The second patch for Alpha 5 is now available. Expect it to be a bit rough around the edges, mainly with player animations, as those have been entirely re-implemented to optimize server CPU usage. Please report your findings!

Expect more on how we're improving server CPU usage in a later blog post, as that is an on-going project to support servers with higher player, brick, and component counts.

Custom Color Palettes

The fixed colorset has been replaced with customizable color palettes. Avatars can also be painted with these custom colors, and the server color palette for bricks can be modified on running servers! As with most other interfaces, you can save and share presets of your custom setups.

Upgraded Materials

Transparent colors are gone! Sorry, no more transparency.

But just in time, we added the new Glass material, which lets you make any color transparent. Along with it, materials can now have an intensity slider that adjusts opacity, glow strength, etc.

Inner covered faces of more materials are now hidden, which mainly means that multiple transparent bricks will look better together.

Melee Weapons

Brickadia has gotten its first melee weapon: the Knife! There will be more in the coming patches, and we're planning more mechanics as well. For starters, the Knife can slash, stab, and backstab. All hit detection uses the actual weapon collision and animations.

Player Customization

Your latest batch of new options for player customization: lots of new stickers, new hairstyles (finally!), more hats and accessories, more brains...

Internals & Engine

The Linux version no longer crashes all the time in the Vulkan renderer, and should generally work natively again. It's still rough around the edges, but now it at least runs.

There have been several optimizations as usual, as well as fixes to servers with a large numbers of components.

And Even More

As usual, we only highlight a few headline changes in updates; there's way more to find below, read on!

Detailed Changelog (CL6413)

This is an exhaustive list of every change in the patch.

Building

• Painting

  • Bricks now use colors from a server color palette that can be modified in the server settings. The server color palette can be modified on running servers, and existing bricks optionally updated to the new one. Loading bricks also corrects their colors to the nearest one in the server color palette.
  • Most brick materials now have an intensity slider that can be adjusted by Ctrl-scrolling on the materials tab. Transparent colors have been replaced by a new glass material that can be used with any color from the server color palette, where the intensity slider controls the opacity.
  • Implemented brick coverage layers. Translucent materials like glass and hologram are now covered by opaque materials like plastic, glow, and metallic, but do not cover them back. Glass now covers other glass surfaces.
  • Picking colors from bricks is now allowed even if the color is not found on the server color palette.
  • Updated the default color palette.

• Tools

  • Can now make fine adjustments to the size of selection boxes by holding ctrl while dragging a handle.
  • Can now toggle detached mode by pressing Numpad 0.

UI

• Color Palette Editor

  • Added brand new interface to create and modify color palettes, and save them as presets.

• Minigames

  • Player name distance is now displayed in studs.
  • Minigames no longer drop a large amount of messages in the chat when re-randomizing all teams.
  • Nametags for players outside your current minigame are now partially faded out.

• Load and Save Bricks

  • Added setting for whether colors should be adjusted to the current server palette on load.

• Misc

  • Renamed the "New" button on preset popups to "Save New Preset" to reduce confusion.
  • Added color palette preset selector and a button to open the color palette editor to all color pickers.
  • Color pickers now convert the hex code input from/to sRGB rather than interpreting it as linear, making it compatible with standard web colors.

Gameplay

• Minigames

  • Health regeneration can now be set to negative values, causing players to slowly die unless they collect health pickups.
  • Added settings to hide score, kills and deaths in Deathmatch.
  • Players outside a minigame will no longer spawn on spawn bricks placed by other players who trust them.

• Player

  • Changing the zoom factor with the mouse wheel is now exponential and clamped to a maximum rather than allowing to zoom in until the rendering bricks.

• Weapon System

  • Added work in progress melee attack system.
  • Weapon equip and unequip animations can now take different durations. Standardized unequip time for all weapons to 0.15 seconds.
  • Held weapons are now dropped on death (only a cosmetic effect, for now).
  • Projectiles now push ragdolls (only a cosmetic effect).
  • Projectiles now push dropped weapons.
  • Added experimental zoom on right click, currently only on Anti-Materiel Rifle.

