S&box is now an open source game engine

https://sbox.game/news/update-25-11-26

by MaximilianEmel • 8 months ago

429 151 8 months ago

sbox.game

tapoxi2• 8 months ago

It depends on Source 2, which is not open source.

charcircuit• 8 months ago

Originally people thought the Source 2 sdk, was going to be released with Half Life Alyx, but it never materialized.

super256• 8 months ago

It feels like Valve's management changed a few years (decade?) ago. I remember when they were still shipping SDKs and proper mod support, even for their multiplayer games. Today they are just killing everything that could divert revenue from their cash cow CS2 and shipping a half baked js-based scripting engine for their maps. (And in the meanwhile they kill fan projects like CS:Legacy, which is a whole game and not even a mod, with their army of lawyers. I don't think stuff like this would have happened 13+ years ago).

jsheard4• 8 months ago

That's pretty shaky ground too, even if you can overlook the foundation being closed source, Valve aren't really known for supporting their engines very well beyond their own internal needs. They're not trying to be Epic or Unity.

The most obvious aspect to that is that Source 2 doesn't support consoles. Valve don't need it, so they didn't implement it.

embedding-shape5• 8 months ago

Valve aren't really known for supporting their engines very well beyond their own internal needs.

Valve has a long history of supporting the modding community and outside users of Source, not sure where you're getting your information from but I don't think they've worked with the Source engine before. One of the biggest and most popular mods of all time was built on Source, and took the world by storm, with pretty big support by Valve through the years as well. Eventually they even bought the whole IP.

Rohansi9• 8 months ago

Valve aren't really known for supporting their engines very well beyond their own internal needs

They don't need to. S&box uses a fork of Source 2 that is maintained by Facepunch, with Valve's upstream changes merged in as needed.

torginus• 8 months ago

Dude. People are playing and making Gmod and HL2 mods and maps to this day. How many 20+yo game engines can say the same?

Stevvo• 8 months ago

The comments are hilarious. Every file has multiple profanity-filled rants.

fragmede• 8 months ago

omg it's great: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3AFacepunch%2Fsbox-public%2...

benbristow• 8 months ago

https://github.com/Facepunch/sbox-public/blob/8b1d58d524c37f...

Log.Error( "Fucked" );

GaryBluto• 8 months ago

I'd be interested in calculating the average profanity per-file count for projects that get open-sourced like this.

TehCorwiz2• 8 months ago

It’s a lot. And more profanity often means better code.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/is-code-that-contain...

Hamuko• 8 months ago

Searching for "fuck" yields 81 files. Searching for "shit" yields 146 files. Only two files for "cunt" though.

LtdJorge• 8 months ago

Nothing new if you’ve read code from other Facepunch/Garry projects like their Steamworks SDK :D

hamdingers• 8 months ago

Their site appears down, here's the github repository: https://github.com/Facepunch/sbox-public

iFire• 8 months ago

Can we use the team fortress 2 release of source?

Oh. It's a modding sdk.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013

rstat1• 8 months ago

and also source 1

terabytest• 8 months ago

I really struggle to wrap my head around how this engine works. I haven’t used it, but I have experience with Source 1 and its systems and I imagine Source 2 is an extrapolation of that. But I really can’t wrap my head around how they’ve turned it into a scene-based game engine when Source 2 is map-based, how they’ve managed to build a completely different editor that still leverages Hammer maps somehow, and all the other stuff.

1bpp• 8 months ago

I've never tried s&box but Source 2 did overhaul the map and asset pipeline quite a bit, everything's a plain mesh instead of BSP and maps are also regular .dmx files, so I'd imagine it's slightly easier to build tools that work on top of it

Rohansi9• 8 months ago

It is a heavily modified Source 2.

