As you can see, the banner isn't animated this week, cause there's no way I'm making a second frame for this banner with how detailed it is. Hope you guys like it! Unfortunately, I feel this piece is still unfinished, so I'll most likely update it further into this week while working on the next blurb. I've put more than 20 hours into working on that banner, and it looks like I'm not done with it quite yet.

This week, we got some information on the release date for Brickadia! That will be talked about in the speculation column for this week.

With that out of the way, let's get into this week's community content!

Now we arrive at this week's user column!

Each week I will be asking members of the Brickadia community a question relevant to Brickadia at the moment, whether that be in regard to development, speculation, or even just hopes and desires surrounding the game itself.

So, as it turns out, we have news on the release date for Brickadia!

Based on comments made by Zeblote, the founder of Brickadia, we now have a more refined scope as to when Brickadia is going to come out!

Given that we are slowly marching into the Q3 of 2023 and that we have basically entered into Summer of this year, it would stand to reason that we would have to get some degree of news eventually. Now we got a small bit of news!

While it is quite unfortunate that Brickadia will not be releasing within the next two months, at least players will be glad to know that there is a particularly specific date in mind. The question comes into mind, though, whether or not the developers of Brickadia will be able to make that specific deadline in the first place. If I had to guess, I would assume that Brickadia would come out during the latter end of Q3 2023, likely towards September given their current progress and the features they want to add. While it had been a while that we've received news on the developer-side of things, as it usually tends to be, there was actually a social media video released by Brickadia talking about water and environments: Brickadia Twitter

Could this be a possible clue on what the next big feature might be? For one, considering the biggest emphasis for this game has been physics, vehicles, and behavior scripts, and given that we've gotten a physics demo already, I would imagine that either behavior scripts or vehicles may be showcased yet. And given that we have gotten a video about environments, I would imagine that vehicles may be next. Why would I speculate that?

Recently, there was discussion in regard to boats and the like in Brickadia, in which we recieved a bit of news as to how boats could function in-game:

As of right now, it's clear that we will be getting boats, but as to whether or not that's explicitly being worked on right now hands-on isn't entirely clear. What is clear is that physics and behaviors are being worked on. While I imagine behaviors is thoroughly being tested, I wouldn't be surprised if we got a major news update from the developers regarding vehicles of any kind. But at this point, I'm just doing mental gymnastics, so who knows?

And that's all for this week of the durb blurb!

If you want to see your creations, ideas, and speculations highlighted on the blurb, contact me at: durb#3215

See you all next week!

Apologies for last week's absent blurb, I mentioned that week that I had a lot of things going on. I myself never like delaying or postponing blurbs for a week, and I think we all know the pain of having people who release stuff on a weekly or biweekly basis start showing extreme inconsistency in regard to their posting schedule (I'm specifically looking at you webcomic artist #1,304,451). It ain't fun, and as a person who likes releasing blurbs, I am on the exact same boat as you, the reader. So just to clarify things, this will NOT affect the release schedule for this blurb, we are maintaining that weekly Monday release schedule.

Apart from that, notice anything different about this week's banner? Recently I just got pen-pressure to work with the program I use to draw these banners, allowing me to thin out lines! This does make it a little more difficult to write the text, but in some areas, I'd say the pen-pressure accentuates some features of this banner! Who knows if I'll keep the thinned pen-pressure aesthetic.

With that out of the way, let's get into this week's community content!

Now we arrive at this week's user column!

Each week I will be asking members of the Brickadia community a question relevant to Brickadia at the moment, whether that be in regard to development, speculation, or even just hopes and desires surrounding the game itself.

BlueBip

"Biker jacket with the brickadia logo on the back."

Ghille

"I feel like a model egg head is the obvious answer, but it'd also be cool to have little figures of the tools."

Bluester16

"probably anything that contains this"

On the last blurb, we talked about all the cosmetics that had currently been revealed that are expected to come to release for Brickadia. However, thanks to BlueBip, it turns out I just forgot one thing, there was a bunch of cosmetics already revealed on the Steam page for the game itself!

