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S&box is now an open source game engine

sbox.game

31–40 of 157 posts

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

#31
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

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/

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

#32
post #9

Earlier 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…

They just opened up the source to TF2 with an SDK not too long ago. Explicitly for modding and community driven development.

https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809

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

#33
post #28
post #13

Earlier 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.

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.

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

#34
post #4

The 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.

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

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

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

#35
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…

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"?

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

#36

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.

Valve's financials are nonpublic, and any numbers you find are rough, indirect estimates.

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

#37
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…

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

#39
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…

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

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

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

#40
post #33
post #28

Earlier 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.

I doubt its much of a deal. Garrys Mod and Rust have both been wildly successful (which means Valve has made tons of money off them as well)

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!

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