S&box Hype Thread

[SaintLuther]

Lol didn't read that but not surprised. Also S&box definitely needs some cleanup. While it's not crashing it's not running very smooth either.

[SaintLuther]

After skipping last month, they're back with a new blog: https://sbox.facepunch.com/news/style-editor

And the first thing they announced is they're no longer doing monthly blogs
But this might be good news because they say they might do smaller blogs more frequently. We'll have to wait and see.

This is the first of these mini blogs since they only talk about the UI system. They've mentioned it before so a lot of it is reiteration. Basically even though the UI system isn't a web browser, coding for it is very similar to that of a browser. This will make it much easier to learn and also be much better than Gmod's very bad UI system that was just super hacky.

UI Inspector


Style Editor

[SaintLuther]

3 mini blogs have come out since they moved away from monthly blogs, so I guess they weren't lying.

14 Feb: https://sbox.facepunch.com/news/hack-week-2

• New gamemode based on bomberman
  
• Main executable now coded in C# rather than C++
  
• Steam HTML Renderer for loading websites in-game. This is actually big because it's a feature that never officially made it to Gmod and is the reason cinema and theater addons for sandbox stopped working. Now we can have them back in S&box
  
• Jailbreak gamemode
  

17 Feb: https://sbox.facepunch.com/news/shader-graph
This was very short, talked about the S&box shader system

22 Feb: https://sbox.facepunch.com/news/source-film-maker
I think this means SFM can be used with the S&box engine? But then they also mention they're making their own tool? idk there's not much explanation here.

[SaintLuther]

Eagle One released a new tower defense mode that is single or co-op



I played it until wave 35 when it crashed. It was pretty easy especially since I was playing single player. Idk if it scales in difficulty though. It was still pretty fun

[SaintLuther]

mini blogs were supposed to be more frequent but I guess not. They recently released 5 new ones.

Hammer Gizmos
Lets you insert lines, shapes, models, sprites or particles into hammer using code. I've never used Hammer before but I guess this might make it easier to design maps with code

Glass Shader
Make sure you check out the screen shots here, the glass and reflections in S&box do be looking hyper-realistic

Area Lights
More reflection porn. Really impressive that none of this requires RTX. Not sure if it uses RT cores at all, or if it's all rasterization.

Input Actions
Game modes can now have their own control system. In Gmod you basically had to intercept key presses to change what a button did, but this lets you define inputs and the player can then change what button is bound to that input. Also looks like they added gyro support for controllers.

UI Update
Added support for CSS masks
Added support for SVGs
Added support for Razor Fragments
Added support for WebSurface (basically a web page being displayed in a UI or in-game)
Drag scrolling and horizontal scrolling

New Zombie outfits
   

[SaintLuther]

Gamemodes (now just called games) have their own menu and loading screens now: https://sbox.facepunch.com/news/game-menus

Custom loading screens were possible on Gmod as we all know, but custom menus (pressing escape) were very hacky and didn't work that well. Now you can define your own menu that players see even before they decide to load into the game.
Of course I do see this possibly being abused since someone could just remove (or not include) the quit option in their menu making it difficult to leave the game without al4+f4'ing

[SaintLuther]

CoD inspired S&box map by Eagle One

[SaintLuther]

Facepunch is rolling out a system where people who currently have access to S&box can invite others to also have access to the game.

https://sbox.facepunch.com/news/invite-system

This means I can potentially raffle off access to S&box to whoever wants it.

[SaintLuther]

S&box is being "re-tooled" to go away from the Entity system and Server/Client model. They're recoding their own system which should be more advanced and easier to use than what Source 2 provides. They paused the invite system until this is done. (Not that I played enough to get any invites

https://sbox.facepunch.com/news/retooling

[SaintLuther]

After a few months they have retooled the whole thing and now use "the scene system". It looks like it will make designing games quite easy and also sfm type stuff or just playing around.



At this point it seems they want S&box to be more of a competitor to Unreal and Unity as opposed to a gmod sequel.

They're also hiring

https://sbox.facepunch.com/news/scene-system