S&box is now an open source game engine

268 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by MaximilianEmel
(sbox.game)

91 Comments

3rodents

10 hours ago

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.

adito

8 hours ago

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/

Unai

7 hours ago

I occasionally play Rust but I've never written a line of Rust, so almost everyday I do a double-take when reading HN. So its pretty amusing to see HN be the one getting mixed up for a change.

stevefan1999

5 hours ago

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.

steveklabnik

5 hours ago

I ran a Rust server on an Oxide rack for me and some friends one weekend.

raincole

9 hours ago

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

hnuser123456

8 hours ago

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 the tools, and he moved to Source2, and built a .net "framework" to make it faster to develop and iterate in Source2. So Garry's tools are now an open version of the closed tools that Valve didn't want to release that they used to make Alyx.

Finally there's another serious competitor to UE and Unity.

russelg

6 hours ago

>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.

hnuser123456

6 hours ago

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.

enbugger

8 hours ago

Yet another one. Along with Stride, Godot, Unigine, O3DE, Flax and tens more. All look like they just want be clone of UE: generic dark UI with inspector, scene hierarchy, asset browser in the bottom and play button in the top. Zero creativity and innovation. Where's Emacs or Vim of game engines which brings its own unique philosophy?

wvbdmp

8 hours ago

I don’t understand this take. The abundance of game engines has never been greater, both open and proprietary. As has the abundance of indie games. Some people make a distinction between more batteries-included engines with editors etc. and “game frameworks”, which are supposedly more bare-bones libraries such as Bevy or Babylon.js. Maybe that’s what you’re after?

lukan

8 hours ago

"Where's Emacs or Vim of game engines which brings its own unique philosophy?"

All forgotten in obscurity.

When making a game, people are usually not so much interested in the philosophy of their tools, but shipping things with it as soon as possible.

That means working as expected.

enbugger

7 hours ago

And then the forums and subreddits are flooded with miserable folks complaining about how destructive, inextensible and unpleasant to use those experiences are. This is not the problem of UI in engines itself, it's problem of how long it takes to bring it to acceptable state with all those moving parts. For UE, Unity and Blender it took decades.

jazzyjackson

8 hours ago

I would suppose anyone being creative and innovative with their game engines are happily using their creation without trying to turn it into a community or business model to the point where you would have heard of it.

Fnoord

4 hours ago

wasd is that, and then 1-9 (tho 9 and such is hard to reach) for the weapons/spells/tools, with keys near wasd for other binds, and the mouse for free look, autorun, shoot, and alt with scrollwheel for swapping weapon, too. This way, you use practically only the left side of the keyboard, but that is because keyboards aren't even an ideal input device for gaming. Something like an Azeron device (think: Orbweaver) would be far better.

BG3 has F5 for quick save and F8 for quick restore. Like the old ways.

As for game engine, who cares how things look in-game? Just make it theme-able and mod-able. Cheaters gonna cheat anyway, no way to hold that back on the client-side.

aDyslecticCrow

8 hours ago

Who cares about the UI. A game engine is the library code needed to make games, not the editor UI. Just use vim to edit your files if that's what you want.

knollimar

4 hours ago

Not all game files are text and the non-text parts massively benefit from good UI.

lelandbatey

8 hours ago

Complaining about the UI color and button layout of an game _engine_ is a bit like comparing aircraft carriers by the color of the rug in the control room. What about the built-in tools for organizing and connecting assets, format support, how user input is handled, the batteries-included ways to model game state, and all the ways of interconnecting all those things in the code the engine provides? Does anyone have interesting comparisons/notes around those subjects as it relates to the S&box engine?

potatoman22

9 hours ago

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

echelon

9 hours ago

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"?

ValveFan6969

22 minutes ago

Skibidi Toilet was made in Source Filmmaker.

lookingdesk

3 hours ago

The Hollywood development company that bought the rights to Skibidi and are developing it filed a DMCA strike against Garry's Mod. It got resolved, but no one involved is talking.

jquaint

8 hours ago

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

7 hours ago

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.

ThatPlayer

6 hours ago

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.

embedding-shape

5 hours ago

> 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.

tomcatfish

2 hours ago

When you say that it would "almost be like a punishment for Linux users", I think you're wrong, because it literally would be a value add. There is something interesting about the fact that offering you 10% more value would be taken as a downgrade

ThatPlayer

3 hours ago

I do not mean separate as in separate matchmaking. Just separate ports of the game. So Linux users are not running the same Windows port of the game as Windows users, just under Proton.

That way you don't need a backdoor in the Windows version of the game for the weaker Linux anticheat that runs through Proton. You would just have a native Linux version of the game with native anticheat.

matheusmoreira

5 hours ago

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.

nullishdomain

4 hours ago

I have a feeling that your ideal game, full of cheaters online, would not be very popular.

