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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Valve doesn't try to make general purpose engines, they make engines that suit their own games, so unless you happen to be making a game which is shaped very much like HL:Alyx or CS2 you would probably be underwhelmed with Source 2. That includes platform support, Source 2 doesn't officially support any of the consoles because Valve hasn't needed it to, having only ever shipped it on PC and (briefly) Android/iOS.

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Then again there is s&box which I would not consider being close to either, well the games that can be made with s&box at least. But I agree that it would probably be hard to build something like Teardown inside the Source 2 Engine. On the other hand: Teardown does not use Unity either.

S&box licensing Source 2 is a bit of an enigma to me, I get the impression that they're having to rewrite huge swaths of the engine so I don't know what they're getting out of it. They've gone to the lengths of integrating C# scripting from scratch rather than using the scripting facilities that Source 2 comes with. Nobody else has licensed Source 2 in the 4 years since s&box adopted it, so they're the lone outlier in any case.

Respawns use of Source 1 was a similar story, they ended up rewriting practically everything in the course of developing Titanfall and Apex Legends, to the point that it's almost unrecognisable as Source at this point.

I don’t think there is (or needs to be) much more to it than Garry’s personal history and success with Source

Garry has publicly expressed regret over choosing Source 2 for this reason, but they might be in too deep now. Generally, the tooling is really great, so I guess that's the primary benefit.

Do you have a source for this? S&box used to use UE4 in the past but as soon as Source 2 became an option immediately jumped ship. There has been a ton of progress since then and I don't see why he would regret switching to Source 2 when no other engine would have made as good of a base for S&box.

S&box has rewritten many parts of the engine in C# at this point. Gets rid of lots of legacy code and makes this easier to change in the future. Using the scripting facilities built into Source 2 would have restricted what could be written in C# and slowed the team down.

If you haven't taken a look at S&box recently it's looking a lot more like Unity now. https://sbox.game/news/scene-system

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