It appears that my assertion on the last blurb had some merit to it, there's quite the amount of military cosmetics! Even looking near the top of the list, I was correct with a couple items, surprisingly! Namely the Angler vest being something fisher related and the fact that some vests have some varying degrees of variety and variance to them. With this attention to detail in mind, mainly in regard to the fact that the developers are willing to implement this degree of versions for a cosmetic, one would wonder if they are willing to do this for other cosmetics as well. Could you imagine medieval armor would different levels of regal decorativeness to them, or different crowns of different decorative varieties, alongside the multitude of cosmetics we could recieve for medieval helmets, or even satchels and ties!

However, in regard to there being this degree of variety, it would also bring into speculation whether or not the developers of Brickadia have a streamlined method of implementing cosmetics. It would be quite unfortunate if they had to do a lot of manual things for each cosmetic every single time like the default coloration or which segments can even be colored. That in itself could be a problem for implementing new cosmetics, but I do believe that if we are to expect more variety to this capacity, they likely do have a system in-place to make it easier to add cosmetics.

Thinking about this, I checked out the Brickadia blog "The New Avatar System: Player Parts" that was released in on May 16th, 2020. In the blog, it describes some features that some may have forgotten about that we could see in the future:

Now keep in mind, this blog is more than 3 years old, so whether or not we're going to still see these two particular features that are highlighted is up in the air. With that being said though, cloth physics and fire effects? Now that's a gnarly idea. Granted, in pretty much all the major games we've seen involve sandbox mechanics like Minecraft or Roblox, we've never really seen any true cloth physics, or anything that solidly emulates that (apart from Minecraft's lame capes, sorry). Could you imagine running around with a cape with your avatar, or flying in the sky with a cape, or even having the chance to glide with a cape? Now that's some wild stuff to think about. Now technically speaking, we do see one degree of an effect used for a cosmetic, and that's mainly for the Hover shoulder piece and the Exo Spine piece:

Now this is really just the neon material being used on these specific sections, but it is fair to say we do see effects being used, though in a very short, marginal degree. Again, very much so up in the air on whether or not we'll see anything like a head on fire or even the possibility of engine parts on a player that puffs out smoke. Steampunk robot costumes, anyone? One idea that has floated around the community are faces that can have their eyes colored or materials changed. Imagine playing in a poorly-lit game and seeing your eyes glow! Now that would perfectly spice-up some robot outfits for sure, or maybe some alien costumes? Who knows!

Since this post, we also really haven't seen stickers spoken of much, by the developers, but we do have some clues as to how they would function if they are still being worked on:

Considering behaviors, physics, and the like have been getting quite the fair share of attention from developers, and rightly so considering they are core features of Brickadia, it's likely that Stickers may yet just arrive in the form of modding in the future, or probably isn't much of a priority right now. As the saying goes, things change, and it's always interesting to see what was initially planned compared to what we see now. Who knows if we'll see cloth physics or more cosmetics with awesome effects, or even LBP-styled sticker planting, we'll just have to wait and see. One thing I'd like to note is that the greatest facet of sandbox games is customization, and variety is always a welcomed pleasure. I will say this though:

ADD A BETTER CAPE, THIS ONE SUCKS, PLEASE ZEBLOTE I KNOW YOU'RE READING THIS GIVE US A REAL CAPE. PLEEEEAAAASE, COME ON MAN JUST GIVE US A GOOD CAPE. I'M LOOK LIKE A KID WEARING THIS, IT DOESN'T EVEN MOVE.

Thank you.

And that's all for this week of the durb blurb!

If you want to see your creations, ideas, and speculations highlighted on the blurb, contact me at: durb#3215

See you all next week!

This week has been quite calm compared to the more busy, busy weeks from before. Unfortunately, I wish I had more time to work on this banner as I would've added more neat things like shine, metal letters, and quite a bit more, but I hope you guys enjoy the banner this week!

With that out of the way, let's get into this week's community content!

Cosmetics.

The ability to transform your avatar into whatever it is that you wish is always a huge staple to any game revolving around a customizable, sociable, sandbox experience. From creating yourself and your favorite 3rd party corporation-owned character, it's needless to say that cosmetics are a crucial aspect of personalization and customization.

