The day has come! Start up your launcher and get right into the game with us, or download it now if you haven't already.

Honestly, getting this changelog ready in time was a big task alone, with how many changes we've had to read through to write it! But here we go. Hope the game's downloading in the background. Get cozy.

This update unexpectedly took us a lot longer to prepare than planned, but now it's out and we hope you're as happy as we are! (I wonder, could this be because of all the changes we added that weren't originally planned??)

With the new automatic update infrastructure set up, we hope to be able to bring you much more frequent (but smaller) updates in the future, so stay tuned!

Highlights

Entirely Redesigned UI

All of the UI in Brickadia has been recreated! UI is now standardized and consistent throughout the game, with great improvements to the Saving, Loading, Minigame and Avatar UI. You can now save and load...

Presets! Tired of setting up that Minigame, or you don't want to lose that special custom avatar you worked hours on? No need to worry, just create a named preset and all settings will be saved!

See our blog post about the UI!

Brick Components

Plug.

Brick Components is our brand new system that allows you to add various features to your bricks, including lights, items, and audio! Enchance your builds dramatically with the quick and easy-to-use Applicator tool. Copy and paste is fully supported as well!

In this version, you'll be able to play with:

• Point Light
• Directional Light
• Item Spawn
• Audio Player

See our blog post about the Audio component and more!

Player Parts

Click.

A5 introduces the brand new Player Parts system, which lets you attach hats, arms, legs, heads, hands, backpacks, glasses, masks and so much more! We're happy to announce that the avatar editor has nearly 100 unique player parts to choose from!

Drag and drop parts onto your player, or simply click on the part to add. All parts are completely colorable as well. With the highly improved parts painter, you no longer need to click in a clunky UI to change colors. Simply pick the color you want, and paint your player!

See our blog post for more about the development of parts.

Latency Compensation & New Weapons

It turns out latency compensation was pretty broken in Alpha 4, all caused by a single line of code. In other words, as a client, your weapons didn't hit when they should. That's fixed now! The higher your ping is, the more of a difference this will make for you.

See our weapons blog post about our weapon making process.

Graphical Improvements

With the upgrade to the latest version of Unreal Engine, we have quite a few new graphics enhancements to give you! Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI) is a brand new way to see the game. Shadows are darker when they should be and light bounces! Be warned, SSGI is fairly performance heavy!

In addition to that, we've improved the lighting from A4. No more brown dust! We've enabled light shafts, which will make your builds look more heavenly! Water has been completely overhauled, introducing new scattering and absorbtion parameters to more accurately simulate water.

Transparent bricks now use Forward Shading, which means they will recieve specular highlights from lights! The Hologram material now uses world-space coordinates instead of screen-space ones, which dramatically improves how it looks. We've also changed the ghost brick material to be much easier to see.

Massive Performance Optimizations

Alpha 5 introduces the brand new Brick LOD system, which will dramatically increase performance for large builds. Far away bricks will be simplified, and their meshes combined to produce a much more optimized mesh.

See our blog post about the nitty gritty details of that!

Automatic Updates

Starting in Alpha 5, you won't have to keep making a mess in your Downloads folder anymore! We've now got a proper installer and launcher to install these updates fully automatically on all supported platforms.

Detailed Changelog (CL5921)

This is not an exhaustive list, as Alpha 5 contains more than two thousand changes from Alpha 4. We summarized and organized the changes that will be most relevant to you.

Weapons

• Weapon System

  • Fixed latency compensation during hit detection. It should now work as well as it originally was intended to. The higher your ping is, the more your experience will be improved by this.
  • Added physics and sounds to weapon magazines, clips, ejected casings, etc.
  • Player shoulders are lowered while in first person.
  • Improved the radial damage calculation.

• New Weapons

  • Added Barrage Launcher.
  • Added Bazooka.
  • Added Twin Cannon.
  • Added Minigun.
  • Added Derringer.
  • Added Flintlock Pistol.
  • Added Revolver.
  • Added Lever Action Rifle.
  • Added Hunting Shotgun.
  • Added Super Shotgun.
  • Added Grenade Launcher.
  • Added Anti-Materiel Rifle.
  • Added Bullpup Rifle.
  • Added Classic Assault Rifle.
  • Added Semi-Auto Rifle.
  • Added Suppressed Assault Rifle.
  • Added Auto Shotgun.
  • Added Tactical Shotgun.
  • Added Heavy SMG.
  • Added Micro SMG.
  • Added Tactical SMG.

• Updated Weapons

  • Refreshed Pistol with a new model, new sounds, and new animations.
  • Refreshed Assault Rifle.
  • Refreshed Sniper Rifle.
  • Refreshed Submachine Gun.
  • Refreshed Shotgun and renamed it to the Pump Shotgun.
  • Updated and improved Rocket Jumper appearance.
  • Rebalanced most weapons.

