Comment by 3rodents
2 days 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.
The origin story of Rust is classic: they got tired of Day Z and wanted to make it better, so they hired some random contractor to copy Day Z with elements of Fortnite and Minecraft, the developer complains that he's entitled to more money from the success of the game, lawsuit follows, and then Facepunch supposedly claims the original version was so buggy they have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. Unclear if they were just trying to start fresh so the lawsuit wouldn't follow them forever, but it started out as just a clone of another game and they turned it into a hugely successful business (and an incredible game). Most games have a short shelf life, but I've watched at least over the past 4-ish years, and the rate that they continue to push changes is impressive.
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/
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/
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.
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.
I ran a Rust server on an Oxide rack for me and some friends one weekend.
Only Xzibit can do that.
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 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.
>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.
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Good, great even. The more the better. Even if the ecosystem gets seriously fragmented I'll take this over your only real choice being UE and Unity (t. Godot enjoyer).
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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?
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Could assume that.
S&box was initially developed on top of Unreal Engine, but in a backend-agnostic design. It's more like a framework/runtime meant to be portable to any backend engine. Once Source 2 released, S&box was ported to that.
I wouldn't call it an engine because of that. S&box is open source, but you can't run it without a closed-source backend.
Valve isn't keen on releasing Source 2 as widely as Source, and I feel like soon, S&box will be declared the official API interface for the engine, while the backend remains unstable. Kinda like Win32 vs NT.
I'd guess S&box is more an extension of Garry's Mod rather than a reaction to Unity
i miss the old facepunch. on gmod i have a couple dozen IP mods. on s&box i made call of duty zombies gamemode and was perma banned. all cause they can make more money, but they forget mods like that is why their games are popular
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"?
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.
Additionally, news came out today that the original creator has lost creative rights to Invisible Narratives. It's looking quite grim all around.
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Skibidi Toilet was made in Source Filmmaker.