Gaming S&box (pronounced Sandbox), the spiritual successor to Garry's Mod, is now released on Steam.

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Night007

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From Facepunch comes Garry's Mod 2! Ahem, S&box! Rather than just being a simple Lua based modding platform for hacking together simple game modes S&box is more like a complete game engine development suite. With a unity like editor that allows you to make full games in Source 2 with either the main S&box platform or by publishing the game directly to Steam as a standalone title.

Our spiritual successor to Garry's Mod, this is a game creation platform built on the Source 2 engine. Play, create, and share games, explore community creations, and experience endless sandbox fun with powerful modern tools.

Get it here on Steam.
 
I remember hearing about this as a big deal for devs because it opens the Source 2 engine up for indie game creation.

I'm on the outside looking in, can someone explain if this is a huge revolution or not?
 
I remember hearing about this as a big deal for devs because it opens the Source 2 engine up for indie game creation.

I'm on the outside looking in, can someone explain if this is a huge revolution or not?
Revolution? Probably not. It's pretty good as a Roblox like platform where you can release your own games. But the real magic here is that you can use it as an SDK to release standalone Source 2 games too. Say you release a fun little game that catches on and becomes popular in S&box. You can build off that and expand it into a full game for standalone release without having to start over from scratch in a new engine.
 
Revolution? Probably not. It's pretty good as a Roblox like platform where you can release your own games. But the real magic here is that you can use it as an SDK to release standalone Source 2 games too. Say you release a fun little game that catches on and becomes popular in S&box. You can build off that and expand it into a full game for standalone release without having to start over from scratch in a new engine.
Ah, thank you. I wasn't sure if this was a big deal in the game dev space.
 
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I remember hearing about this as a big deal for devs because it opens the Source 2 engine up for indie game creation.

I'm on the outside looking in, can someone explain if this is a huge revolution or not?
it's a downgrade over GMod, the default player models are ugly sausage dudes that you can't change, there's no workshop support
 
it's a downgrade over GMod, the default player models are ugly sausage dudes that you can't change, there's no workshop support
You haven't played it. There's a sausage character and a human model. Your customization options get applied to both. Moreover servers can ignore them entirely and provide their own models if they want too. A lot do. And it has it's own built in equivalent of the Steam workshop. It's actually a massive upgrade compared to what you can build in Gmod.
 
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Free to play in 2 years apparently and it's not being received that well for now

Looks like the plan to have the game priced at 20€ for the beginning in order to not have it buried under a bunch of AI generated shovelware didn't work at all, so I'll refrain from getting it for now.
 
It's nice to see that the Source engine is still relevant today. So many games that were made in Source were now remade in different engines like Unity (except for the ones made by Valve), so I thought that it died completely.


It didn't "die" Just that valve works in silence and also stopped handing out engine licenses to just anyone.
So while Source 2 was in dev hell. Source 1 just got older and older and other engines got much better.

Though titanfall and apex legends notably use a heavily modified source 1.

Source 2 has been in the works since like 2013. Dota 2 reborn and steam VR home were the only public showing of Source 2 for ages. Meanwhile Valve was prototyping stuff with it for ages but not actually committing to a full on game because of internal madness. It got the point CSGO was getting content back ported from Source 2 to source 1.

Then Half life alyx forced them to really finish source 2 in 2020 and its been their main engine since.


Now Garry is prob the only person to actually get a source 2 engine license from valve and hes using for s&box.
Since Valve seemingly has no intention to make a Mod SDK for source 2 at this time. S&box is the only way to make things in source 2 and also has the benefit of valve allowing standalone releases on the steam store.
 

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