N_Lens

4 hours ago

I don't agree with your take because it's an example of individual 'freedoms' shitting all over something communal - a caricature of freedom that America has become known for. Cheating ruins online games.

matheusmoreira

3 hours ago

Online games are nothing. They are a literal non-issue next to the loss of computing freedom. Let them be ruined so that we can have the freedom to control our computers without undue intrusion. If online games are the price of freedom, so be it.

Sacrificing freedom for security? I don't agree with it but I can at least understand where the impetus comes from. Sacrificing freedom for fun? For video games of all things? That's pretty disgusting and I want people to be better than that.

Accept this, and you also indirectly accept corporations regulating "your" computer's ability to copy, as well as governments regulating "your" computer's ability to encrypt.

MrZander

3 hours ago

You don't have to sacrifice anything, no one is making you install anti-cheat software.

> Sacrificing freedom for fun? For video games of all things? That's pretty disgusting and I want people to be better than that.

What is the point of freedom if you have a joyless existence?

matheusmoreira

3 hours ago

> What is the point of freedom if you have a joyless existence?

> no one is making you install anti-cheat software

You don't see the irony here? You don't see the trillion dollar corporations dangling "joy" in front of us and conditioning access to it on acceptance of their bullshit non-negotiable take it or leave it contracts where "we own your computer now" is a clause?

The powerful choice is to reject the silly binary choice they offer you and take a third option. Refuse their deal and refuse your so called "joyless" existence.

Enjoy your games while also keeping control of your computer. If they try to usurp control of your computer, stop them from doing so. Only malware would try that, treat them accordingly. If you must associate with cheaters and pirates in order to acquire the necessary technology and know-how, then so be it.

It's the same thing with DRM, it's the same thing with ads, it's the same thing with pretty much everything. They give you some bullshit choices, but you can take a third option because you own the machine. That's the power they would take away from you.

Rohansi

7 hours ago

> 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

9 hours ago

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/

terabytest

10 hours ago

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

9 hours ago

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

9 hours ago

It is a heavily modified Source 2.

tapoxi

10 hours ago

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

jsheard

10 hours ago

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.

embedding-shape

9 hours ago

> 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 big support by Valve through the years as well. Eventually they even bought the whole IP.

jsheard

9 hours ago

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 trying to be a general purpose toolkit a la Unity.

embedding-shape

9 hours ago

S&B existing and being what it is, effectively makes it the Source 2 SDK, although it's not from Valve. But fair point Source 2 isn't licensed to others, I think the expectation is that if you wanna build a Source 2 game, you have to use S&B. At least for now, who knows what their ideas and ambitions really lie.

fngjdflmdflg

9 hours ago

>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.

hn773746483

6 hours ago

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.

Rohansi

9 hours ago

> 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.

jsheard

9 hours ago

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.

Rohansi

9 hours ago

There is already a deal between Valve and Facepunch. I don't know all the terms but you will need to publish your game to Steam (not exclusively).

https://sbox.game/dev/doc/systems/game-exporting/ (bottom of page)

Nathanba

4 hours ago

that's pretty vague, I mean are there no real licensing terms somewhere? What am I truly signing up for when I try to use this engine? I have to publish my game on steam but in what form? Same price as I do on my own website/store? Same exact form as on other stores? Same exact time, I can't publish first on epic and only later on steam?

sieep

9 hours ago

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!

torginus

4 hours ago

Dude. People are playing and making Gmod and HL2 mods and maps to this day. How many 20+yo game engines can say the same?

charcircuit

10 hours ago

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

super256

10 hours ago

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 even a mod, with their army of lawyers. I don't think stuff like this would have happened 13+ years ago).

wavemode

9 hours ago

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.

npinsker

9 hours ago

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

mjr00

9 hours ago

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.

wavemode

9 hours ago

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).

silver_silver

3 hours ago

They’re (genuinely) gearing up to release Half-Life 3 at the moment, and not as a VR exclusive

jim201

2 hours ago

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!

Stevvo

10 hours ago

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

LtdJorge

4 hours ago

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

Hamuko

9 hours ago

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

bangaladore

6 hours ago

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

4 hours ago

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..

Vermeulen

6 hours ago

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.

LelouBil

4 hours ago

It's Source 2, its not legacy

Vermeulen

2 hours ago

Source2 is the giant legacy codebase I was referring to.

qingcharles

7 hours ago

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

2 hours ago

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

serf

7 hours ago

>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)

polski-g

44 minutes ago

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

cyberrock

7 hours ago

Give how abruptly Facepunch forums went down last time, I'm not sure if Discord is the one to worry about in this equation.

7bit

9 hours ago

As a web dev, I pronounce that sampersandbox.

nosmokewhereiam

8 hours ago

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

8 hours ago

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