• Weapons

  • Added Knife. Includes a light double swing attack and a heavy stab attack that will instantly kill players on backstabs.
  • Added Magnum Pistol.
  • Added Impact Grenade.
  • Added Impulse Grenade.
  • Added projectile bouncing to Stick Grenade and Grenade Launcher.
  • Updated explosive weapon categorization to split launchers and grenades.

• Weapon Balance

  • Buffed SMG damage.
  • Buffed Tactical SMG damage.
  • Buffed Micro SMG damage.

Maps

• Environment Settings

  • Added setting to disable the stud texture on Plate.

Cosmetics

• Body Parts

  • Added Brain head.

• Headwear

  • Added Medium hair.
  • Added Side Fade hair.
  • Added Bobcut hair.
  • Added Hooded Cap.
  • Added Keffiyeh hat.
  • Added Knight Helmet.
  • Added Fish Bowl hat.

• Accessories

  • Added Space Marine pauldron.
  • Added Trooper pauldron.
  • Added Round Glasses.
  • Added Demon Horns.
  • Added Bandana Mask.
  • Added Neck Gaiter.
  • Added Ski Mask.

• Stickers

  • Added Sailor torso.
  • Added Clown Face face with a masked variant.
  • Added Feminine Neutral face.
  • Added Smile Eyebrows face.
  • Added AE White torso.
  • Added AE Black torso.
  • Added Backpack Straps torso with a zipper variant.
  • Added Dress Shirt torso with a clean variant.
  • Added Dripcadia torso.
  • Added Logo Box torso.
  • Added Logo Brick torso.
  • Added Puffer Jacket torso.
  • Added Ricky Belmondo torso.
  • Added Suit torso.

Servers & Hosting

• Interfaces

  • Added button to customize the server color palette to the advanced server settings tab.

• Performance

  • Skipped attachment of player parts on servers, saving thousands of useless transform updates every frame.
  • Significant performance optimizations to player animations and player movement on servers.
  • Significantly improved deferred initialization and replication speed of builds spread thin over a large number of chunks.
  • Dedicated servers will now run at 60 Hz if possible.

• Console

  • Added ability for chat commands to be called from the console using Chat.Command. Currently allowed for Help, TP, and GetTransform.
  • Added Server.PlayerPositions command.

• Misc

  • Added a permission for sending chat messages, enabled by default.
  • Added /GetTransform chat command.
  • Updated /TP to allow teleporting a player to specific coordinates.

Engine

• Misc

  • Updated to latest 4.26.1 fixes from Epic. Most importantly, the Vulkan renderer on Linux is no longer randomly crashing within a few minutes of play.

Bug Fixes

• Crashes

  • Fixed crash when displaying a thumbnail for a build with invalid image dimensions.
  • Fixed crash caused by overzealous assert in weapon latency compensation.
  • Fixed multiple crashes accessing minigame team before it replicated.
  • Fixed crash during editing minigame team names.
  • Fixed crash receiving invalid blog image.
  • Fixed crash during server startup if a client connects and aborts before the server is registered.

• Building

  • Implemented a bodge to brick component replication to stop it from breaking entirely at high component counts. We now only replicate up to 100 components per tick, also capping how much this can drag down the server performance. This will result in updates to individual components taking longer to replicate, pending replacement by large upgrades to the engine net code in a future patch.
  • Fixed being able to load bricks with materials not available for painting, will now be replaced with plastic.
  • Fixed missing texture array and LOD material versions for blocked ghost bricks.
  • Fixed too dark LOD for micro bricks.
  • Fixed rare misalignment of the building grid when aiming at the sides of a ramp brick on Peaks.
  • Fixed starting to build by pasting a template not correctly opening the quickbar, causing building to deactivate when changing tools.
  • Fixed "Shift Vertically" and "Plate Shift Vertically" doing exactly the same thing. Will now correctly move the brick up a full stud if it currently has an upright plate pivot.

