Welcome to today's blurb!

No two-week delay this time!

I would've released today's blurb just a little sooner, but I had to fix up the banner due to a small animation mishap. There were more frames, the only problem is that the animation itself wasn't panning out quite nicely. To put it simply, it kind of sucked. As a result, I spent some time figuring out what to do with the banner. Thinking about it a little bit, especially given what's seen on the banner itself, I thought it'd be funny if it was just a two-frame animation.

On top of that, I slept too early on accident yesterday when I needed to grab some comments for the speculation column, so that took a little but of some extra time as well. What's important though is that the blurb is out, and that the banner is epic.

Other than that, what's the deal here? Why did I draw myself eating a wheel? Well you see, we'll be talking about vehicles today in our speculation column! But to what extent do we talk about vehicles? Will it just be cars? You'll just have to wait and see.

For now, let's take a look at what the community has been up to recently:

Vehicles!

Credit: Tori

Vehicles!

Credit: Sixmorphugus

And so much more!

Credit: Sixmorphugus

It seems like the past couple weeks have been very exciting on the development side of things!

It seems that almost every day, we see a piece of something either new or learn new info about something in reference to vehicles, logic gates, and so much more!

Now what is there to look at with vehicles this time around?

For one, we have proper functionality for steering, as seen in the videos above!

How is that possible?

As of right now, vehicle functionality is specifically dependent on the Engine brick we covered a while back on the blurb. The brick itself, interestingly, got a small touch-up, just like the logic bricks!

Credit: ConfidentBottle

Credit: Sixmorphugus

On top of that, we have a dedicated Wheel Joint brick!

Credit: ConfidentBottle

It seems to handle everything from wheel turning, suspension, to motor functions that can be tweaked fairly precisely.

On top of that, we've also recieved the day of reckoning a series of brand new pieces to go with the servo hinge pieces!

Micro-joints!

Credit: ConfidentBottle

It seems that week by week, we see more significant progress on Brickadia! Even more than that, I still remember how for a string of months, we didn't even get even a drip of development insight on features through recorded or pictured media. Compare that to now, it's incredible!

Now what could we even try to speculate on right now, with all of this? After all, we're seeing a lot right now in terms of what we've been curious about.

Well, when one door closes, another door opens! Some questions may be answered, but now there's even more questions!

Will we get dedicated steering wheel pieces? What about different engine variants? We know that there will be different engine variants, ESPECIALLY on a more micro-scale. How will that work with a lot of the wire connections needed for vehicle movement? With the introduction of micro-joints, is there a difference between how micro-joints keep bricks connected in a stable way versus stud-sized joints? Will there be even bigger servo joints for large connections? Will those connections be more stable for heavier connections as well?

And that's only the tip of the iceberg, check out this thruster brick that was recently introduced!

Credit: ConfidentBottle

What will planes look like? How will things like lift be handled? With that in mind, what about elevons for planes, which act as plane flaps? What will their engine bricks look like? What about vehicles that float along the floor, how will that be handled? Will there be anti-gravity bricks that push back against the ground? Let's not forget about boats, could you imagine a dedicated sail brick? What about propeller bricks?

As we can see, we got a lot to think about. But that doesn't mean we have to consider every single question right off the bat and try to answer them straight down right now. Some of these things might not even be on the minds of the developers at the moment! (But I hope they are cause come on, boats and planes are pretty cool.)

Let's take it one piece at a time:

Steering wheels! What's the deal with that?

As of right now, there are confirmed plans to try and put in steering wheels into Brickadia.

Credit: ConfidentBottle

Based on this, it seems the functionality of steering wheels would largely be cosmetic in that regard, which makes sense as most vehicle functionality is attributed to the Engine brick. Keeping that in mind, I would imagine this would be the same of both steering wheel variants and different vehicle types in that regard. The comment about "adding a splitter" that allows you to isolate a signal from control wires is fairly interesting. Not only could you apply that to something like steering wheels, but to other things like ship rudders, plane flaps, or even non-conventional means! Imagine driving a vehicle but every time you press on the gas, a radio-dish at the top of the vehicle turns. Gnarly idea!

And considering we're bound to see steering wheel variants (based on these comments), it's safe to assume we'll be getting a wide variety of things, from pirate ship steering wheels to the sleekest design you can think of.

Speaking of variants, let's take a moment to relax! After all that thinking, let's turn our brain off and check out some new wheel variants!

Credit: ConfidentBottle

Okay, turn your brains back on, dead-brain activity is over.

Planes. That's something I like to think about, as I am a fan of anything that can float or fly. Will we be getting anything like balloons? What about plane-centric bricks? We do have confirmation on different levers and swithces making it into the game, so it's fairly likely that we'll be seeing plane switches get in easy peezy. But what about something as simple as a navigation ball? In a dark and stormy night, I need to make sure my golden-covered highly overmodified SR-71 is flying at the correct angle! If I had to take a guess on that, considering how complicated it would be to make a navigation ball in a decently small scale (out of microbricks, no less), I can picture there being a dedicated piece for that, considering the amount of information that would be attainable from that.