UI

• General

  • Added presets system to most dialogs, which let you save and load your customizations. This includes all the settings; mini-games; player customization; and the environment.

• Main Menu

  • All-new interface.
  • Added blog widget that fetches articles from here.
  • Added the ability to customizer your avatar.

• In-Game HUD

  • New fonts, colors, hints, kill log, brick downloading progress, etc.
  • New pause menu.

• Avatar Editor

  • All-new interface.
  • Completely reimagined the avatar editor for the new player parts system.
  • Integrated presets for your custom avatars.

• Catalog

  • All-new interface.
  • Catalogs are now integrated in many more places, such as when selecting starting items in a minigame.

• Player List

  • All-new interface.
  • Added server and player details.
  • Added ability to manage roles of other players.
  • Added ability to report players to Global Moderators.
  • Ability to switch between a minigame-specific and full view of the list.

• Load and Save Bricks

  • All-new interface.
  • Added folder support and a fully fledged save browser that can create files and folders, move them around, copy/cut/paste them, delete them, search them, etc. The browser supports both a tile view mode with thumbnails and a compact list view mode.
  • Added screenshots to saves and displayed them in the UI. You can view the full screenshot for a specific save.

• Minigame Editor

  • All-new interface.
  • Fully reorganized minigame settings into two new tabs.
  • Integrated presets for entire minigames.

• Server Settings

  • All-new interface.
  • Integrated maps list so you can now easily change the current map on your server.
  • Improved permissions settings, can now explicitly deny a permission with a custom role.

• Environment Settings

  • Updated interface and available settings.

• Options

  • All-new interface split into multiple pages.
  • Integrated presets for each page.

• Chat

  • New font.
  • Added monospace text formatting.
  • Added tons of new emoji.
  • Fixed chat layout on less wide monitors.
  • Fixed chat being cut off after two lines.

• Misc

  • New simple dialogs.

Building

• General

  • Entirely rewrote the building mechanics. Placing bricks is now more intuitive, less clunky, and much more powerful with extended features such as reorienting bricks, micro-shift in mouse mode, full selector row previews, and many more.
  • Reduced the maximum brick size from 200 studs to 100 studs. This allows for more densely packed bricks, and improves collision update performance. Cuboid bricks beyond the new limit from previous versions will be converted to multiple smaller bricks.

• Applicator

  • Added the Applicator tool, which allows you to add components to bricks. You can have one of each component type on a brick. The component types available in this release are
  • Added Audio Component: Plays looping sounds from the brick.
  • Added Item Spawn Component: Attaches a resizable item that players can pick up.
  • Added Point Light Component: Emits light from the brick in all directions. Fully customizable and can optionally have real-time shadows.
  • Added Spot Light Component: Emits light from the brick in a cone shape. Fully customizable and can optionally have real-time shadows.

• Selector

  • Improve usability of multi select dragging by expanding the box between the first and last hovered brick, instead of continuously expanding to cover all hovered bricks, which often resulted in incorrect boxes and having to start over.
  • The Selector and Resizer tools now highlight the resize handles on hover and on drag.
  • The resize handles are now automatically scaled to a consistent size on screen.

• Misc

  • Renamed the Brick Tool to the Placer.
  • Renamed the Paint Tool to the Painter.
  • Renamed the Hammer Tool to the Hammer.
  • Renamed the Resize Tool to the Resizer.
  • Renamed the Selection Tool to the Selector.
  • Renamed the Blueprint Tool to the Outliner.

Bricks

• Added resizable smooth tiles (no edges on top).
• Added resizable studded cubes.
• Added resizable micro bricks.
• Added resizable micro wedges.

Gameplay

• Added Tap to Sprint option.
• Added default setting to automatically switch to third person on death.
• Added minigame option to force players to use either first or third person.
• Added sounds to Clap emote.
• Added Beckon emote.
• Added Shrug emote.
• Added Think emote.
• Temporarily broke ragdolls. They will occasionally have absurd behavior. Do not be alarmed.

Servers, Hosting

• Permissions can now be left unchanged from lower roles, meaning that you can finally create "Muted", "Building Ban", "Allow Loading", etc. roles that only affect those individual permissions.
• Permissions now have better names, with tooltips.
• Separated more building tools and actions out into permissions.
• Added Chat.Whisper console command.
• Added Bricks.Clear console command.
• Added the ability to silently load saves via console commands.
• Kick and ban messages are now shown to the recipient instead of "connection lost".
• New chat command system with help texts.

Graphics

• Added options to enable a new, very fancy but slow screen-space global illumination effect.
• Updated sky appearance and lighting.
• Updated water appearance.
• Improved skylight behavior and appearance of bricks in shadow.
• Added light shafts to fog.
• Brick transparency sorting has been improved to stop flickering on building.
• The hologram material effects are now world-aligned instead of screen-relative.
• Updated the blocked ghost brick material.

