I really like all the cultural oddities that Garry's Mod spawned. All of the indie animation. It was a big piece of machinima / virtual filmmaking / YouTube history and absolutely paved the way for VTubing and Unreal Engine in film.
Any idea if Facepunch or Valve retain rights to "Skibidi Toilet"?
Finally there's another serious competitor to UE and Unity.
S&box was initially developed on top of Unreal Engine, but in a backend-agnostic design. It's more like a framework/runtime meant to be portable to any backend engine. Once Source 2 released, S&box was ported to that.
I wouldn't call it an engine because of that. S&box is open source, but you can't run it without a closed-source backend.
Valve isn't keen on releasing Source 2 as widely as Source, and I feel like soon, S&box will be declared the official API interface for the engine, while the backend remains unstable. Kinda like Win32 vs NT.
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...
Apex Legends went through the same issue when they enabled Linux support, cheaters swarmed to Linux en-masse because it was so trivial to evade detection even with free/public cheats, and after a year or so the devs threw in the towel and blocked Linux again.
They're not doing this out of spite, they'd be happy to take your money if there were no downside, but unfortunately it is a trade-off for games which are sensitive to being ruined by cheaters. At least for now.
I don't think cheaters are swarming to Linux, but part of the issue with Apex Legends is that Linux support is done through Proton, through the Windows version of the game, because there no Linux version of Apex Legends. So now you've got a backdoor for everyone on Windows to run the less secure anticheat.
Solvable maybe by having a separate Linux version of the game, but that's also more supported needed.
Something has to change to move away from these rootkit antivirus like apps looking for exploits.
It was bad enough that we had to put up with nvidia's proprietary nonsense if we wanted hardware acceleration. Things have finally started to improve. They have finally started open sourcing things. Now that things are finally getting better this anticheat nonsense shows up. You gotta be kidding me.
Nobody needs a bunch of game companies feeling entitled to full access to our computers. You'd have to be nuts to let game companies run ring zero code on your system. You want their nonsense absolutely contained and isolated, not deep in your kernel.
Here's a thought: they don't own our computers, we do. We own the CPU. We own the RAM. We own the motherboard. If we want to edit their game's memory while its running, it's our god given right as the owners of the machine the game is running on. Any attempt to stop us from doing so is an affront to our freedom. The mere attempt to do so with "anticheating" kernel malware is offensive. The audacity.
Cheating at video games is an exercise in computer freedom. I realize I'm defending scoundrels here and it doesn't matter in the slightest. Our computing freedom is orders of magnitude more important than video games. I want them to suck it up and accept it. That is the price of freedom. If they want to be on Linux, it should be on our terms.
Don't care about this ideological stuff? Here's the sort of risk you're accepting when you opt into this bullshit:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/fs-labs-flight-simulator-pas...
Corporation thinks its the FBI and starts shipping a browser stealer to users to "catch pirates". Bonus points for exfiltrating the data on an unencrypted channel!
https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1cibw9r/valorant...
https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/634974-...
Screenshots your screen and exfiltrates it to their servers.
https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...
https://twitter.com/TheWack0lian/status/779397840762245124
https://fuzzysecurity.com/tutorials/28.html
https://github.com/FuzzySecurity/Capcom-Rootkit
A literal privilege escalation as a service "anticheat" driver!
Game companies give negative amounts of shit. If you trust them you're out of your mind.
The native Linux build never worked that well. Something was always broken because Unity's Linux support is/was spotty. Upgrading Unity versions would break random things.
Anticheat is the issue holding back Proton support, though.
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.)
I would caution Facepunch though that what made their past games a success wasn't perfection. In the case of Gmod I would actually say imperfection was the charm.
>Obviously this isn't the Source 2 code, that's up to Valve to open source if they want.
Does this mean you need Source 2 to develop with S&box?
The game reminds me of sitting down at a poker table in a casino. It's very unforgiving - you grind, invest a lot of time, and make calculated bets as to whether you can win or lose a raid, but you can instantly lose everything in a failed raid.
I wish someone would make a browser-based version that was fun to play, and I've thought about it for some time, but the struggle is scoping an MVP that is as compelling given the constraints (eg a 2d or top-down version makes it harder to do things like build multi-story buildings and raid them).
Maybe I'm wrong, but S&box is essentially a game developed with Source 2, thats purpose is to expose internal APIs and wrap them for users to build their own games with. So you develop your thing in S&box that happens to be made with Source 2, but you don't care about that. Basically Roblox.
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.
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.
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.
Log.Error( "Fucked" );
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/is-code-that-contain...
Except all third party components that are included in the source, maintain their own license.
I’m interested in how they’re sandboxing C# code. Seems like an engineering problem full of pitfalls. I’ll definitely be peeking at this!
Maybe competing with other engines, but it's hard to know how good enough this will be.
The age of mods is over, we're in the age of engines now, I don't think they will catch up.
Valve is not a game company anymore, they out source everything.
Interesting take when they have (at least) one upcoming game and two released games in development.
Probably has the same resources as Facepunch, but nowhere near the following or players.
What does monetization look like? Can you ship standalone games? Source 2 licensing requirements? Is this closer to Unity or closer to Roblox when it comes to publishing?
So I'm not certain why S&box is Windows only, but my guess is that's just temporary.
that cute snide comment won't somehow ensure that all of your community discussion isn't lost to discord-rot in a few short years.
keep your fate in your own hands..
(unless you just don't care)
Oh. It's a modding sdk.
