Welcome to today's blurb!

Apologies for the delay in releasing the article today, it seems like Neocities itself had different plans in mind.

Perhaps the developers of Brickadia paid off Neocities to prevent today's release? Perhaps they don't want me to leak the realistic human limbs for avatar customization?

Who knows, but it was annoying that Neocities had to pull that on me, but stuff like that happens and that's alright, first time it's happened on a release day in more than a year of making the blurb so it's not really a huge issue anyways.

Apart from that, hope you guys like the banner today, I had to cram it a bit since I got a little busy last week. If I had more time, I actually would've made this an animation where the whole background would be moving! I also took inspiration from the 2001 Tokyo Game Show Autumn Directory cover, which features a Sonic-like human character with all sorts of cool gizmos, attire, and all that stuff. I also decided to make this look like it was something meant for the SNES console. Part of the reason for that was the fact that I dig the overall aesthetic for game covers for that console, as well as the fact that it fits more comfortably into the banner dimensions for the blurb.

With all that out of the way, we have some interesting speculation to get into, featuring a special guest with interesting credentials to help us look into Logic Gates!

Let's take a look at what the community has been up to:

Logic Gates!

We dipped into it once, and we'll be double dipping right back into it.

The last time we talked about Logic Gates, we only really ever saw one Logic Gate, which was the NOT Logic Gate.

Credit: ConfidentBottle

However, ever since the plethora of vehicle development that dropped recently, there has actually been a whole lot more development content surrounding Logic Gates shared by the developers!

So knowing that, let's see what Logic Gates we've seen so far:

Credit: ConfidentBottle

Look's like we have a lot of Logic Gates to play around with in Brickadia with these

new Logic Gates!

Interestingly enough, since the last time we've covered Logic Gates, there has actually been a remodel to the brick model for the gates themselves. In contrast to having just one singular color, it seems more like a singular piece made of two molds with different shades of the top brick's color (it's funny how I talk about these pieces as though they're actual physical plastic pieces I can mess around with).

Let's compare real quick what they looked like before and after:

Credit: ConfidentBottle

For one, the big thing you can see straight away is the change in the nuts for the Logic Gates being more hexagonal than round. A more subtle change that you might not notice straight away is that the gate model is physically beveled now in contrast to the texture giving the illusion that it is beveled. One thing that I was curious about was whether or not the Logic Gate was actually two pieces or not. However, since you're able to notice the difference in bevelling in both pictures, you're better able to see that they are very much so just one singular brick considering the bottom slab piece in the new model is bevelled as well.

If I had to say anthing about this, I weirdly like the original model for Logic Gates since they fit more in line with the style of Bricks already, whereas the new remodel feels more like a Avatar piece than an actual brick. This is really more so of a whatever opinion, but I think one interesting idea to consider for a game about building would be to have stylistic variations of the Logic Gates themselves.

Now it is a curious opinion to have considering all they do is help with wiring, but I think of this more in terms of both fitting in with a build and having its potentially different and unorthodox uses. For example, you'll notice that for some of the new pieces for Logic Gates, there's a "-", "=", "≥", "≤", "<", and ">". My first instinct for building would probably be to use these bricks as a way of showing Roman Numerals, or perhaps using the "+" gate as a medical symbol similar to the Red Cross. It's a weird opinion to have, but I think it would be a little neat to have variations of the brick where maybe the symbol appears engraved, or maybe the gates look more like a literal chips like transistors or even computer chips, with little prongs coming out of the sides.

One thing to note is that considering that we'll be seeing thinner of variants of bricks like the Engine brick, it isn't unlikely that we'll see thinner, smaller, potentially microbrick-sized variants of the Logic Gates to hide away in particular builds. Now the uninitiated reader may wonder why that may be the case, but considering players may want to build their own custom microbrick engines and make their builds as "clean" and as best looking as possible, there's no reason to assume that there wouldn't be a convenient way to make variants that suit that intent.

Opinions and general conclusions aside, what are these new Logic Gates supposed to do? Keep in mind that Logic Gates are meant to deal with Wires, which if you don't know already, is a sort of super-simplified Behavior system that allows for the convenient creation of specific functions. To boil it down, if you have a switch and a light, a wire connects the two to allow for the function of being able to turn a light on and off at the switch of a button.

However, in understanding Logic Gates, it's important to keep in mind that they essentially operate on Boolean parameters; true or false inputs with true or false outputs. In other words, they're essentially binary in function, operating on 1's and 0's.

With that in mind, it may be easier to wrap your head around why there might be some arithmetic symbols in the array of Logic Gate bricks, but that doesn't quite cut it. What's the deal with all of these, and how hard is it going to be to collect them all?

Dead bugs and sad bug catchers aside, as much as I can ramble on about specific topics with amatuer expertise, it's probably best that I consult someone about this. I have a history with programming, but Logic Gates? That's a little beyond my own expertise, so instead, we're going to have a professional help us out with this.

My expert today on the matter of Logic Gates is someone who goes by the pseudonym of Bob Johnson, a graduate with a degree in Electrical Engineering. More than enough to talk about Logic Gates in its entirety! But I'm the one writing this, not him, so we'll be covering bare essentials to understanding these gate thingies.

We're going to do this bit by bit, so we'll be covering the different Logic Gates as they're conveniently arranged in this image:

Credit: ConfidentBottle

We'll start with the top left group first, featuring four different Logic Gate bricks (one of to which we've seen before, that being the second to the left):

Credit: ConfidentBottle

We'll be consulting our friend Bob Johnson for these. First off, what are these pieces, and what are their functions?

