Today we are checking out s&dBox, a new “game engine” and spiritual successor to Gary’s Mod by Facepunch (who also created the hit game Rust). While Gary’s Mod enabled gamers to create cool experiences to share and interact with, s&dbox takes it a step further, by not only having the interactive physics sandbox of Gary’s Mod, but also adding a full-blown game engine built on top of Valve’s source engine (and user the Hammer game editor). This will enable creators to actually publish their creations as full blown games and Facepunch intend to build their future projects on s&dbox’s foundations.
s&dbox is described as:
S&box is not going to be Garry’s Mod 2. It will eclipse what is possible in Garry’s Mod rather than simply be a modern version of it.
We are taking Source 2 and using our knowledge of Source 1, Garry’s Mod, Unity and Unreal Engine we’re trying to create an intuitive, modern feeling game development environment where everything is moddable.
Like Rust and Garry’s Mod – we see this as a long term thing. We intend to eventually make our own games using it. It is something for us to work on and improve every day for the next couple of decades.
Right now you can sign up for s&dbox completely free, you simply need to log in using your Steam account on this page.
S&dbox is a full-blown game engine with world editing tools (Hammer), animation tools, terrain tools, as well as a C# scripting support in addition to ActionGraph, their visual scripting solution. When you launch s&dbox you also have the option to simply launch into sandbox mode and play the creations of other users. One important question for developers of course is… can we make money?
Will creators be able to monetize?
Yes. But we want to be careful about what that means. We don’t want everything becoming pay to win like on other platforms.
Key Links
You can learn more about s&dbox and see it sorta in action (it’s a bit buggy for me… it is still very much under development at this point) in the video below.