Performance

• Added dynamic level of detail to bricks. Distant bricks are now merged procedurally into simpler, textureless meshes. This, along with other changes, massively improves performance rendering large builds.
• Overhauled many parts of the brick system, massively improving performance of uploading, loading, downloading, modifying, clearing, and just having and using bricks, in terms of FPS, memory usage, time taken, stutter, etc.
• Optimized game startup and loading times.

Player Customization

• General

  • All-new player parts customization system.
  • Temporarily removed the ability to rotate hats. It will return in a future patch.
  • Updated the colorable sections of most parts, giving them more detail.

• Sets

  • Added Cyborg pieces: arms, base, hands, shoes, shoulders, torso, wrists.
  • Added Skeleton pieces: arms, base, hands, head, shoes, torso, wrists.
  • Added Pirate pieces: Pirate Hook wrists and hands, and Peg Legs.

• Accessories

  • Added Bandolier.
  • Added Chestplate.
  • Added Space Marine Armor.
  • Added Tactical Vest.
  • Added Adventure Pack.
  • Added Bookbag.
  • Added Toolbelt.
  • Added 3D Glasses.
  • Added Aviators.
  • Added Monocle.
  • Added Shades.
  • Added Snow Goggles.
  • Added Welding Goggles.
  • Added Balaclava.
  • Added Cat Hairband.
  • Added Headphones.
  • Added Gas Mask.
  • Added Surgical Mask.
  • Added shoulder Epaulettes.
  • Added shoulder Pauldrons.
  • Added Shoulder Guards.

• Body Parts

  • Added Sleeveless arm.
  • Added Racing Glove part.
  • Added Glove Cuff part.
  • Added LCD Wristwatch part.
  • Added Spiked Bracelet part.
  • Added Wristwatch part.
  • Added CRT Monitor head with face sticker support.
  • Added Egg head.
  • Added Striped legs and shoes.
  • Added Thin torso.
  • Added Ducktail hair.
  • Added Swooped hair.

• Headwear

  • Added Altyn hat.
  • Added Angler hat.
  • Added Footman Helmet hat.
  • Added Hardhat.
  • Added Madman hat.
  • Added Pickelhaube hat.
  • Added Space Marine Helmet hat.
  • Renamed Band hat to Headband.
  • Renamed Beanie With Pom Pom hat to Pom Pom Beanie.
  • Renamed Headdress hat to Headwear.
  • Renamed Paperbag hat to Paper Bag.
  • Renamed Scout hat to Scout Hat.
  • Renamed Roman Helmet Plume hat to Plumed Roman Helmet.
  • Renamed Tophat to Top Hat.
  • Renamed Viking hat to Viking Helmet.
  • Removed Bandana Dotted hat.
  • Removed Pumpkin hat.

• Stickers

  • Added a blank face.
  • Added a different smile face, with variants for a stuck-out tongue, and eyebrows.
  • Added a buff chest decal.

Audio

• Improved background music system.
• Added new OST volume from Septilateral.
• Added muffling effects for moving your camera below water.
• Added bullet casing impact sounds and various other weapon sound updates.
• Added many audio loops to play on audio components on your bricks.
• Added compressor for automatic weapons, i.e. the first shots will be louder than the rest.
• Many other miscellaneous audio updates - alpha 5 comes with several hundreds of new sounds!

Engine

• Upgraded to Unreal Engine 4.26.1.
• Upgraded the physics engine to PhysX 4.1.
• Made custom improvements to PhysX 4.1 to improve performance when updating large chunks of bricks.
• Removed support for OpenGL backend which has been deprecated in the engine.
• Vulkan is now the default (and only) backend on Linux.
• Now built with a new compiler, which generates better code for faster loading times and higher framerates in non-GPU-limited scenarios.

Bugfixes

• Hit detection properly adjusts when crouching.
• Brick save files with sections larger than 268 MB no longer crash the game when read.
• Controller camera sensitivity is no longer dependent on the frame rate.
• Fixed some cases where the brick break sound did not play when using the hammer.
• Fixed dual monitor focus on linux.
• Fixed console output buffering incorrectly, leading to difficulty capturing it.
• Fixed equip sounds not playing when equipping a weapon for the first time in first person.

Miscellaneous

• Added the new game launcher system for easier updates in the future.
• Added /Ghost command for moving through bricks and a permission to disable it.
• Several chat messages mentioning brick counts now have thousands separators.
• Widen the sky radius on Plate to 5 times its previous size.
• Updated available chat emotes.

Detailed Changelog (CL5925)

Bugfixes

• Fixed crash entering spectator mode in minigames.
• Fixed crash trying to add a brick component to a public brick.
• Temporarily clamped player limits to 30 to increase server stability.
• Fixed broken team auto sort.

As usual, and especially now, if you have any questions or ideas, feel free to find us on Discord, Twitter, or e-mail.