3rodents• 8 months ago

For those unfamiliar, the studio behind S&box is Facepunch, creators of Garry's Mod and Rust. Facepunch as a company doesn't get much attention but they're wildly successful. Started as just some guy in a bedroom, now ~$100m/year in revenue (all via Steam), $100m in the bank, ~100 employees and almost entirely a company of game developers (maybe 20% of employees are administrative staff). Still owned and ran by the founder, Garry. S&box (and Garry's Mod and Rust) is pure game developers making things they want to make.

rootlocus• 8 months ago

Oooo, I remember Garry Newman! I found his UI library GWEN (GUI Without Extravagant Nonsense) when I was still in uni and working on my game engine. It's been abandoned for 9 years now, nice to see he's still working on cool tech.

[1] https://github.com/garrynewman/GWEN

Rohansi9• 8 months ago

He also made the UI framework used by S&box. It's based on HTML/CSS + Razor but is not rendered with a browser.

https://sbox.game/dev/doc/systems/ui/razor-panels/

echelon2• 8 months ago

That's an amazing story.

I really like all the cultural oddities that Garry's Mod spawned. All of the indie animation. It was a big piece of machinima / virtual filmmaking / YouTube history and absolutely paved the way for VTubing and Unreal Engine in film.

Any idea if Facepunch or Valve retain rights to "Skibidi Toilet"?

lookingdesk• 8 months ago

The Hollywood development company that bought the rights to Skibidi and are developing it filed a DMCA strike against Garry's Mod. It got resolved, but no one involved is talking.

ValveFan6969• 8 months ago

Skibidi Toilet was made in Source Filmmaker.

raincole• 8 months ago

Isn't Rust Unity-based? Was he just too fed up with Unity and decided to roll his own engine?

potatoman22• 8 months ago

I'd guess S&box is more an extension of Garry's Mod rather than a reaction to Unity

hnuser1234562• 8 months ago

S&box was based on UnrealEngine 4 until late 2020. I think Garry wanted to use the latest and greatest engine, then Valve continued to be friendly with him, and even though Valve wanted Source2 to be a VR platform, it was clear desktop was going to remain relevant, but the content creation tools on SteamVR Environments were a cut-down version of what was actually used to make Half-Life Alyx, but they gave Garry all the tools, and he moved to Source2, and built a .net "framework" to make it faster to develop and iterate in Source2. So Garry's tools are now an open version of the closed tools that Valve didn't want to release that they used to make Alyx.

Finally there's another serious competitor to UE and Unity.

sznio• 8 months ago

Could assume that.

S&box was initially developed on top of Unreal Engine, but in a backend-agnostic design. It's more like a framework/runtime meant to be portable to any backend engine. Once Source 2 released, S&box was ported to that.

I wouldn't call it an engine because of that. S&box is open source, but you can't run it without a closed-source backend.

Valve isn't keen on releasing Source 2 as widely as Source, and I feel like soon, S&box will be declared the official API interface for the engine, while the backend remains unstable. Kinda like Win32 vs NT.

adito• 8 months ago

Oh, you mean Rust (the game[1]), not Rust (programming language[2]).

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/252490/Rust/

[2] https://rust-lang.org/

Unai• 8 months ago

I occasionally play Rust but I've never written a line of Rust, so almost everyday I do a double-take when reading HN. So its pretty amusing to see HN be the one getting mixed up for a change.

stevefan1999• 8 months ago

As someone who both plays the game and used the language at work, and used to do cheat development, I always wonder if I can write a Rust cheat in Rust.

jmtame2• 8 months ago

The origin story of Rust is classic: they got tired of Day Z and wanted to make it better, so they hired some random contractor to copy Day Z with elements of Fortnite and Minecraft, the developer complains that he's entitled to more money from the success of the game, lawsuit follows, and then Facepunch supposedly claims the original version was so buggy they have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. Unclear if they were just trying to start fresh so the lawsuit wouldn't follow them forever, but it started out as just a clone of another game and they turned it into a hugely successful business (and an incredible game). Most games have a short shelf life, but I've watched at least over the past 4-ish years, and the rate that they continue to push changes is impressive.

