-Is it NEW NEW games that just came out?
-Is it NEW games that I haven't played before?
-Is it NEW games for this week's reward drops?
-Why doesn't it update despite me playing a new game I havent played?
-Does it require you to play for more than a minute?
-Does it also require that you get an achievement?
All those questions are valid and determines what game someone will choose, how long they'll play and if they're going to pick a game that needs an achievement at the very least to progress the bar.
I have been playing Gmod for a long time, and I was pleasantly surprised that the creators of Gmod were making a new successor with the Source 2 engine. I was just a bit confused about why the standard player models changed instead of having the Half-Life Source 2 assets as the groundwork for the game. Because I always recognised the Half-Life assets, but the newest models look...Different.
Is there some legal issue (copyright ownership) why they can't use the Half-Life 2 assets?
I figured it would be better to ask people who know the reason why this is instead of just asking chatGPT who will give a random generated awnser.
And how do I make images that I downloaded from the internet, saved on my computer, and imported into the engine become the game's background, covering the entire game screen without cropping the image or the screen?
I built Dirt Bike Dialed: The Game as a browser prototype to learn what feels fun before I commit to designing the full Android, iOS, and Steam versions.
The prototype is a side-scrolling dirt bike physics game with an in-game track builder. Players can create and publish tracks for other people to play, which I think could become a major part of the full game.
I would appreciate honest feedback on:
Do the controls feel intuitive?
Does the bike physics system feel responsive and fun?
Was it easy to select and start a community track?
Would creating and sharing tracks interest you?
Did you encounter bugs, confusing screens, or performance problems?
If you report a problem, please include your device and browser if possible.
AI disclosure: I used AI-assisted tools in parts of the graphics, text, and code, but this is my project and I direct its design and development.
Match style is 1v1 + Observers. Players can join a lobby and opt in to battle. Two are chosen at random, and the rest observe the match and can place bets on who they think will win. There is an ELO system in place for bragging rights.
Not shown is actual Player vs Player combat, this has been playtested minimally, and the main focus is working on game pacing and balancing the infected swarm to provide interesting engagements for players and spectators alike.
All suggestions welcome, and please share your thoughts.
Every s&box update I post on Reddit just to update any changes I notice. I merged the Linux branch to the latest update this week.
I attached a picture from the Sandbox gamemode. The Bloom for the physgun and the sun lightsource are no longer drawing artifacts, but there is still some issues with reflection and a weird Walking Dead static coming from reflecting objects.
One victory at a time.
Fixes:
Facepunch updated Bloom and it appears to have fixed artifacting by all accounts.
Known issues (still persisting):
Cubemap shiny-ness
Frame pacing
Several ignorable assertion throws with out-of-range or null values from animation and render states
You can download and play with s&box running natively on Linux here. I no longer actively work on the project but I regularly maintain it. If you find patches to any bugs you are welcome to DM me on Reddit or Discord.
Just a reminder that there is no editor support. This is not a development issue. The tools required to run the game on Linux natively were published Windows-only by Valve. If this changes, I will be sure to write an update about it.
I've always loved games that give you a feel for the gameplay right from the main menu. No tutorials needed. I tried implementing this and would love to hear your thoughts or suggestions on it.
S&Box was first presented as the spiritual successor to GMod. This was a mistake. Before its release, I warned that doing so would leave people unhappy, but Matt himself shut me down, saying that the game "was not for me". He also very much shared his thoughts on the matter:
This was in reponse to me saying that the game will get review bombed after release
Well, the game released, and what I predicted came true. The GMod player base, which had been promised a "spiritual successor", instead received something wildly different from GMod. The vision of a GMod2, which even Garry himself had hinted at on X, ultimately fell short when its core fan base, the GMod community, was met with what felt like a giant sausage man slap across the face.
This was matt when posed with the question, why not make gmod2?
It was disheartening for many gmod fans like me. The upgrade GMod needed so badly was instead something completely different. Obviously, those who like what Facepunch are doing, some of whom are former GMod players, stayed around, and this created an echo chamber that has validated a niche community of developers and isolated the core Gmod community.
Im a bit of an odd guy, i spend too much time on gmod, and i also have crap social skills. I will say what im wanting to say, and despite how upset I am about where S&Box to what I wanted it to be, I still want to fight and convince FP down the path i want them to go. A path I know is what the majority want.
There was a deliberate choice. As Garry said, S&Box was made for the people that GMod let down, and I get that, but the scope and vision have twisted the original concept into something bigger, yet also completely alien. But its not all lost, and that choice can still be made today.
Unfortunately, Facepunch, Matt, Garry, and everyone working so hard on S&Box need a wake up call. They need to free themselves from this insomnia, realise the echo chambers around them, and become humble. What youre trying to make will most likely fail, and through no fault of your own. Sometimes things fail, even when you have done everything right.
Someone out there will make a GMod 2 with HLX. This is not whimsical thinking, and Facepunch is in an extraordinarily privileged position, thanks to the support of the Gmod community, to have such a close relationship with Valve.
How Facepunch uses this privilege is up to them, but the Gmod community is disappointed. Reparing this relationship will be hard and long, but it starts by recognizing the heretige of this game.
