S&box is now an open source game engine

[3rodents]

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]

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

[adito]

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/

[jmtame]

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.

[echelon]

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"?

[raincole]

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

[ProfessorZoom]

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

[jquaint]

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...

[jsheard]

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.

[Rohansi]

> 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.

[Topgamer7]

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/

[cedws]

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?

[jmtame]

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).

[bangaladore]

> 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.

[hamdingers]

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

[tapoxi]

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

[jsheard]

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.

[charcircuit]

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

[terabytest]

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]

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

[Rohansi]

It is a heavily modified Source 2.

[Stevvo]

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

[fragmede]

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

[benbristow]

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

Log.Error( "Fucked" );

[GaryBluto]

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

[LtdJorge]

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

[Hamuko]

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

[justinclift]

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

[whywhywhywhy]

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

[quantummagic]

MIT + copyright retention requirement

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

[Vermeulen]

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.

[debugnik]

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

[LelouBil]

It's Source 2, its not legacy

[7bit]

As a web dev, I pronounce that sampersandbox.

[remix2000]

S&box huh

[aranw]

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

[jim201]

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!

[jokoon]

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.

[Rohansi]

> 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.

[qingcharles]

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]

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

[igleria]

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)

[debugnik]

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.

[nosmokewhereiam]

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

[seg_lol]

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

[bangaladore]

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]

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]

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

[serf]

>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)

[Detchibe]

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

[cyberrock]

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]

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

[leberknecht]

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

[derelicta]

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

[tapoxi]

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

[DeathArrow]

Is this a competitor for Unity and Godot?

[debugnik]

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.

[koolala]

Could it be ported to Source 1 now?

[iFire]

Can we use the team fortress 2 release of source?

Oh. It's a modding sdk.

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

[rstat1]

and also source 1