S&box
S&box is an engine developed by Facepunch studio. Initially, the development was based on Unreal Engine 4, but as soon as 
Half-Life: Alyx came out, Facepunch immediately requested the engine of the newly-minted game. This received a positive response in the form of the 1st terabyte of source data, after which, in 2020, S&box's transition to 
Source 2 was announced. This event was the first time that Source 2 was transferred to third-party developers.
User Access
S&box is currently in closed beta testing. It is not possible to get access to the engine (as of May 5, 2022) due to the termination of the test recruitment in December 2021.
Previously, access was available from the addon developers page, which now takes care of redirecting users to the S&Works home page.
Release Date
An exact release date is unknown, but Facepunch plans to release S&box around 2023, according to a post on the project’s description page: “Our plan is to get to a releasable state over the next 6–12 months, then improve it over 10–20 years.”
The approximate dates for the completion of primary work were first announced by Garry Newman on February 19, 2022, on the official S&box Discord server:
Addons
S&box currently supports 4 types of add-ons:
- Games - addons that run through the main menu of the engine
- Maps - game locations that are addons for games
- Content - probably these are future addons for games (the publication is temporarily unavailable)
- Tools - improved or created-from-scratch editors, compilers, etc. designed to make your life easier (the publication is temporarily unavailable)
Maps
Map creators are provided with a partially rewritten Hammer map editor.
Addon control panel
In the control panel, you can write supported games, thereby prohibiting the search for a map in the general list of maps for games that are not included in the list.
Publication
Currently, maps cannot be launched directly from the game, so they have to be released as a separate addon (one for each map). The map is published by clicking on a special button in the addon control panel.
Characteristics
| Unlimited for models, but 32768 units (624.23 m / 2048 ft) for meshes | |
| The player currently sees approximately 131233.6 units (2.5 km / 8202,1 ft) in front of him |
Shaders
S&box supports HLSL Shader Model 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0. You can create your own shaders and customize their interface for the material editor.
Sounds
Currently, the sounds are arranged in an extremely primitive way due to the content associated with them cut from the engine.
An analogue of Steam Audio using C# is currently being developed. In addition, a convenient sound editor based on graph nodes is being developed.
Programming
S&box uses C#, which greatly expands the possibilities for developers in comparison with the same Lua, which is used in Garry's Mod.
Currently, the API is underdeveloped, and not all ideas can be fully implemented.
Gallery
- Sbox-News-Screenshot-01.jpg