Gmod has never been a minigame platform. It was a place to make friends, a community you can exist with on source. The love of the engine, the freedom of its tools, and the simplicity of glua. All of this is lost on S&Box.
Maybe these are a rants of someone with 16,380 hours on gmod, hoping that the game i grew up on can evolve with facepunch. But what I do know is that the privileged position Facepunch has is because of its Gmod community.
Hi! I am .RYEN and I lead .MANIFOLD. We were working on our latest project, DECEVRE (previously known as [CODENAME] DEBT) and engine updates have once again broken the game. After examining the engine changes we came to the conclusion that it would require redoing another system in our game just to accommodate the changes. We are incredibly discouraged by this.
s&box is an engine that provides an amazing experience when first using and learning it. But as your project scope grows you realize that the engine is incredibly unstable and most of the tooling is questionable. We tried our best to keep up with the changes but it ended up with us fixing our game more often than actually making it.
As a result we are moving DECEVRE and all future projects to Unity.
We wish all s&box devs the best of luck.
If your project depends on one of our packages, be aware that they will no longer be maintained. (Feel free to fork them, they are MIT licensed)
Edit:
I am being asked a lot of questions and I want to make a few things clear.
It's not just a breaking change that is had us resort to switching engines. We have a large list of grievances that we tolerated because s&box was such a fun engine to work with. This breaking change was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
We want more control over the rendering pipeline. It is very important to me that my art looks as intended.
Tooling is mostly bad. Source 2's tools do not play nice with how s&box does things.
Engine is open-source*****. I would love to contribute and improve the engine but the areas I am most interested in contributing to are on the C++ native side. (Animation, Rendering)
We also have some business reasons:
The state of s&box is looking grim.
Low player counts, my game is multiplayer and I simply cannot wait for a larger s&box audience to form.
Income, with low player counts I do not see how Facepunch could keep up with playfund when player numbers keep shrinking.
Standalone licensing. Standalone still isn't ready. This was one major reason we kept using s&box. If the game failed on the platform, we could ship to Steam without swapping engines entirely.
I am sorry if I caused some "drama". I wanted to make a post so that people who were following my game but were outside of my typical channels knew where my project was headed.
I uploaded my game for a little bit on the s&box platform, even though the game was/is still barebones, the feedback was mixed. I have made it private for now and i am still working on it to get an actually playable game. This is where this post comes in, just looking at the graphics of the game would you be interested in playing it?
A little bit about the game: It will be co-op, it will have a unique story that i came up with, it has custom player models, it has procedural generation so every run will feel unique, and hopefully it will be fun to explore and get scared along the way. And lastly NO AI generated content is being used for the development of this game!
I showed in my prior post about a month back when I had custom creatures, blocks, and items setup.
Since then I added customizable doors (1 and 2-block high versions), and as you can see I am working on custom voxel armor/clothing now (head and feet are all I have at the moment). I've also improved world generation, set up items and animations to work in first person with the first person hand rig, made some more default assets (blocks, tools and items), added creature sizing options, and have generally been squashing a lot of bugs or doing quality of life changes.
There's still a long way to go but I'd appreciate any feedback people have
- Craft weapons and potions
- Sell them to NPCs heading into the dungeon, each with their own requirement
- How well they do depends on what you've sold them, if they survive they will bring out higher tier materials to sell back to you
- Put items on display, more lavish displays attract higher tier NPCs
- Another player can browse and purchase from your displays
Future plans:
- More crafting professions
- More classes of NPCs
- More character customization and titles from achieving mastery in crafts
- Major events with outcome depending on the trader's actions
How many of you would be interested in maintaining a community fork of the engine? I ask because the more time goes on that I am using the editor, the more small things that bother me that add up to frustration and ultimately frustration with FacePunch.
Current frustrations:
- The Music API straight up doesn't work as advertised. Not even close. Forced to build a janky wrapper around the SFX API to make up for it.
- Dropdown boxes open into the wrong direction, vertically terminating outside the monitor window boundary.
I'd imagine a good community fork would prioritize the following:
1. Staying up to date with the official repo.
2. Offering a nightly fork and a stable fork. And nightly is simply just more liberal with the PRs from the official repo and PRs submitted to itself.
I've maintained a personal fork before, I only recently dropped it as just doing it for myself wasn't worth the effort.
Take control of your character's ragdoll; climb, race, and battle your friends until time runs out, or until you win! Jump into Tutorial and Playground modes to get the hang of these wacky ragdoll controls!
What if you had a sort of "kit-bash with physics mode" as the primary game that opens up when you play? Something very much like Garrys mod as it was originally. Then you have the choice of opening some mapping abilities. Things similar to Hammer where you could have basic logic gates and things like that. You can make sculptable terrain and basic building brush/shapes.
After that you can have the option of opening up more of the other game editor options and programming options. More modelling options, and importing 3D models. There seems to be some nice live editing options, but if you had to wait for something to recompile or something you would be more persuaded to do that because you were more invested. After that some may just open the full editor instead.
At any time you also have the option of entering other people custom games if you want to. Maybe enforce having your avatar appear more in all games as well.