On this blurb, we talk about a game that, gameplay-wise, already has a lot going for it customization wise. Even with the current list of cosmetics currently in game, players have been able to create all sorts of characters! Like this dumb Yoda avatar I created with a custom color palette I created:

Now while systems and features do get the highlight quite often, it's also nice to take a look and talk about cosmetics every so often. On recent posts, we've covered a couple cases where new cosmetics were shown off. Let's take a look at what has been revealed and refresh ourselves on what we've seen already!

Now that's quite a bit! A lot of these are very military-esque, I guess the devs assume I'm going to be dropping into urban warfare the moment Brickadia comes out. However, there are still quite a decent amount of new cosmetics seen, and we are yet to see a whole lot more. Just think about the possibility of seeing cosmetic ideas like samurai helmets, different assortments of beards and mustaches in greater variety, and peg-leg arms! While I would say that the strong amount of military cosmetics is surprising, I would be more of a fan towards more casual, silly cosmetics, as well as more historic, accurate hats. As of right now, the current medieval helmets in game are a little generic, if not simple. But who knows, perhaps once release comes around, maybe we will get cosmetics like a chef's hat or decent suspenders. After all, if they can make this many new cosmetics, who knows how much more they can cram into Brickadia before release!

And that's all for this week of the durb blurb!

If you want to see your creations, ideas, and speculations highlighted on the blurb, contact me at: durb#3215

See you all next week!

If you're wondering if anything has happened just based on the banner, nothing crazy has happened. Just a couple of silly, shocked faces.

One brief thing I will note is that these banners are getting easier and easier to make the more I make with each blurb, they're fun to make and I hope you readers enjoy the banners as much as I do!

Now let's get into what the community has been up to this week!:

Now we arrive at this week's user column!

Each week I will be asking members of the Brickadia community a question relevant to Brickadia at the moment, whether that be in regard to development, speculation, or even just hopes and desires surrounding the game itself.

During the release of the Physics Demo and the devblog, some information was dropped:

The main focus of this post by Kenko, who was the person that filmed the Physics demo, is the first part about the VFX of the Manipulator tool. For one, I forgot to clarify that this could've been a temporary effect of the Manipulator. However, it is very good to have clarification that this effect is very much so temporary, which could leave some speculation as to what the Manipulator tool's effect could end up looking like.

The second point in that response, however, is just more or less an issue of clarity on my part. I pointed out that it could be possible that cylinder pieces wouldn't be getting larger, however I meant that only in regard to the cylinder bricks we currently have, not in regard to wheels. It is perfectly understandable, however, that current microbrick wheels are just a stand-in for actual wheels in the future. Given that the post, however, highlights that it's not exactly known just how big wheels can get. Personally, I could totally imagine big monster-truck sized wheels getting in.

If anything, to avoid the issue of there not being enough wheels to fit the needs of all people, I could imagine there being some sort of dynamic wheel creation system where wheel sizes could be as big as you want through sliders and the like, with different parts of the wheel being partially customizeable like color, rims, tire width, bevel size, and so on and so forth. All that just so you can have wheels big enough for a construction haul-truck but small enough for a bike, or even office chairs! But now that's just my idea of a solution for that, there is no way to tell if something like that is actually being made.

What is actually being made however is this:

Whether or not this is just a literal joke or whatever is to be seen, but I would very much so imagine spheres are going to be implemented into Brickadia as they are very crucial for certain types of builds. Can't exactly play pinball, pachinko, or bowl with microbrick spheres, can you? The question, however, becomes whether or not spheres are resizeable on the spot or need to have different sizes implemented for it. As of right now, you can only resize cylinder bricks by extending the tube-end of the cylinder bricks, you can't resize the circular edge of the cylinder so that it can expand width-wise (which would be extraordinarily convenient as it is a little annoying switching to the build menu and back or filling up by build slots with different sized cylinders). For spheres, I would love to imagine that you can just expand the sphere in terms of resizing, but I would imagine that you'd also have to grab different sized spheres individually from the build menu.

