[HN Gopher] S&box is now an open source game engine
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S&box is now an open source game engine
Author : MaximilianEmel
Score : 156 points
Date : 2025-11-26 19:58 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sbox.game)
(TXT) w3m dump (sbox.game)
| tapoxi wrote:
| It depends on Source 2, which is not open source.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Originally people thought the Source 2 sdk, was going to be
| released with Half Life Alyx, but it never materialized.
| super256 wrote:
| It feels like Valve's management changed a few years
| (decade?) ago. I remember when they were still shipping SDKs
| and proper mod support, even for their multiplayer games.
| Today they are just killing everything that could divert
| revenue from their cash cow CS2 and shipping a half baked js-
| based scripting engine for their maps. (And in the meanwhile
| they kill fan projects like CS:Legacy, which is a whole game
| and not even a mod, with their army of lawyers. I don't think
| stuff like this would have happened 13+ years ago).
| wavemode wrote:
| Valve's cash cow is Steam.
|
| All of their games (Dota 2, CS, and the other ones they
| hardly maintain anymore) are basically just passion
| projects at this point, lingering on from a bygone age when
| they were a game development company.
|
| Their most recent title, Half-Life: Alyx, probably only got
| greenlit because someone internally was able to convince
| leadership that it would help sell VR headsets.
| npinsker wrote:
| CS2 makes an enormous and non-negligible amount of money.
| mjr00 wrote:
| Dota2 as well. Like I'm sure CS2/Dota2 are small
| _compared to Steam_ , but the revenue from these games
| alone dwarfs what most other companies are making.
| wavemode wrote:
| Valve's financials are nonpublic, and any numbers you
| find are rough, indirect estimates.
|
| In any case, my point was not that these games make no
| money, but simply that Valve doesn't need them. The total
| number of people buying games on Steam vastly dwarfs the
| number of people who play Dota 2 and CS2 (even just
| counting total players - how much more when you narrow
| down to players who spend money).
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| They just opened up the source to TF2 with an SDK not too
| long ago. Explicitly for modding and community driven
| development.
|
| https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809
| jsheard wrote:
| That's pretty shaky ground too, even if you can overlook the
| foundation being closed source, Valve aren't really known for
| supporting their engines very well beyond their own internal
| needs. They're not trying to be Epic or Unity.
|
| The most obvious aspect to that is that Source 2 doesn't
| support consoles. Valve don't need it, so they didn't implement
| it.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Valve aren't really known for supporting their engines very
| well beyond their own internal needs.
|
| Valve has a long history of supporting the modding community
| and outside users of Source, not sure where you're getting
| your information from but I don't think they've worked with
| the Source engine before. One of the biggest and most popular
| mods of all time was built on Source, and took the world by
| storm, with pretty big support by Valve through the years as
| well. Eventually they even bought the whole IP.
| jsheard wrote:
| That was then, in 2025 they don't have a public Source 2
| SDK, nor do they generally license the engine to third
| parties, S&box being the sole exception. They barely have
| their toes in the middleware game anymore.
|
| Even when they were more open with their tech it was on the
| basis of "you can play with the tools we used to make Half
| Life and if your idea is sufficiently Half Life shaped then
| it will probably work", not trying to be a general purpose
| toolkit a la Unity.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| S&B existing and being what it is, effectively makes it
| the Source 2 SDK, although it's not from Valve. But fair
| point Source 2 isn't licensed to others, I think the
| expectation is that if you wanna build a Source 2 game,
| you have to use S&B. At least for now, who knows what
| their ideas and ambitions really lie.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| >They barely have their toes in the middleware game
| anymore.
|
| Well they do have Steam Audio but yeah I agree. I think
| Epic is much better in this space, even though its only
| source available in practice they do a lot to support
| engine modifications and also accept external PRs. I
| think Valve has a lot to gain from open sourcing Source 2
| and they should realize how important modding was to
| their initial success. The issue is now they can just
| print money with Steam so there is no need to invest in
| modding support.
