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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

#61

Post by russelg »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #43
raincole wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 t…

>even though Valve wanted Source2 to be a VR platform

I don't think this is true. The first Source2 game "released" was Dota 2, and currently it's used for CS2 and Deadlock as well.

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

#62

Post by 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.

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

#63

Post by 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?

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

#64

Post by hnuser123456 »

russelg wrote: post #61
hnuser123456 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>even though Valve wanted Source2 to be a VR platform I don't think this is true. The first Source2 game "released" was Dota 2, and currently it's used for CS2 and Deadlock as well.

Fair point. Maybe I should've said SteamVR environments instead, it never took off like SourceSDK did, partially due to incomplete tools. SteamVR as a whole is very healthy though.

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

#65

Post by hn773746483 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #15
jsheard wrote: 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. 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…

There are various internal Valve tools that aren't available in any Valve-published SDK, but are in (accidentally?) within Dino D-Day's, a third party game based on Portal 2's version of Source.

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

#66

Post by ThatPlayer »

jsheard wrote: post #54
jquaint wrote: post #45

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...

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…

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.

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

#67

Post by matheusmoreira »

jsheard wrote: post #54
jquaint wrote: post #45

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...

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…

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.

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

#69

Post by stevefan1999 »

adito wrote: post #44
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…

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/

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.

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

#70

Post by embedding-shape »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #66
jsheard wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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

As someone who would play on Linux then, it doesn't sound like a solution at all. The separate version would just be filled with cheaters then, would almost be like an punishment for Linux users.

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