Seems like a minute since we've had a blurb! As a matter of fact, based on some people's comments, it seems like some of you guys have been having blurb withdrawals! Now you're probably wondering, what happened that caused me to delay the blurb for a week?

So as you all probably know, the blurb kind of relies on Discord acting as a host for media for the blurb, like pictures, videos, that sort of stuff. A couple months back, Discord announced that they were adding expiration dates to their hotlinks, so images could last for a bit, but they'd be cut down short after a certain period. However, when the time came around for when they actually started being used, it never struck any of the videos or images for the blurb. At that point too, I had announced I was making a back-up for images and videos for the blurb, but since it had never struck, I had assumed that somehow there was a blindspot in how it worked or that maybe it didn't even hit at all.

After updating the site to add new borders for the articles themselves, that's when the whole site basically got borked. Not only that, I'm not very organized with how I set up each blurb, I just grab the images straight from the source and post it here. Not only that, a lot of images were custom made, meaning finding them was a whole lot more tricky. So as a result, some of these blurbs became even more difficult to fix again, and would require an even greater amount of time to get back up and running.

Now you're probably wondering how this was made infinitely easier, or how some blurbs are even back up? Crazily enough, if you notice in the banner, right next to the Discord logo is the Internet Archive site. Someone, I don't know WHO, or if it's even one person, saved a lot of pages of the blurb onto the Internet Archive, enough to where it covers most of the blurbs on this site up to around blurb #41. So if you've ever wanted an easy way to look at the old blurbs with their images still intact, take a look at this link: Internet Archive

So the fact that either this blurb is relevant enough to be archived or this just being the result of some guy or a few people thinking this is neat, I got to save this, it's awesome that I even get to recover a lot of the articles this way. So now I've learned my lesson, actually archive all blurb media in a good place in a responsible way.

You may have noticed though, looking back at a lot of blurbs, that not all of the articles are back up. While the work flow for getting them back up and running is incredibly easy now, it's still a bit of work doing that. What's my process? All I have to do, really, is save the each picture in a sequence of numbers, slap them onto a folder, compress the images, put them on Neocities as the hosting site, and reassign each image source link on each blurb to the folder to their respective number. For videos, I host them on dropbox currently, but this might change as I consider switching over to the supporter perk for Neocities which would allow me to host here.

Overall, a crazy story that you may be thinking "well that was very nothing, lol". To that, I say that's fair, it's kind of my fault, and I apologize for the inconvenience, and I was feeling incredibly terrible realizing I had lost a lot of images and realizing the amount of work that was going to have to go into fixing each article. If you're interested in helping out a little in regard to saving an article, let me know and I'll tell you what to do, as I'm still currently under the process of saving each blurb! Out of the 45 blurb articles currently out, 11 should be back up and running, and soon they'll be all back up eventually.

Now with that dumb stupid baby stuff out of the way, let's take a look at what the community has been up to as of late, especially considering the community has recently taken part of a newly released Brick Party, this time being themed after the Wild West! Later on after that, Tantiem will help us cover the speculation for this week regarding the new building UI and mechanics coming up in Brickadia for release!

Greetings all, Tantiem filling in for the speculation section again.

This week will be part summary, part speculation, to fill in for all those brick lovers that don’t check in daily.

The overall topic for this week: Building! (Centered around building controls). We have had a great number of interesting new developments surrounding the advancement of building techniques that will blow your socks off.

Since I don’t want to bloat the blurb file storage, I’m going to select a few choice videos from the dev media section to highlight the biggest changes:

First of all, we cannot forget about multi axis repeat place -

Credit: Sixmorphugus

These are all huge additions for more than one reason. First of all, find me one person that didnt feel like this pressing forward slash to reorient their brick 80 times to find every permutation before finally landing on the right one:

Second of all, I don’t know about everyone necessarily, put I almost never use the brick inventory since most of my building can be done with a 1x1 micro or stud and just using resize and cherry pick to make any brick I want, so putting those into one tool is an awesome improvement at least on my end. In addition, don’t forget about on screen size measurements! Awesome improvements.

Lastly, as much as I probably wouldn’t use it, mutli axis drag repeat place is a welcome addition in the macro placing universe. Although it could potentially be used as a easy access to golden turkey bombing, I can see it having many practical applications as well, such as: 3D equal spacing, quick spaced plot placements, easy starts to modular build layouts, and more.

Ok so as far as the summary goes, that’s about all that happened in the build tool space. But what are some lesser known facts about building that we don’t have any official information on?

Something I’ve been quite curious about is how the implementation of placing brick grids is going to work in the realm of new building controls. Are we going to be able to lock them to grids, or even better, freely rotate and place in the same tool, without use of the manipulator? Will we get new bricks? How about a new brick type?

Credit: Tantiem

As seen in this very unofficial (but legally binding) statement made by LEAD Dolphin / Bear developer Sixmorphugus, it seems that he is at least planning on implementing a “water” type brick into the EA build. This leads me to wonder: what else could be up the sleeves of these silent, brooding type developers? Are water bricks planned to be one of many types of new “zone” type bricks that alter the behaviors of entities that enter them, such as lava, anti gravity, or trigger zones?

Hard to say, but hopefully we can get some more official news soon to satiate the appetites of all these brick crazy creative types. What do YOU think could be coming next for building tools, bricks, or even building controls? Seeing as how a lot of the implemented changes on building controls are a direct result of community feedback, what else do you think could be coming for existing tools? Will the paint beam ever look like paint!?!?!?

Anyway, that is all for now. Keep on bricking brick people! And stay tuned for the next blub!