I cannot believe we don’t have a topic regarding this new kid ?
Anybody already tested S&box, how does it compare to Unity and Godot ?
Not at all.
You cannot compare a Sandbox game (like Minecraft or s&box) with a game engine for game developers. At best you could compare its Source 2 engine but that also makes little sense without considering its restrictive terms of use.
S&box internally use Source 2 and is considered a game engine as I know.
It is compile-able to executable file.
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Their Steam page states otherwise:
Or if you want, you can publish your games to Steam, royalty-free. (although we’re not quite ready on this yet)
While the S&box .NET layer is currently under a permissive license, Source 2 is not publicly available, so there’s a lot of risk in adapting proprietary technology with muddy licensing and unclear future from a 3rd party that doesn’t maintain the said proprietary technology.
Beyond that - limited platform reach, next to no integrations for industry standard middleware and 0 confirmed releases past the S&box (the platform) itself adds to the hard no on top of licensing. If I wanted to be an early adopter, I’d go for Godot where licensing is crystal clear.
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I’m also surprised there hasn’t been more talk about it. I think this is the main video going around about it.
From what I’ve seen there seems to be two versions. One sandbox game and a game engine version. I’ve been trying it out and its almost a clone of Unity e.g. GameObject, Component, OnAwake(), OnStart(), OnFixedUpdate(), OnEnabled(), OnDestroy() etc. Looks like the standalone builds for games are only a few months away.
For the most part it seems like a c# wrapper around Source 2. Sounds like the licensing with Valve to allow standalone builds is nearly done. I do like how it handles UI with razor. The animation system also reminds me of Unreal. The physics look really good e.g. Half-Life: Alyx. Hotload also looks interesting. It seems to have the best modding support out of the other game engines I’ve seen.
Probably my main issue is that it seems to only makes builds for windows at the moment. There are plans for mobile but that won’t be any time soon. I’m also not sure how much support you’d get on other platforms e.g. I feel like you won’t be able to publish to the Epic store.
I haven’t looked too much into it but it doesn’t seem to have much 2d support, so it looks like it’s mainly for 3d games. One other odd thing is that you need a Steam account to run the editor, even if you compile it from source.
I’ve been trying Godot for quite a while but I had too many issues with it. I think I’ll give s&box a go but I feel like it will probably be another year until it’s stable enough to release games on.
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After trying it out for a bit I thought I’d post my thoughts on it.
Things I liked:
- Hot reloading works really well. So I might have a debug log in an update, I change it in VS and as soon as I click save it updates in the live game.
- The animation system is really nice. I definitely prefer it over the Unity system.
- Shared assets. It seems like I can take my characters and other assets and reuse them between games (or use other peoples assets). I haven’t played any sandbox games like roblox or garry’s mod before so maybe this is quite common.
- Multiplayer seems to be easy to implement. The animation system also has multiplayer support. It does however look like it’s only for basic multiplayer at the moment e.g. no RTS.
Things I disliked:
- I couldn’t get breakpoints working. Seems like it’s already an known issue.
- There isn’t any support for 2d at the moment.
- Windows/Steam only really limits my options.
- Although I really like Razor UI it isn’t artist friendly and it’s hard to make interesting UI.
- I don’t like having to log into Steam to launch the editor.
- It was quite slow. To get breakpoints working the recommended way is to start debugging it from Visual Studio which launches the engine (similar to Godot). My machine is fairly new but it still takes about a minute to start.
- Current build is a bit buggy.
Overall I’m not planning on using it anymore at this point.
I feel like it could be a real competitor with Unity in a few years depending on the amount of support it gets. It seems like it would be in Valves best interest to support it if it locks devs into the Steam platform. I feel like Valve probably has enough money to get IP similar to how Fornight does. I’d be very tempted to use s&box if I was making something like a cart game and I could support characters from other franchises like SpongeBob without much effort or legal issues.
