interesting :)
- Controls have improved!
- The game is very atmospheric at night, the zap nests that are hanging from trees look nice. The swimming fish and corals are really cool.
- Wipfs!
- The new materials are really great. Decorations such as the flowers and branches look very nice, too.
- A lot of scenarios to play.
Parent - - By Clonkonaut [de] Date 2016-01-17 11:44 Edited 2016-01-17 23:36

> Interaction menu: It seems that the contents menu is also called interaction menu sometimes.


That's completely Zapper's fault for breaking naming schemes!!!

> Every time I use it the GUI completely blocks everything on screen. I would like to see what is going on.


The game doesn't tell you (*cough*) but there is a minimise button in the lower right of the menu. Of course, you can't access everything from the minimised menu but maximising is no problem!

> Digging & Hangling


Yes, it seems we have to do something about those actions. I guess the 'why' it is like that is obvious, it somehow fits the animations and was a try to be more realistic. But gameplay-wise it is true that slowing down your character for no good reason, even making it less nimble(!), is a bad idea.

> Chopping & Digging


I'm reluctant to have anything lock the clonk in a certain state (like click at x,y and the clonks digs until there or click tree and the clonks chops until chopped). Not only is this error-prone (stucking permanently in a certain state) but it is a slight contradiction to your previous issue: not having full control over the clonk at all times. You'd need some kind of cancel button.
Games with a similar control scheme than clonk (to my knowledge) also don't seem to take this path. In Terraria / Minecraft, you also have to hold down the mouse button to mine / chop trees
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Parent - By Pyrit Date 2016-01-17 13:43
The contents menu *is* a bit big. And most of the time it is 75% empty. It could just be scaled down, imo. But not the icon size, just the menu size. But on smaller screen sizes it should probably fill more of the screen, for it must not become too small.
Parent - By Marky [de] Date 2016-01-17 22:00

>The game doesn't tell you (*cough*) but there is a minimise button in the lower right of the menu.


I already saw that, but I used it in an area without objects or interaction, so it had about the same effect as closing the menu and I thought "what's that for then?" and dismissed it.

>I'm reluctant to have anything lock the clonk in a certain state (like click at x,y and the clonks digs until there or click tree and the clonks chops until chopped).


This would probably be a bad idea anyway. In case of digging I think that the most annoying thing is the delayed animation. A "keep doing what I am doing at the moment"-button could be nice though.

>Not only is this error-prone (stucking permanently in a certain state) but it is a slight contradiction to your previous issue: not having full control over the clonk at all times. You'd need some kind of cancel button.


I'd cancel it by clicking "use" again. Why not have the tree offer a "chop tree" interaction if you have the axe selected? This would also to some extent eliminate the problem that you have to estimate the correct chopping distance before swinging at the tree.

>Games with a similar control scheme than clonk (to me my knowledge) also don't seem to take this path. In Terraria / Minecraft, you also have to hold down the mouse button to mine / chop trees


That may be true, but in shooters it is common to have a "toggle crouch" button for example. Also, digging and chopping were good in previous Clonk titles as well. Still, I'd rather fix animation problems first, before considering a change in the control scheme.
- - By Deflaktor [de] Date 2016-06-01 10:19
I also want to give some Feedback.
This is my first real try of open clonk. I already tried earlier versions but the controls and the tutorials seemed really off to me. I had a really hard time to learn it and it seemed more like a beta version to me because of how little content there was.

This version is completely different. The controls are almost on spot! The tutorials are great and interesting and I learned very fast to get used to the controls. It feels like a real clonk game now! You guys did some tremendous work! Now I want to see if I can get enough free time to help out with this amazing project =)

What I also really like is the light system underground. This has always been missing in clonk. Now you can explore the underground. It has always been way too easy to find gold.

A few suggestions:
- In one tutorial mission you have to get the plane from the mountain back to your pilot. There is a lava sea you have to pump out. I got successfully to the plane, but since I didn't know the controls for how to fly a plane, I crashed it straight to the bottom of where the lava sea was. There it was stuck so the only idea I had was to blow it up with some flintstones. But then nothing happened. The pilot still wanted to get the plane back, which did not exist anymore :D it should be fixed somehow.
- I like that the music fades off underground. It is really atmospheric. However it is annoying that it shuts off even if you walk past a few pixels of tunnel. It should be done like in Terraria. If you clonk is surrounded by a large amount of underground stuff it should shut off.

A little feedback without suggestions:
- The inventory needs some more work. I find myself constantly confused on which inventory currently is opened. And I thought it would be intuitive if I could drag and drop items into a crate. Also if I grab a lorry and open inventory I expect the lorry inventory to open and not the structure behind (but some other times I expect the lorry on the left side and the structure on the right side).
- I also thought it was hard to manage a crate and get stuff inside there and in your inventory while holding it. It should be done so it automatically fills up the crate somehow.
Reply
Parent - - By Clonkonaut [de] Date 2016-06-02 10:00
Thanks for the positive feedback! :)

We are working on some of the things you mentioned. Drag & drop for menus is a missing but planned feature.

As for the contents menus, there is a general problem and I don't know whether we can fix it. We changed the menu so it does only show two inventories which is a big improvement imho. Before that you could never easily tell which inventory was what, what goes where when I click it and so on. But of course just having two inventories poses the problem of what to show. It's impossible to predict what the player really wants. Sometimes the clonk and the lorry, sometimes the lorry and the building, sometimes the clonk and the building.
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Parent - - By Luchs [de] Date 2016-06-02 12:23
Good keyboard shortcuts may help here. I get confused by the menu as well. Shortcuts for "select next {building, vehicle, clonk}" and "select own clonk/surrounding" could allow selecting the right thing without looking.
Parent - By Clonkonaut [de] Date 2016-06-02 13:11
Suggestions? ;)
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