ProfessorZoom• 8 months ago

i miss the old facepunch. on gmod i have a couple dozen IP mods. on s&box i made call of duty zombies gamemode and was perma banned. all cause they can make more money, but they forget mods like that is why their games are popular

justinclift• 8 months ago

The license: https://github.com/Facepunch/sbox-public/blob/master/LICENSE...

quantummagic• 8 months ago

MIT + copyright retention requirement

Except all third party components that are included in the source, maintain their own license.

whywhywhywhy• 8 months ago

It's built on Source 2 so that license isn't the full story

7bit• 8 months ago

As a web dev, I pronounce that sampersandbox.

remix2000• 8 months ago

S&box huh

Topgamer7• 8 months ago

I always enjoyed Garry's blog.

It just seemed like a public diary. And a place to vent about dev,life,w/e. He seems to be unapologetic-ally himself.

Although I was pretty sure there used to be more posts (although maybe I'm conflating his posts there with his contributions to his old forums.)

https://garry.net/posts/

nosmokewhereiam• 8 months ago

Woohoo, G man made it to HN! I believe in this project and am very hopeful as new game modes and models are added

jquaint• 8 months ago

This is cool, though I'm reluctant to give praise when they have been so weird with Linux support on their games.

It was annoying after buying Rust to learn that you can't play on official servers on Linux. The game runs fine on Linux, the devs just don't allow it.

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/survival-crafting/rust-develop...

jsheard4• 8 months ago

They're pretty upfront about the reason - their anticheat supports Linux, but enabling it would make it much easier to cheat because it's not nearly as effective on there, and they decided the cons outweigh the pros.

Apex Legends went through the same issue when they enabled Linux support, cheaters swarmed to Linux en-masse because it was so trivial to evade detection even with free/public cheats, and after a year or so the devs threw in the towel and blocked Linux again.

They're not doing this out of spite, they'd be happy to take your money if there were no downside, but unfortunately it is a trade-off for games which are sensitive to being ruined by cheaters. At least for now.

ThatPlayer2• 8 months ago

Yeah I'd say it's not accurate to say it's the same anticheat. Only the same name. It's like saying Excel supports iPad. Except Excel on iPad doesn't support VBA, so any more complicated spreadsheet will not work.

I don't think cheaters are swarming to Linux, but part of the issue with Apex Legends is that Linux support is done through Proton, through the Windows version of the game, because there no Linux version of Apex Legends. So now you've got a backdoor for everyone on Windows to run the less secure anticheat.

Solvable maybe by having a separate Linux version of the game, but that's also more supported needed.

matheusmoreira7• 8 months ago

Hope that never changes. Linux has enough problems without invasive kernel mode anticheat malware trying to install itself on our systems.

It was bad enough that we had to put up with nvidia's proprietary nonsense if we wanted hardware acceleration. Things have finally started to improve. They have finally started open sourcing things. Now that things are finally getting better this anticheat nonsense shows up. You gotta be kidding me.

Nobody needs a bunch of game companies feeling entitled to full access to our computers. You'd have to be nuts to let game companies run ring zero code on your system. You want their nonsense absolutely contained and isolated, not deep in your kernel.

Here's a thought: they don't own our computers, we do. We own the CPU. We own the RAM. We own the motherboard. If we want to edit their game's memory while its running, it's our god given right as the owners of the machine the game is running on. Any attempt to stop us from doing so is an affront to our freedom. The mere attempt to do so with "anticheating" kernel malware is offensive. The audacity.

Cheating at video games is an exercise in computer freedom. I realize I'm defending scoundrels here and it doesn't matter in the slightest. Our computing freedom is orders of magnitude more important than video games. I want them to suck it up and accept it. That is the price of freedom. If they want to be on Linux, it should be on our terms.

Don't care about this ideological stuff? Here's the sort of risk you're accepting when you opt into this bullshit:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/fs-labs-flight-simulator-pas...

Corporation thinks its the FBI and starts shipping a browser stealer to users to "catch pirates". Bonus points for exfiltrating the data on an unencrypted channel!

https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1cibw9r/valorant...

https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/634974-...