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It’s not a Valve initiative though. They’re just signing off on Facepunch being allowed to use Source 2. And Garry Newman was recently in the news equating AI use with porn, which is far from his first colorful use of language in media. Full quote from a news article title so I don’t get banned.
I doubt we’ll see any brand deals in this context. He’s doing Garry’s Mod 2 with an additional standalone export, not Fortnite. If you want to do brand deals, Epic does allow access to some branded content if they vet you personally. And there’s the upcoming Unity-Fortnite bridge too.
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There’s a sentence in the s&box documentation that indicates that the exported files (standalone EXE) may also be published in other stores. However, it’s mandatory that it also be published on Steam.
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Wonder what the main selling points of this engine are?
Since if there isn’t something clearly advantageous, it’s rough on this very tightly fought market.
One advantage is that it’s completely free, and you don’t have to pay for development to use the editor, nor do you have to pay a share of the revenue later. Apparently, only the standard store fees apply. Hence the requirement to publish on Steam.
So, no 5% of revenue above a certain amount (like with the Unreal Engine) and no ongoing costs for the developer tools (like with Unity 3D). If I understand correctly.
Source 2 is a robust engine that has been used in games such as Half Life 2, Counter-Strike GO, Counter-Strike 2 and Half Life Alyx.
They show many Features in their blog news: s&box
However, we will have to wait until the release to see what it will look like.
And as already mentioned, it currently only supports Windows and doesn’t have as many features as, for example, Unreal or Unity 3D, as far as I can tell from what I’ve seen so far.
I wonder how Source 2 bugs are addressed (if at all). It’s one thing for them to patch the .NET layer, but they probably have to forward Source 2 issues to Valve with unknown timelines. It just seems awfully convoluted and the FOSS nature is jut lip service when core technology is not source available. I don’t see studios adapting this so called engine at all.
Look at what Epic are doing when Fortnite money is starting to run out. What will happen when Facepunch starts to run out of Rust money?
s&box ist opensource under MIT License: GitHub - Facepunch/sbox-public: s&box is a modern game engine, built on Valve's Source 2 and the latest .NET technology, it provides a modern intuitive editor for creating games · GitHub
If they run out of money, you could just clone the Repo and maintain it by yourself.
If Valve runs out of money, the world will end. 
It being open source is pretty meaningless since it’s just a high level layer on top of the true engine - Source 2. And I don’t have close ties to Valve built over the past 20+ years like Garry does. Few to no devs can pull that off.
If Facepunch pulls development resources sometime in the future and Valve does something like Source 3 engine, this whole operation is pretty much done.
And there are plenty of actually FOSS engines out there that are considerably at less risk of going under.
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Not completely meaningless, because all tools and the editor can be maintained with it.
But yes, you’re right about that. What if Valve develops a Source 3 engine and then stops releasing it?
But that can happen with any engine, too—that it suddenly stops being developed and you have to switch engines (usually after a project).
I feel like s&box will probably do ok. I’d say it’s not directly competing with Unity or Unreal. Instead I feel like it’s really targeting roblox. I’ve never used roblox but s&box seems to be a lot better e.g. c# vs lua, better graphics, single click upload release, better revenue (I think roblox takes a 80% cut, s&box seems to take 0%). I think roblox has about the same number of devs making games as Unity or Unreal but they’re mainly younger and making smaller games.
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I would say good physics and multiplayer out of the box are great selling points.
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…and much simpler “Drag and Drop” from their store. Seems like you only need to click on something and it appears in front you.
I love the hotloading in s&box. Action Graph is also interesting. I haven’t seen / tested how UI works but seen good stuff overall in that community.
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It being open source is pretty meaningless since it’s just a high level layer on top of the true engine - Source 2.
s&box does not sit “on top of” Source 2.
From what I gathered, Facepunch has access to Source 2’s…source, and they just make additions/removals they deem necessary. If you look at a blogpost, you can see they’ve made changes to Hammer editor and such.
So even if Source 3 comes out, they’ll be fine. And I doubt Source 3 is coming out anytime soon. And even if it comes out, who knows what deal they might work out with Valve then.