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
S&box is now an open source game engine
31–40 of 157 posts
Re: S&box is now an open source game engine
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Originally people thought the Source 2 sdk, was going to be released with Half Life Alyx, but it never materialized.
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…
Re: S&box is now an open source game engine
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#34The comments are hilarious. Every file has multiple profanity-filled rants.
I'd be interested in calculating the average profanity per-file count for projects that get open-sourced like this.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/is-code-that-contain...
Re: S&box is now an open source game engine
#35For 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…
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"?
Re: S&box is now an open source game engine
#36Earlier 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.
In any case, my point was not that these games make no money, but simply that Valve doesn't need them. The total number of people buying games on Steam vastly dwarfs the number of people who play Dota 2 and CS2 (even just counting total players - how much more when you narrow down to players who spend money).
Re: S&box is now an open source game engine
#37For 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…
Re: S&box is now an open source game engine
#38The comments are hilarious. Every file has multiple profanity-filled rants.
Re: S&box is now an open source game engine
#39For 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…
Isn't Rust Unity-based? Was he just too fed up with Unity and decided to roll his own engine?
Re: S&box is now an open source game engine
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Oh right, that's more reassuring. I guess you'd still have to cut a deal with Valve to use FPs fork commercially though? Which is a wildcard since the licensing terms aren't public as far as I can tell.
My point is, if I were Valve id let Garry run wild with my engine--no deal needed. Hes proven himself more than once. Just a thought!