Screenshots your screen and exfiltrates it to their servers.

https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...

https://twitter.com/TheWack0lian/status/779397840762245124

https://fuzzysecurity.com/tutorials/28.html

https://github.com/FuzzySecurity/Capcom-Rootkit

A literal privilege escalation as a service "anticheat" driver!

Game companies give negative amounts of shit. If you trust them you're out of your mind.

hypercube33• 8 months ago

Anticheat has to stop being hostile and move to zero trust client server models. Stop giving clients enough data to snipe players across the map. We can probably get someone smart enough to write an model to overlord the server and realize when someone is wall hacking or moving faster than they should be able to pretty easy - we have the compute these days.

Something has to change to move away from these rootkit antivirus like apps looking for exploits.

Rohansi9• 8 months ago

The game runs fine on Linux, the devs just don't allow it.

The native Linux build never worked that well. Something was always broken because Unity's Linux support is/was spotty. Upgrading Unity versions would break random things.

Anticheat is the issue holding back Proton support, though.

seg_lol• 8 months ago

I heard Valve was going to Open Source the Source Engine when they launched the Steam Machine.

serf• 8 months ago

Once you have access to the developer preview, please use developer docs and discord to figure stuff out. Yes, I hate that every community is moving to discord and no-one uses forums anymore too, but it's the way the world is.

that cute snide comment won't somehow ensure that all of your community discussion isn't lost to discord-rot in a few short years.

keep your fate in your own hands..

(unless you just don't care)

cyberrock• 8 months ago

Give how abruptly Facepunch forums went down last time, I'm not sure if Discord is the one to worry about in this equation.

polski-g• 8 months ago

There are several daemons for discord to post all chats for a server into an HTML document.

Detchibe• 8 months ago

Garry literally shut down Facepunch, which was a huge repository of community discussion for GMod, on a whim so I don't think he's in a place to whine about the Discordification of game communities

qingcharles2• 8 months ago

I really feel like that name is going to cause them issues with the other game builder with the same name:

https://www.sandbox.game/en/

Banditoz• 8 months ago

I have never heard of this. It looks like a crypto thing. Can they really hold a candle to Facepunch?

qingcharles2• 8 months ago

They were pretty big at one point, though they've been losing traction. Their investors seem to have fairly deep pockets (hundreds of millions). Their software (game maker and client) are really well-developed and excellent. The crypto means you can trade any game assets freely, which is great, but also traditionally made it hard for new players who aren't into crypto (they just added credit cards).

Probably has the same resources as Facepunch, but nowhere near the following or players.

Vermeulen2• 8 months ago

I don't understand what they got basing off the Source engine. Maybe it made sense when they started 6 years ago - to allow using Hammer and such. But at this point they've made their own editor, networking, scene system... why is it still attached to a giant legacy codebase.

LelouBil2• 8 months ago

It's Source 2, its not legacy

Vermeulen2• 8 months ago

Source2 is the giant legacy codebase I was referring to.

debugnik3• 8 months ago

Didn't they start using Unreal Engine for S&box, then pivoted? Something must have been better for them on the Source side.

bangaladore3• 8 months ago

Looks like a serious competitor to Unity. Modern C# is really easy to pick up for beginners (that's actually how I started learning programming back around 2010).

What does monetization look like? Can you ship standalone games? Source 2 licensing requirements? Is this closer to Unity or closer to Roblox when it comes to publishing?

unavailableuser• 8 months ago

You can't ship standalone games yet, they're currently in talks with Valve, lawyers talking to lawyers to try and make this happen. Right now, they have a Play Fund, and pay creators for minutes played, similar to Fortnite. This is definitely closer to Roblox for now, but yeah standalone coming soon hopefully..

needle0• 8 months ago

A major advantage of using modern game engines is the multiplatform support. This seems pretty weak on that front.

bangaladore3• 8 months ago

I haven't look into it much, but, Source 2 supports all major desktop platforms and even all mobile platforms. Dotnet supports all those platforms as well.

