October Update

The October Update is now live, bringing new game discovery, better physgun physics, cloud entities, duplicator, and explosions! Big performance boosts and news about game exports! Here's some highlights from this months update.

Check out the October Update dev blog to read everything!

Game Discovery

The games list was getting a bit stagnant, being ordered by popularity. Nothing new was really breaking through, despite there being a lot of cool things being made. So I decided to put the work in this month and make a "shelf" system where we can dynamically edit the shelves, and they can have different styles. Inspired by Netflix.

Sandbox

Prop Interactions

Props can be set on fire and explode again! This is configured in ModelDoc, and is something I want to add more engine-wide interactions to in the future.

Duplicator

I fixed up the duplicator to work properly with objects connected by physics joints. While I was there I gave it some extra pazzaz. Now you can hold shift and add extra unconnected objects to the duplication, too.

Graphics Options

We didn't have any real graphics options before, everything was cranked to the max all the time.

We've added options for some of our more intensive render features to turn them down.

Physgun Physics

The benefit of using Box3D is that we can get constant updates to it. One of these updates included a "motor" joint, we call it a control joint in our API.

The control joint is designed to control the movement of a body. This improved our physgun to behave more like it does in gmod.

Cosmetics

Last month we launched our first community cosmetic, the Shark Head by Shadowbrain. That item has now stopped being sold, and we won't sell it again. Half way through the month we started selling the Safety Glasses by GKaf, and those will stop being sold on the 14th of October. Today we've started selling the Propane Helmet by Duck. It'll stop being sold on the 1st November..

There are people that like to laugh and point out that we shouldn't be selling cosmetics for a game that isn't released. The thing about that is that monetization is part of making a game. We need to test it and we need to make sure it works. In an ideal world games would be funded with sweet dreams and warm hearts, but that's not the world we live in. We want s&box and its engine to be a feasible, self sustaining system that we can develop and evolve for years to come, and that really only works if it can wash its own face.

We're trying to find ways to monetize in ways that sustains us and feeds the community. To find ways to help people use their talents to make a living. That's what Valve did with me and Garry's Mod. That's what I want to spend my time doing.

Standalone Exports

As we've mentioned previously, we intend to let you export games from S&box and release them on Steam.. without paying any royalties to us or whatever. We think that'd be pretty cool.

Getting the license to allow us to do that has been treading water for a few months, without anything really noticeable happening. Things started moving this month. It's still lawyers talking to lawyers, so it's never going to be fast - but we're seeing progress!

Hopefully, we'll have more to talk about with this soon!