🎃 USBX 0.5.142

✨ Effects

Ever wanted to throw a fireball, summon a tornado, or hit the ground so hard the screen shakes? Meet the Effect Composer. You build an Effect from layers on a timeline and watch it play on a stage, with a player and a test dummy to try it on.

Layers
One sparkle is nice, but what about a hundred?!

• Particles, trails and lights
• 3D shapes
• Beams and ribbons
• Paths: give your projectiles some real moves. Drag the curve on the stage and they follow it, and volleys are just as easy
• Hitboxes, so your effects can actually hit things
• Camera shake and anime-style impact frames!

Looks
Effect looking a little plain? Give it a Look of its own. Start from a ready-made one, or build your own with a node graph: shifting colours, glowing rims, burning edges, swirling noise. There are 66 new textures to work with, too.

Scripting
Play an Effect with effects.play, attach one to anything with effects.attach, and find out what your hitboxes hit:

local effects = require("@usbx/effects")

local fireball = effects.play("Fireball", { follow = player, point = "right_hand" })
fireball.hit:connect(function(target, hitbox)
	-- you decide what a hit does
end)

🖼️ UI editor

Your game's menus are about to look a lot better. We rebuilt the UI editor to be much more accessible and easy to use, with every screen in your place laid out together on one canvas.

Design

• Frames, text, images, buttons, text boxes, lists and progress bars
• Auto layout keeps everything lined up for you, no more nudging pixels
• Components and variants: make a button once, use it everywhere, and update every copy in one go
• Click any text and start typing, right on the canvas
• 15 new fonts

Prototype, no code needed
Want your menus to actually do something? Switch to Prototype and drag from a button to a screen to link them. Buttons can open a screen, stack one on top, go back or close, and you can pick a screen every player sees when they join. Add hover and press effects, keyboard shortcuts and smooth smart animate transitions, then hit Preview to click through the whole thing.

For scripters
A quick guide to showing off UI!

local ui = require("@usbx/ui")

local shop = ui.screen("Shop")
shop.opened:connect(function(player, screen)
	screen:bind({ tokens = 250 })
end)

And closed tells you when it's gone again.

🛠️ Studio

Your work is safe
Ever lost an hour of building to a crash? That's over.

• Ctrl+S works everywhere in Studio (We made a mistake... and it wasn't working before... whoops!)
• Autosaves keep copies of every place for you
• Crash recovery: if Studio closes unexpectedly, your unsaved work is waiting when you open it again
• A broken place file can no longer wipe the place you have open

Webhooks
Want your Discord to know the moment someone reaches a level you thought only unemployed folks would achieve? Now it can. Send messages to Discord or any other service straight from your game. Set one up on your game's Webhooks page, then send it from a script or the Send Webhook node:

local webhooks = require("@usbx/webhooks")

webhooks.send("lvlwebhook", { player = player.name, level= 9999})

The webhook's address stays on the website, so it never ends up in your scripts.

Your servers, live
Curious what's happening in your game right now? The new Servers page shows every server running it, with its live output. Just published an update? Restart them all onto the new version in one click, or stop just one.

Polish

• Undo, prefabs, groups, teams and the Explorer are much more reliable
• The script editor handles emoji properly, and format on save and breakpoints behave
• Building together with friends is smoother
• Output and Live errors are in the File menu

🌄 Graphics

Games look a lot better this update, and run faster too.

Lighting

• Sun shadows are sharper and reach much further, with soft shadows on Ultra
• Lamps and other lights can cast shadows now. Turn on Casts Shadows and watch the mood change
• Richer lighting and more natural colour all round
• Parts have slightly bevelled edges that catch the light

Automatic quality
The game now adjusts its own graphics to stay smooth.

New settings
For those with the battle stations:

• A new Ultra level
• FSR 2 upscaling for a sharp picture at higher frame rates
• SMAA anti-aliasing for smoother edges

Performance
And for those with weaker potatoes.... big maps draw faster than before.

🎮 Playing

Getting in

• 17 Server regions in total. Now there's no excuse for the ping~
• The client now actually tells you why you failed to connect... shocking.

Feel

• Menus look right on any window or screen size (Scaling for 4k...!)
• Cutscenes ease back into your camera, and their captions fit smaller screens
• Zooming and turning stay smooth even when things get busy
• Touch controls feel the same on every device (Android build soon tm)

Fixes
We fixed some of your complaints too...

• Space no longer presses the same button twice
• Typing in chat no longer skips through NPC conversations
• The scoreboard keeps up as players come and go
• The pause menu works with a profile open
• Long emoji messages send properly
• Avatars load more reliably, and NPCs finally wear their shoes
• Your settings survive even if the settings file gets damaged

Crash reports
Want to help us fix bugs faster? The game and Studio can send us crash and error reports. They always ask first, and you can turn them off any time in Options.