| Rohansi wrote:
| > _Valve aren 't really known for supporting their engines
| very well beyond their own internal needs_
|
| They don't need to. S&box uses a fork of Source 2 that is
| maintained by Facepunch, with Valve's upstream changes merged
| in as needed.
| jsheard wrote:
| Oh right, that's more reassuring. I guess you'd still have
| to cut a deal with Valve to use FPs fork commercially
| though? Which is a wildcard since the licensing terms
| aren't public as far as I can tell.
| sieep wrote:
| I doubt its much of a deal. Garrys Mod and Rust have both
| been wildly successful (which means Valve has made tons
| of money off them as well)
|
| My point is, if I were Valve id let Garry run wild with
| my engine--no deal needed. Hes proven himself more than
| once. Just a thought!
| Rohansi wrote:
| There is already a deal between Valve and Facepunch. I
| don't know all the terms but you will need to publish
| your game to Steam (not exclusively).
|
| https://sbox.game/dev/doc/systems/game-exporting/ (bottom
| of page)
| Stevvo wrote:
| The comments are hilarious. Every file has multiple profanity-
| filled rants.
| fragmede wrote:
| omg it's great:
| https://github.com/search?q=repo%3AFacepunch%2Fsbox-public%2...
| benbristow wrote:
| https://github.com/Facepunch/sbox-public/blob/8b1d58d524c37f...
|
| Log.Error( "Fucked" );
| GaryBluto wrote:
| I'd be interested in calculating the average profanity per-file
| count for projects that get open-sourced like this.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| It's a lot. And more profanity often means better code.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/is-code-that-
| contain...
| Hamuko wrote:
| Searching for "fuck" yields 81 files. Searching for "shit"
| yields 146 files. Only two files for "cunt" though.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Their site appears down, here's the github repository:
| https://github.com/Facepunch/sbox-public
| iFire wrote:
| Can we use the team fortress 2 release of source?
|
| Oh. It's a modding sdk.
|
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013
| rstat1 wrote:
| and also source 1
| terabytest wrote:
| I really struggle to wrap my head around how this engine works. I
| haven't used it, but I have experience with Source 1 and its
| systems and I imagine Source 2 is an extrapolation of that. But I
| really can't wrap my head around how they've turned it into a
| scene-based game engine when Source 2 is map-based, how they've
| managed to build a completely different editor that still
| leverages Hammer maps somehow, and all the other stuff.
| 1bpp wrote:
| I've never tried s&box but Source 2 did overhaul the map and
| asset pipeline quite a bit, everything's a plain mesh instead
| of BSP and maps are also regular .dmx files, so I'd imagine
| it's slightly easier to build tools that work on top of it
| Rohansi wrote:
| It is a heavily modified Source 2.
| 3rodents wrote:
| For those unfamiliar, the studio behind S&box is Facepunch,
| creators of Garry's Mod and Rust. Facepunch as a company doesn't
| get much attention but they're wildly successful. Started as just
| some guy in a bedroom, now ~$100m/year in revenue (all via
| Steam), $100m in the bank, ~100 employees and almost entirely a
| company of game developers (maybe 20% of employees are
| administrative staff). Still owned and ran by the founder, Garry.
| S&box (and Garry's Mod and Rust) is pure game developers making
| things they want to make.
| rootlocus wrote:
| Oooo, I remember Garry Newman! I found his UI library GWEN (GUI
| Without Extravagant Nonsense) when I was still in uni and
| working on my game engine. It's been abandoned for 9 years now,
| nice to see he's still working on cool tech.
|
| [1] https://github.com/garrynewman/GWEN
| Rohansi wrote:
| He also made the UI framework used by S&box. It's based on
| HTML/CSS + Razor but is not rendered with a browser.
|
| https://sbox.game/dev/doc/systems/ui/razor-panels/
| echelon wrote:
| That's an amazing story.
|
| I really like all the cultural oddities that Garry's Mod
| spawned. It was a big piece of machinima / virtual filmmaking
| history and absolutely paved the way for VTubing and Unreal
| Engine in film.