But what about aspects of a vehicle that rely on certain requirements? We all love gas, and I personally love shelling out $50 for some fine gas (as I'm sure, again, that we all do). Or what about things like speedometers, or any gauge-related bricks? After all, I need to know how much of my well-priced gas I have left!

For that, let's ask one of the developers, Sixmorphugus!

Will there be dedicated pieces for things like speedometers, fuel trackers, or gauge-related trackers?

"No plans atm, interesting idea for later."

Will it be possible to have vehicles rely on quantities of things like fuel/gas?

"You can do that with wires right now, just wait for the engine to be active (player driven) and start subtracting from a value on some gate somewhere once the value hits 0, force the engine to turn off by disabling it (No idea how you could make a nice refuel though)."

Well, you heard it here!

One thing to always keep in mind for developer answers though is that while these answers are given now, they only are given in the now. What some answers will be later on are bound to change, or perhaps those changes will come sooner than you might expect. I can completely believe that guage-related trackers are bound to make it into the game at some point, and I can imagine that at some point, maybe the process for giving vehicles fuel of somekind will be simplified. I also just want to have gasoline so I can dump it into a hole and light it up. No one would be hurt though, I promise.

Now let's take a detour. We're about to take a step into some deep territory. Rockets. Why am I talking about it? You can probably guess why. I see a jet-engine thruster, my mind goes places. YOUR mind would go places. I have no doubt in my mind that we'll eventually see rocket thrusters of some type, but there are other aspects of a rocket I get concerned about. Now if you REALLY know me, you know I am a huge fan of Kerbal Space Program. As a matter of fact, I can say right now that I was one of the people heavily disappointed by KSP2's launch and untimely, literal death! So knowing what I do about rockets, could they even be feasible in Brickadia?

I believe on a small-scale, they are certainly possible, and I'd be a bit surprised if dedicated pieces didn't end up in the game somehow. But what about things like decoupling pieces? In other words, the means to separating different stages of a rocket. Another thought to take in, which some of you may have not thought about, is using vehicles in the SPACE map. I'm probably reminding some of you right now that a space map even exists in the first place, players and non-players alike. For zero-gravity environments, how am I meant to reorient my vehicles? How do I even turn in space?

In the real world, solutions for that obviously exist. They're called Reaction Control Systems! Here's an example of what one looks like:

Credit: NASA (who else would I credit?)

And for people who shudder at the thought of looking at real world hardware and not understanding it, here is a brain-friendly picture in a familiar form:

Credit: LEGO (I have the remastered set of this spaceship, it's pretty awesome)

I think it's absolutely inevitable that a piece like this, in some way, shape, or form, will make it into the game. If not, then I'd guess that an alternative may appear instead that doesn't rely on propellant or thrust of any kind. Instead, I can imagine it may arrive in the form of an automated vehicle stabilizer! What's that? In the real world, something-something gyros and gimbals! In this game? Probably just a dedicated piece that just does it for you!

Tangent over. While there are a lot of other questions that may be lurking, there are some I also decided to get some comments on from Sixmorphugus:

For joints, will we be seeing bigger joint pieces? Will the size-differences for joints account for the needed stability for differently-scaled builds?

"No, you will only have the macro and micro joint. [...]joint brick size doesn't actually affect joint rigidity, a PhysX joint exists at an infinitely small point with the same rules no matter how it was created, so larger ones wouldn't help with that."

What about different vehicle types? Planes and boats exist, and they operate on different parameters. Will separate engine bricks exist for those sorts of vehicles?

"Yes but potentially not for EA1."

Will I be able to drink gasoline in-game?

"No, but you can have SODA and [UNKNOWN RED POTION NOT REGULATED BY THE FDA]"

They can't keep getting away with this, I want my gasoline! I want to drink it!

Joking aside, it's actually pretty interesting that joints actually operate in that way. To simplify what's being said, anything that deals with joint rigidity isn't affected by the scale of joints themselves as they currently work, so having a small micro-joint versus a macro-joint doesn't change anything apart from how visible they are in reference to the connected bricks.

Different engines though, that will be exciting! While it may be disappointing to hear that we probably wouldn't get it for EA1, that doesn't mean someone won't find a way to make it work. Not only that, I can sort of picture EA1 as being a starting ground for a lot of major features in the future, and what we're getting right now as the fun tools to play around in the rabbit-poop infested sandbox. We just got to wait after to break into our dad's shed and grab ourselves a shovel and a concrete driller.

So with all this vehicle business, there's still a lot for me to cover, and I've only scratched the surface on what we've been shown in reference to developer content.

What else do we have to look forward to, though? Well, let's just take a brief detour first, I think we need to take a drive to the mall and take a look at some new cosmetics for our avatar. I just got a new car too, so hop on in! We're riding in style.

Credit: Sixmorphugus