Another thing to note is that a question was recently asked to Zeblote, the creator of Brickadia, about how the elevator platform in the Physics Demo trailer moved:

This shows that as of right now, gears don't exactly exist yet in Brickadia and, in other words, aren't exactly possible in the way it was shown in the video. This also means that those gears were just moving on motorized hinges. However, it is quite interesting that that managed to pull that effect off with a motorized linear joint. To clarify real quick, it means that this:

Was done using something similar to this, except only on a much larger, slower scale:

One of the big things I'm hoping for something like springs and hydraulic pipes, that would add great fluidity and liveliness to a lot of builds. Imagine being able to hop around on springs or have some sort of suspension on your vehicles! Moving away from that for a second, despite the fact that we don't have gears and that gears on a small scale aren't exactly possible, there may yet be light at the end of the tunnel:

Also, very cool thing, it would appear that the UI for Brickadia is getting a touch-up in the form of bevels

If we're expecting tabs like this, there's no doubt that using certain tabs like the environmental effects tab or the components tab is going to be a lot easier on the eyes. As a matter of fact, we have UI to compare with each other!

As we can see, there are some things different, the biggest obvious difference being the variances of bevels on all the UI squares. One thing to note is that the Load Build label is much more pronounced, a great help to remember where you were after you come back from the bathroom. The build icons are lacking the thick border in the new UI than the old UI, and pairing that up with beveling, that could make it just the tiniest bit more difficult to recognize certain builds. I believe thin border with bevels help keep the icons pronounced and more individualized. Another thing to take note of is the fact that the right side info-tab, which lists information about the build like the brick count, who built it, and so on and so forth, takes up more space leftward leaving the left-side holding all the build icons smaller. This does, however, make the preview icon a lot bigger!

One other thing to note is that, surprisingly, the way in which the information regarding brick count, save authorship, and the like are no longer listed one after another in a sort of bullet-point list-type way. There's no reason to assume that all of these design choices are final, and it could very well be the case that this is still being worked on, but one could imagine that when the brick count goes into the millions, has several authors, and is hosted by someone with a huge name that the new format becomes particularly unhelpful to the eye. However, there is some benefit to the information being simplified, mainly with some bits like "Hosted by:" being culled.

One last thing to note is that now with more space on the information preview tab, this leaves even more space for other things to be added! Though that doesn't necessarily mean more things SHOULD be added, one user in the community had suggested an idea about player information showing up on the player's list page:

Very cool mock-up art for their idea of player previews for the player's list, and I could totally see this idea being implemented into Brickadia! However, I believe that with more space present on the information tab on Brickadia, this could also be incorporated into the information preview tab as well, where the appearance of the creator could be layered over the bottom right of the preview image for the build.

While we do have some bits and pieces on what Brickadia is probably going to look like once it comes out, there are still some bits and pieces we don't know, and I feel it's always fun to imagine the possibility of new features and tid-bits making it into Brickadia. But who knows, maybe we'll see some form of these ideas appear in the future of Brickadia, but only time will tell.

And that's all for this week of the durb blurb!

If you want to see your creations, ideas, and speculations highlighted on the blurb, contact me at: durb#3215

See you all next week!

Apologies for this coming out a little late today, ran into issues trying to get the pages set up considering this new blurb is starting on a new page!

Last week, we went over the physics demo for Brickadia which, if you haven't seen it yet, you should go watch!

This week, we'll be going over the development blog that was released alongside the physics demonstration video, and I'll try my best to simplify it and analyze the information provided! With that out of the way, lets take a look at the community progress of the current Brick Party in Brickadia! Last week I didn't go over the builds just quite yet just so I could give builders more time to complete their works, but I think plenty are now ready to see, so let's take a look while we also catch a glimpse at what the community has been up to!

Now this isn't everything that was built in the Brick Party, and many people are still working on their builds. I'll continue to share updates each week on the Brick Party for as long as it goes on!

Now we arrive at this week's user column!

Each week I will be asking members of the Brickadia community a question relevant to Brickadia at the moment, whether that be in regard to development, speculation, or even just hopes and desires surrounding the game itself.

