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S&box is now an open source game engine

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Re: S&box is now an open source game engine

#21

Post by 1bpp »

terabytest wrote: post #7

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…

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

Re: S&box is now an open source game engine

#23

Post by npinsker »

wavemode wrote: post #19
super256 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Valve's cash cow is Steam. All of their games (Dota 2, CS, and the other ones they hardly maintain anymore) are basically just passion projects at this point, lingering on from a bygone age when they were a game development company. Their most recent title, Half-Life: Alyx, probably only got greenlit because someone internally was able to convince leadership that it would help sell VR headsets.

CS2 makes an enormous and non-negligible amount of money.

Re: S&box is now an open source game engine

#24

Post by mjr00 »

npinsker wrote: post #23
wavemode wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve's cash cow is Steam. All of their games (Dota 2, CS, and the other ones they hardly maintain anymore) are basically just passion projects at this point, lingering on from a bygone age when they were a game development company. Their most recent title, Half-Life: Alyx, probably only got greenlit because someone internally was able to convince leadership that it would help sell VR headsets.

CS2 makes an enormous and non-negligible amount of money.

Dota2 as well. Like I'm sure CS2/Dota2 are small compared to Steam, but the revenue from these games alone dwarfs what most other companies are making.

Re: S&box is now an open source game engine

#25

Post by Rohansi »

terabytest wrote: post #7

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…

It is a heavily modified Source 2.

Re: S&box is now an open source game engine

#27

Post by 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/

Re: S&box is now an open source game engine

#28

Post by Rohansi »

jsheard wrote: post #13
tapoxi wrote: post #2

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

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.

> 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.

Re: S&box is now an open source game engine

#29

Post by rootlocus »

3rodents wrote: post #8

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 f…

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

Re: S&box is now an open source game engine

#30

Post by fngjdflmdflg »

jsheard wrote: post #17
embedding-shape wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That was then, in 2025 they don't have a public Source 2 SDK, nor do they generally license the engine to third parties, S&box being the sole exception. They barely have their toes in the middleware game anymore. Even when they were more open with their tech it was on the basis of "you can play with the tools we used to make Half Life and if your idea is sufficiently Half Life shaped then it will probably work", not…

>They barely have their toes in the middleware game anymore.

Well they do have Steam Audio but yeah I agree. I think Epic is much better in this space, even though its only source available in practice they do a lot to support engine modifications and also accept external PRs. I think Valve has a lot to gain from open sourcing Source 2 and they should realize how important modding was to their initial success. The issue is now they can just print money with Steam so there is no need to invest in modding support.

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