|
| Any idea if Facepunch or Valve retain rights to "Skibidi
| Toilet"?
| raincole wrote:
| Isn't Rust Unity-based? Was he just too fed up with Unity and
| decided to roll his own engine?
| potatoman22 wrote:
| I'd guess S&box is more an extension of Garry's Mod rather
| than a reaction to Unity
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| S&box was based on UnrealEngine 4 until late 2020. I think
| Garry wanted to use the latest and greatest engine, then
| Valve continued to be friendly with him, and even though
| Valve wanted Source2 to be a VR platform, it was clear
| desktop was going to remain relevant, but the content
| creation tools on SteamVR Environments were a cut-down
| version of what was actually used to make Half-Life Alyx, but
| they gave Garry all the tools, and he moved to Source2, and
| built a .net "framework" to make it faster to develop and
| iterate in Source2. So Garry's tools are now an open version
| of the closed tools that Valve didn't want to release that
| they used to make Alyx.
|
| Finally there's another serious competitor to UE and Unity.
| enbugger wrote:
| Yet another one. Along with Stride, Godot, Unigine, O3DE,
| Flax and tens more. All look like they just want be clone
| of UE: generic dark UI with inspector, scene hierarchy,
| asset browser in the bottom and play button in the top.
| Zero creativity and innovation. Where's Emacs or Vim of
| game engines which brings its own unique philosophy?
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Who cares about the UI. A game engine is the library code
| needed to make games, not the editor UI. Just use vim to
| edit your files if that's what you want.
| wvbdmp wrote:
| I don't understand this take. The abundance of game
| engines has never been greater, both open and
| proprietary. As has the abundance of indie games. Some
| people make a distinction between more batteries-included
| engines with editors etc. and "game frameworks", which
| are supposedly more bare-bones libraries such as Bevy or
| Babylon.js. Maybe that's what you're after?
| lukan wrote:
| "Where's Emacs or Vim of game engines which brings its
| own unique philosophy?"
|
| All forgotten in obscurity.
|
| When making a game, people are usually not so much
| interested in the philosophy of their tools, but shipping
| things with it as soon as possible.
|
| That means working as expected.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| Complaining about the UI color and button layout of an
| game _engine_ is a bit like comparing aircraft carriers
| by the color of the rug in the control room. What about
| the built-in tools for organizing and connecting assets,
| format support, how user input is handled, the batteries-
| included ways to model game state, and all the ways of
| interconnecting all those things _in the code the engine
| provides_? Does anyone have interesting comparisons
| /notes around those subjects as it relates to the S&box
| engine?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I would suppose anyone being creative and innovative with
| their game engines are happily using their creation
| without trying to turn it into a community or business
| model to the point where you would have heard of it.
| adito wrote:
| Oh, you mean Rust (the game[1]), not Rust (programming
| language[2]).
|
| [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/252490/Rust/
|
| [2]: https://rust-lang.org/
| justinclift wrote:
| The license: https://github.com/Facepunch/sbox-
| public/blob/master/LICENSE...
| quantummagic wrote:
| MIT + copyright retention requirement
|
| Except all third party components that are included in the
| source, maintain their own license.
| 7bit wrote:
| As a web dev, I pronounce that sampersandbox.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| I always enjoyed Garry's blog.
|
| It just seemed like a public diary. And a place to vent about
| dev,life,w/e. He seems to be unapologetic-ally himself.
|
| Although I was pretty sure there used to be more posts (although
| maybe I'm conflating his posts there with his contributions to
| his old forums.)
|
| https://garry.net/posts/
| nosmokewhereiam wrote:
| Woohoo, G man made it to HN! I believe in this project and am
| very hopeful as new game modes and models are added
| jquaint wrote:
| This is cool, though I'm reluctant to give praise when they have
| been so weird with Linux support on their games.
|
| It was annoying after buying Rust to learn that you can't play on
| official servers on Linux. The game runs fine on Linux, the devs
| just don't allow it.
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/games/survival-crafting/rust-develop...
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