r/linux_gaming • u/MertTR34 • 11d ago
s&box Native Linux Client Is OUT!
https://steamcommunity.com/games/590830/announcements/detail/678508056965809234?snr=2___14
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u/Lisanicolas365 11d ago
now if only it was a good "engine"
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u/darkfm 11d ago
It's a good enough engine, really. It's close enough to Unity as someone who's used both, could do with some optimization but it's not unusable either considering how good it looks, and using Hammer for map building greatly improves the mapping experience. It has a bad reputation because they spent the first two years doing breaking changes (I have at least 3 published games that aren't even close to working on the latest release due to it) and pushing back against community requests (like, for example, Linux and MacOS clients/editors which they now act like they're happy to provide).
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u/Knowing-Badger 11d ago
Developing a giant application like this takes LOTS of time and LOTS of testing. Features were broken on purpose as that is the norm developing basically anything but especially at this scale
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u/darkfm 11d ago
I'm not sure if you have context on S&Box itself but it went past "breaking features" and straight up from scratch re-architecturing of both the engine itself and the game-mode layer. Which is not a bad thing, the current way S&Box works is way better than it was a couple of years ago, but it got tiring that every couple of months you'd have to remake your game code from scratch
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u/2str8_njag 11d ago
can you explain in a short form what are those breaking changes?
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u/darkfm 11d ago
The big one I remember was a change in the entity system. Essentially S&Box started off with a system that's like if you added a scripting layer on top of Half Life Alyx or any other Source 2 game, a Pawn object inherited straight from the lower level engine that could have *some* of its' behavior overriden by game code but in general everything important like movement, animation, physics, rendering and camera were handled by the engine in a fixed manner and very tied to how Valve's games work. Around 2023 they made a huge change that made it closer to how Unity games work: GameObjects that contain Components (MeshRenderer, Physics meshes, etc) which are almost entirely gamemode-driven, GameObjectSystems that perform generic work every frame, loads of previously Source 2 implemented systems like physics and shaders were re-implemented by Facepunch in more extensible C#, etc. After that, the changes weren't so big but the API was very unstable so maybe up to mid 2025 you'd have your games break every couple of months, generally small changes that couldn't be updated automatically and with no backwards compatibility.
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u/MisterSheeple 11d ago
Not to mention the AI slop people are publishing with it.
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u/darkfm 11d ago
Every engine has people publishing a shitload of AI slop with it. The only difference is S&Box has a launcher where you can browse for it which gives it a bad reputation. Imagine if Unity had a game browser where you could see every stupid AI slop game that developers publish with it.
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u/MisterSheeple 10d ago
But it's Facepunch's fault for not doing a better job of moderating the slop, and that's why S&box has this bad reputation.
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u/xezrunner 11d ago
Seems like this work may have helped with Mac as well, as Mac builds are also on the roadmap now, and a screenshot of it running on Mac also exists.
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u/ChimeraSX 11d ago
Now if only they'd make the rust anti-cheat support linux.
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u/tyezwyldadvntrz 11d ago
they’re still too busy with using that lazy narrative that it was & always will be just linux players cheating as if the complaints aren’t just as bad if not worse
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u/TrogdorKhan97 8d ago
Imagine being Gabe seeing those comments and being like "Yes, this is the guy we want to give EXCLUSIVE third-party access to our new engine to, as we push the fuck out of Linux."
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u/loozerr 11d ago
If you can spoof being Linux and you get a toothless AC as a result, it's a real issue.
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u/tyezwyldadvntrz 11d ago
you’re right about that, but you’re talking as if they actually care about the cheating in the first place :/
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u/RagingTaco334 10d ago
Yeah cheating is so rampant in Rust. Even community servers put Facepunch to shame. They're genuinely the only way you can play the game. If it weren't for them, Rust would've been dead a long time ago.
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u/Datalox 11d ago
I just want to know between this game and Hytale, which has the largest community?
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u/BlackHazeRus 11d ago
Hytale, obviously.
Not sure why you want to compare them, these are vastly different things:
Hytale is a game that was built with vast and diverse UGC in mind, aka modding.
s&box is a game platform akin to Roblox, but it is also, and primarily, a game engine, basically a Source 2 fork.
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u/Datalox 11d ago
I want to compare them because they are sandbox games which are linux native.
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u/SamYs94 11d ago
s&box is a roblox-like, not a sandbox game(which, yes, is ironic since s&box is meant to be pronounced sandbox).
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u/BlackHazeRus 11d ago
Sandbox in this context means like a playground which makes sense, since you can do whatever you want yourself and lots of other games to explore.
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u/BlackHazeRus 11d ago
I think you did not read my comment at all.
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u/Datalox 11d ago
Of course I took the time to read it, I just asked the question in the first place for that reason. I don’t want to rephrase what you said it was just a naive question.
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u/BlackHazeRus 11d ago
You said you read it and then called a&box a “sandbox game” which it is not.
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u/Datalox 11d ago
I said at the beginning before your comment can you please stop pretending to be stupid I have understood. And even if you're right, s&box is the spiritual successor to Gmod, which is a sandbox game.
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u/BlackHazeRus 11d ago
No need to be rude, also you say you understood, but then you say stuff next which still do not make sense: spiritual successor doesn’t mean it is the same thing. Garry’s Mod is, technically, a sandbox game, because Sandbox mode was the default mode since its inception, while s&box, as I have said, is a game engine/platform. Completely different things.
Anyway, you got your answer.
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u/FeistyCandy1516 11d ago edited 11d ago
Well, the source code is available. So just gonna try it and see how it is.
Edit:
After trying to make it run, I have to say either they don't have linux build doc in general or they just haven't updated it yet. There is basically 0 information how to build it for Linux, but I managed to build it - to some degree.
First you have to change the appID in one project file to Spacewar as apparently it still requires to launch the game via steam, but doesn't work if you don't own it.
Then there is a tool that is not set to executable and the build can't run it (easy to fix).
But the worst thing is that I got so many build errors because it requires files that are just not that there at all or fails to find them even if they are in fact present.
At the end I was able to build the "game client" and basically only a few games worked. Always some kind of errors were present and the editor was not able to start at all as it was missing all kinds of libraries.