• Minigames

  • Fixed team weight of 0% or capacity of 0 not correctly disabling auto sort to that team.
  • Fixed Bricktionary builder team not having all building permissions by default.
  • Fixed default minigames printing the player join message twice.

• Player

  • Fixed camera arm not correctly centered on head part when dead.

• Weapons

  • Fixed damage direction indicator pointing to the wrong side for radial damage.
  • Fixed weapons held by other players sometimes being invisible after late join.
  • Fixed secondary crosshair not being hidden together with the HUD.
  • Fixed secondary crosshair being shown during equip animations, where it is usually meaningless due to the large movement.

• Interfaces

  • Fixed unpersisted changes confirmation dialog only opening on loading a new avatar preset, now opens on reset to defaults too.
  • Fixed shadow of color picker popups being clickable.
  • Fixed changing colors by typing a value in the text fields on linear color picker popup not correctly committing the new value.
  • Fixed console errors when changing the game mode of a minigame.
  • Fixed opacity field showing in the color picker when editing the opacity is not allowed by the property.
  • Fixed max selection box size not replicated in server settings.

• Engine

  • Fixed active reverb not correctly resetting when changed back to none. Engine was leaving the most recent one enabled forever.
  • Fixed rare cases of flickering from HZB occlusion culling, especially far ends of long tunnels. Engine was sampling depth on the wrong mip level of the HZB.

Detailed Changelog (CL6457)

This is an exhaustive list of every change in the patch.

UI

• Color Palette Editor

  • Added ability to delete a column of colors by right clicking its header, similar to deleting a single color.

Gameplay

• Weapons

  • Added placeholder Impact Grenade Launcher.

Cosmetics

• Headwear

  • Added Pompadour hair.
  • Upgraded the glass material used for Fish Bowl and Motorcycle Helmet, now actually looks like colored glass.
  • Fish Bowl now detaches on death, so other accessories like glasses no longer look like they're magically falling through it.

• Accessories

  • Added Jetpack.
  • Added Optical Reader.

Bug Fixes

• Crashes

  • Fixed crash joining a server while another player is dragging a row of bricks.
  • Fixed crash sorting team array before replication is complete.
  • Fixed crash caused by race condition between switching weapons and animation graph grabbing aim offset.

• Building

  • Fixed color distance function for migrating between palettes.
  • Fixed missing alpha fix when loading server color palette from ini.

• Player

  • Fixed first person hands being visible when dead in first person with force third person on death turned off.
  • Fixed incorrect leaning animations while holding two handed weapons.
  • Fixed crouch animation looping after landing.

• Player Parts

  • Fixed missing LOD group configuration for player parts.

• Weapons

  • Fixed players becoming very large for a single frame when switching from a one handed to a two handed weapon. This was caused by a bug with async animation updates in the engine, and resulted in several glitches like people managing to damage the temporarily oversized parts, flashing the screen of listen server hosts, etc.
  • Fixed unnecessary verbose logging about melee explosion replication.
  • Fixed unnecessary warning messages in the log every time someone unequipped a weapon.
  • Fixed Super Shotgun remaining on screen after death instead of detaching.
  • Fixed Derringer having multiple physics joints.
  • Fixed projectiles being able to damage each other, causing incorrect hit markers.
  • Fixed overzealous LOD transitions for weapon pickups.
  • Fixed Sniper pickup not spinning up close.
  • Fixed broken projectile prediction for throwing grenades.
  • Fixed bouncing grenades colliding with players, which cannot be correctly replicated yet.
  • Fixed bad LOD group on Stick Grenade projectile.

• Interfaces

  • Fixed being unable to change the server color palette when starting a server from the main menu.
  • Fixed being able to load invalid color palettes with opacity values from presets.
  • Fixed blurry blog images on main menu.
  • Fixed missing character limit for color palette group names.
  • Fixed opacity support for color and linear color properties in inspector panels.

• Engine

  • Fixed "Send and Restart" button on crash reporter.