Bob: "AND, NOT, OR, XOR. AND has 2 inputs and 1 output; the output is only true if both inputs are true. NOT (aka inverter) has 1 input and 1 output; the input is the opposite of the output. OR has 2 inputs and 1 output; the output is only false if both inputs are false. XOR (exclusive or) has 2 inputs and 1 output; the output is only true if exactly 1 input is true. NAND and NOR (not included) output the opposite of an AND gate or an OR gate, respectively, thus they can be made easily with the current pieces by putting an inverter before or after the gate. XNOR (not included) is the same idea for XOR."

Excellent descriptions, and it's interesting to hear that with all of these Logic Gates, not all of them are actually here yet!

Now let's look into the top right section:

Credit: ConfidentBottle

What's with those pieces?

Bob: "[These are] addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, equal, greater than, less than, greater than or equal to, less than or equal to, [&] not equal. The first 4 [top left] seem to be arithmetic and all the rest are for comparisons."

But why would there be arithmetic Logic Gates for a system that is essentially binary in nature?

Bob: "Even though they could be compatible with each other, the binary and arithmetic gates will generally have different applications. An example of a situation where a true/false output would suffice is a light switch that can be either on or off. Arithmetic would be more suitable for a light dimmer, where you would want a range of signal strengths to correspond to a range of possible outputs. It is also worth noting that arithmetic functions can be made out of basic logic gates, but it is nice to have so you don't have to do this every time."

Bob: "In this line of thought, I wonder if the arithmetic gates could give an output in binary, so instead of 1+1 giving a single output of value 2, it could give 2 outputs of values 1 and 0. Probably not useful enough to include. Also it seems likely that the arithmetic gates could output floats (non-integer numbers), so a binary output in that case would just be a big mess."

Credit: Bob Johnson

To break it down, convenience would essentially be the name of the game. Different functions require different gates. So while Logic Gates are essentially binary, the arithmetic exists for convenience and for those numeric results.

Quite a lot to unpack, isn't it? Let's keep going!

What about the bottom left group of Logic Gates?

Credit: ConfidentBottle

How cool are those pieces? Do they live up to their appearance?

Bob: "The bottom left group, if they are bitwise operators as speculated here, will work as follows:"

Credit: Bob Johnson

Bob: "[They] take 2 binary inputs and give 1 binary output, comparing each bit in the first input to its corresponding bit in the second input to determine the corresponding output bit. basically it can do the same thing as a 2-input AND gate, but handle many cases all at once. So having the inputs as 10101 and 01110 outputs 00100, for example. As a side note, the advantage of using a regular AND gate instead of bitwise & could be that it can handle 3 or more inputs to 1 output (still outputting true only if all inputs are true), but it remains to be seen if that functionality will be in Brickadia. To explain next few gates I will just use the same inputs as my previous example, since the idea is the same."

Bob: "Bitwise NAND: inputs 10101, 01100 -> output 11011. Bitwise OR: inputs 10101, 01100 -> output 11101. Bitwise NOR: inputs 10101, 01100 -> output 00010. Bitwise XOR: inputs 10101, 01100 -> output 11001. Bitwise NOT would only have 1 input and would just invert each bit. Bitshift left and right would move each bit to the osition left or right of it, probably with bits that are pushed off the end being discarded, and the resulting empty space on the other end being filled by a 0."

So with all that and how they function, what purpose would they serve in the Logic Gate system?

Bob: "Generally bitwise stuff will probably have more niche applications than the regular logic gates, but there is some use in being able to handle the 2-input logic functions en masse, so instead of having 8 separate 2-input AND gates you could have 1 bitwise & that takes two 8-bit inputs for an 8-bit output. Here is a famous application of the bit shift in John Carmack's fast inverse square root function for Quake 3."

Credit: John Carmack

"This is just as confusing as it looks."

To break it down, bitshifts basically help with simplifying logic calculations just as the arithemitic gates do as previously stated before, where in this case the usage of bitshifts is a little more complicated than the arithmetic uses.

Lastly, let's take a look at the final section of Logic Gates at the bottom right.

Credit: ConfidentBottle

They look like they can do a little bit of math'ing, and I feel like I have an idea as to what they can do. But just so I don't look like an idiot on my own website, I'll ask you: what do they do?

Bob: "The % means modulo, which is basically a remainder like when you do long division, so 9 % 4 outputs 1 because 9/4 is 2 with remainder 1. The % with brackets is probably floored modulo, which just means any decimal results will be rounded down to a whole number. To compare the difference, 9.9 modulo 4 is 1.9, but 9.9 floored modulo 4 is just 1. The floored division is the same idea but for division, so 9.5 / 4 without flooring is 2.375, but floored it will just be 2. I am not really sure what the underlined X means, but it also seems to have options for floor and ceiling. My best guess would be that it gives an average of many inputs since x with a bar over it is usually the symbol for that, but in that case it would be upside down which seems unlikely given the way the x is drawn. Another possibility is that those are just for floor and ceiling, without any other operations involved."

Thank you for saving me from embarrassing myself, Bob Johnson!

From what can be gathered, there's definitely been a lot of thought going into Logic Gates. A couple blurbs ago, I discussed what was possible with Logic Gates in more simple case uses. But some of you may not realize that you can build entire calculators out of Logic Gates. Data storage, arithmetic operations, anything that can traditionally build out of Logic Gates, you can potentially recreate in Brickadia!

Of course, a lot of what you can make with Logic Gates is something you'll likely be able to recreate with Behaviors, considering Behaviors will be a fully fleshed-out scripting language for Brickadia. However, I think the thing that makes Logic Gates neat is the fact that you're able to make things in that particular method, kind of like how you can travel on the road, you can do it either by driving or have someone drive for you.

Now, I think that's a bit enough for speculation today. I wonder who this Bob Johnson person is, he could be any one of us in the community! I guess we'll never know, a true mystery indeed...

Yeah I'll just leave it off like that.