So I'm not certain why S&box is Windows only, but my guess is that's just temporary.

jim201• 8 months ago

Looks like they’re positioning themselves as an open-source Roblox competitor. That would be awesome. Especially so if they follow through on the promise of standalone mode.

I’m interested in how they’re sandboxing C# code. Seems like an engineering problem full of pitfalls. I’ll definitely be peeking at this!

DeathArrow• 8 months ago

Is this a competitor for Unity and Godot?

debugnik3• 8 months ago

More like Roblox at the moment. It could compete with Unity/Godot if they arrange a deal for standalone games with Valve, as it builds on top of Source 2.

igleria• 8 months ago

I feel the call of the valve hammer editor now (ok, that is a 20 year old memory so hopefully this engine has better map making tools)

debugnik3• 8 months ago

AFAIK this can use both the new Hammer for Source 2 and its own Unity-like editor. Hammer is one of the few editors with actual level-design tools still maintained, most other engine's editors can't do much more than drop static meshes and prefabs around.

cedws2• 8 months ago

I've been following S&box for probably over 10 years at this point. It's been obvious for the last 5+ years that the vision isn't "Garry's Mod 2" anymore but maybe something else, like a Roblox-like metaverse. I'm unsure where this project is going but they seem to have smart developers and a lot of passion so hopefully it works out.

I would caution Facepunch though that what made their past games a success wasn't perfection. In the case of Gmod I would actually say imperfection was the charm.

Obviously this isn't the Source 2 code, that's up to Valve to open source if they want.

Does this mean you need Source 2 to develop with S&box?

bangaladore3• 8 months ago

Does this mean you need Source 2 to develop with S&box?

Maybe I'm wrong, but S&box is essentially a game developed with Source 2, thats purpose is to expose internal APIs and wrap them for users to build their own games with. So you develop your thing in S&box that happens to be made with Source 2, but you don't care about that. Basically Roblox.

cedws2• 8 months ago

Ah ok so this is more of a S&box SDK. I misinterpreted this announcement and thought they were basically just releasing S&box for people to fork.

bullen• 8 months ago

Seems this generates some sort of shim that calls source 2 dynamic lib.

jmtame2• 8 months ago

Rust has so many compelling features as a game. It was the first game where I felt like I thought about it while I wasn't playing it, because your character remains "in the game" and your base can be raided even if you log off. I don't play a ton of online games, but that was a very new and different concept when I first discovered Rust.

The game reminds me of sitting down at a poker table in a casino. It's very unforgiving - you grind, invest a lot of time, and make calculated bets as to whether you can win or lose a raid, but you can instantly lose everything in a failed raid.

I wish someone would make a browser-based version that was fun to play, and I've thought about it for some time, but the struggle is scoping an MVP that is as compelling given the constraints (eg a 2d or top-down version makes it harder to do things like build multi-story buildings and raid them).

koolala• 8 months ago

Could it be ported to Source 1 now?

aranw• 8 months ago

I really like the evidence for the bug fix for "VR not rendering" in the "Fixed" section

jokoon• 8 months ago

I don't understand the point of this thing.

Maybe competing with other engines, but it's hard to know how good enough this will be.

The age of mods is over, we're in the age of engines now, I don't think they will catch up.

Valve is not a game company anymore, they out source everything.

Rohansi9• 8 months ago

Valve is not a game company anymore, they out source everything.

Interesting take when they have (at least) one upcoming game and two released games in development.

leberknecht• 8 months ago

"Looks 20% cooler" What is 1 "cool"?

derelicta• 8 months ago

oh man, I know facepunch for two great things: GMod and Sly Cooper. Both games were a defining feature of my childhood ahah

tapoxi2• 8 months ago

You're thinking of Sucker Punch for Sly Cooper. They're still around and just shipped Ghost of Yotei.

S&box is now an open source game engine

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