To follow along in a sort of skimmy-skim-skim sort of way, or if you just want to read the development blog, check it out here! Devlog #4 - Fast Collisions for Large Editable Vehicles

Alright, now that we've dealt with the eye-candy that we got last week with the physics demonstration, it's only fair that we deal with the hard-copy, text-wridden, reading aspect of the whole deal. Now personally, I myself didn't read the whole thing at first cause I'm not a nerd, lol! However, it should still be looked at just to better understand how some aspects of physics will work on release. Let's get right into it by talking about collisions:

While we have seen clips and images of physics objects and vehicles in the past, the general issue with collision in those videos was that physics objects were dealt dirty with a regular collision box rather than a sort of in-depth collision. As a result, you get this:

In other words, a Garry's Mod moment. Also, for some reason, ragdolls didn't collide with those physics objects? Just a tid-bit, but let's keep moving. Over the course of the development blog, the developers go over a series of possible solutions for having concave collision detection, which is basically the kind of collision for physics objects we all want aka you being able to sit in a seat even though the car is angled 0.01 degrees east. Let's go over those in a sort of quick bullet-point sequence:

• Compounds and Aggregates in PhysX: Solution would generally be have a parent object and have all other shapes be connected to that parent object. The negative is that each shape has physics calculated for them still. This, your giant 1 million part Titanic boat makes the game unplayable because all the bricks in the Captain's bedroom are being calculated alongside every brick in every other room on the ship.

• Voxel-Based Concave Collisions: All collision is created by uniform voxel blocks. The problem is, to put it bluntly, that Brickadia's bricks aren't uniform to a single size, but to a variety of grid increments. Also memory issue possibilities. No gaming here.

• Custom Compound Shapes in PhysX:This is what they chose, let's go home (just kidding). PhsyX, a feature in Unreal Engine, basically does the work for you. Put simply, an object that collides with another object is positioned relative to the object collided with, find the overlapping parts, create the contact points, and then physics-up the contact points.

Are you following along just fine? Let's keep going:

The developers then talk about choosing a Dynamic Spacial Index, which is basically in reference to a brick collision detection system that can have the objects be updated. They then go over some of the things they need for this spatial index system, like the ability to remove objects at random, the ability to handle wildly-different sizes for collisions, and so on and so forth.

Now the devs go over some common spatial data structures that fit the bill for what they are looking for in regard to their collision system. Let's not go over those cause it's 1 AM on a Thursday as I'm typing this. What you need to know is that the developers went with Loose Octrees after regular Octrees asked the developers for voxels, but we know NEVER to talk to a stranger that wants to offer you voxels.

In short, Loose Octrees still didn't fit the bill, and the developers decided to improve what they had with Loose Octrees and call it OctoBVH, BVH standing for Bounding Volume Heirarchies. Why do we need to know this? In short, OctoBVH helps with collision by simplifying boundary boxes by subdividing the overall boundary box into smaller boundary boxes that hold bricks. The bounding box is then used for collision.

If anyone who actually has technical expertise in this is reading this and are just shaking their head, I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Let's keep going!

A lot of stuff from this point mainly deals with information regarding memory, queries, and all that stuff. And frankly, I prefer my stuff to be visually appetizing. Ignoring all of that cause man, we find that with the collision system figured out for the most part in reference to primitives, now brick-on-brick collision needs to be figured out. In other words, how do I cram 10 white whales inside an Office Depot build? The collision box is convex appromated, meaning based on the cubes that we got from OctoBVH for giving birth to it (we love you, kid), those cube subtrees are used to create the convex shape, at least from what I gather. From there, you get this:

What is interesting is when you pay close attention to this picture, some of the ships don't completely collide/touch each other, and this can mainly be seen with the ship on the most-left and with the ship to the upper right of it. Though, at best, they just may be frozen midair.

And I'll leave it from there, considering the rest of the development blog mainly deals with optimizations for loading builds and lots of code.

Adding to that real quick though, given that the game has been optimized for release with the addition of less memory usage, this will make it easier to be able to play on servers whose brick count reaches the millions!

And now I'm done. This is also the last time I cover technical stuff in this manner, cause even I had a hard time following along. lol.

And that's all for this week of the durb blurb!

If you want to see your creations, ideas, and speculations highlighted on the blurb, contact me at: durb#3215

See you all next week!