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Comment by 3rodents | Hacker News Reader

For those unfamiliar, the studio behind S&box is Facepunch, creators of Garry's Mod and Rust. Facepunch as a company doesn't get much attention but they're wildly successful. Started as just some guy in a bedroom, now ~$100m/year in revenue (all via Steam), $100m in the bank, ~100 employees and almost entirely a company of game developers (maybe 20% of employees are administrative staff). Still owned and ran by the founder, Garry. S&box (and Garry's Mod and Rust) is pure game developers making things they want to make.

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Oooo, I remember Garry Newman! I found his UI library GWEN (GUI Without Extravagant Nonsense) when I was still in uni and working on my game engine. It's been abandoned for 9 years now, nice to see he's still working on cool tech.

[1] https://github.com/garrynewman/GWEN

He also made the UI framework used by S&box. It's based on HTML/CSS + Razor but is not rendered with a browser.

https://sbox.game/dev/doc/systems/ui/razor-panels/

Oh, you mean Rust (the game[1]), not Rust (programming language[2]).

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/252490/Rust/

[2]: https://rust-lang.org/

I occasionally play Rust but I've never written a line of Rust, so almost everyday I do a double-take when reading HN. So its pretty amusing to see HN be the one getting mixed up for a change.

As someone who both plays the game and used the language at work, and used to do cheat development, I always wonder if I can write a Rust cheat in Rust.

I ran a Rust server on an Oxide rack for me and some friends one weekend.

Only Xzibit can do that.

The origin story of Rust is classic: they got tired of Day Z and wanted to make it better, so they hired some random contractor to copy Day Z with elements of Fortnite and Minecraft, the developer complains that he's entitled to more money from the success of the game, lawsuit follows, and then Facepunch supposedly claims the original version was so buggy they have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. Unclear if they were just trying to start fresh so the lawsuit wouldn't follow them forever, but it started out as just a clone of another game and they turned it into a hugely successful business (and an incredible game). Most games have a short shelf life, but I've watched at least over the past 4-ish years, and the rate that they continue to push changes is impressive.

That's an amazing story.

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"?

The Hollywood development company that bought the rights to Skibidi and are developing it filed a DMCA strike against Garry's Mod. It got resolved, but no one involved is talking.

Additionally, news came out today that the original creator has lost creative rights to Invisible Narratives. It's looking quite grim all around.

Oh no. I just read up on this, it sounds awful.

https://www.thegamer.com/skibidi-toilet-creator-legal-disput...

Skibidi Toilet was made in Source Filmmaker.

Isn't Rust Unity-based? Was he just too fed up with Unity and decided to roll his own engine?

I'd guess S&box is more an extension of Garry's Mod rather than a reaction to Unity

S&box was based on UnrealEngine 4 until late 2020. I think Garry wanted to use the latest and greatest engine, then Valve continued to be friendly with him, and even though Valve wanted Source2 to be a VR platform, it was clear desktop was going to remain relevant, but the content creation tools on SteamVR Environments were a cut-down version of what was actually used to make Half-Life Alyx, but they gave Garry all the tools, and he moved to Source2, and built a .net "framework" to make it faster to develop and iterate in Source2. So Garry's tools are now an open version of the closed tools that Valve didn't want to release that they used to make Alyx.

Finally there's another serious competitor to UE and Unity.

Yet another one. Along with Stride, Godot, Unigine, O3DE, Flax and tens more. All look like they just want be clone of UE: generic dark UI with inspector, scene hierarchy, asset browser in the bottom and play button in the top. Zero creativity and innovation. Where's Emacs or Vim of game engines which brings its own unique philosophy?

Who cares about the UI. A game engine is the library code needed to make games, not the editor UI. Just use vim to edit your files if that's what you want.

Not all game files are text and the non-text parts massively benefit from good UI.

I am confused by this as well (not a game developer). The engine is under the hood and has no UI. The UI is in the car cabin.

Non-text file editing is done in a 3d model or image editing app.

The vast majority of non-text editing in game development isn't done in modeling or image manipulation apps, it's done via the game engine's editor. That's true whether you're using Unity, Unreal, Godot, or a homebrew engine.

There are the rare engines with no editor to speak of -- where things are either done programmatically or other textual definitions -- but they're very very very few and far between.

The engine itself doesn't have a UI, but working with any major engine without using their editor is functionally impossible.

Code is code, use a text editor.

3D assets can be made in your 3d program of choice.

Skeletons and animations are also somewhat standard. Use whatever tool you prefer.

Textures are bound to 3d assets, and use plenty of 3rd party tools.

USD makes scenes interchangeable. Use or write tools to fit your needs.

compute shaders are also somewhat standard. Work them out in python until you're happy with them.

Thats alot of it, if you really hate all game engine UIs. But the UI was good enough for the developer of the engine so mabie it's good enough as is.

I think the game engine UIs are very good for hooking parts together, personally.

I don’t understand this take. The abundance of game engines has never been greater, both open and proprietary. As has the abundance of indie games. Some people make a distinction between more batteries-included engines with editors etc. and “game frameworks”, which are supposedly more bare-bones libraries such as Bevy or Babylon.js. Maybe that’s what you’re after?

"Where's Emacs or Vim of game engines which brings its own unique philosophy?"

All forgotten in obscurity.

When making a game, people are usually not so much interested in the philosophy of their tools, but shipping things with it as soon as possible.

That means working as expected.

And then the forums and subreddits are flooded with miserable folks complaining about how destructive, inextensible and unpleasant to use those experiences are. This is not the problem of UI in engines itself, it's problem of how long it takes to bring it to acceptable state with all those moving parts. For UE, Unity and Blender it took decades.

Complaining is a lot easier than actually doing anything.

Realise that the people you are slinging mud at are actually busting their asses to provide game engines to the public some of them for free and with the source.

To be honest for most developers editors are much alike. While Emacs and Vim guys debate on their philosophies and config files others just open their favourite editor/IDE and ship.

This take has given me second degree burns. I must have never shipped anything then, what with vim being my favorite editor.

Lol, I haven't tinkered with my emacs config in nearly 10 years now. Most vim and emacs users put together a config they like over maybe a few weekends then get to work. We have deadlines to meet just like all the rest of you.

Complaining about the UI color and button layout of an game _engine_ is a bit like comparing aircraft carriers by the color of the rug in the control room. What about the built-in tools for organizing and connecting assets, format support, how user input is handled, the batteries-included ways to model game state, and all the ways of interconnecting all those things in the code the engine provides? Does anyone have interesting comparisons/notes around those subjects as it relates to the S&box engine?

I would suppose anyone being creative and innovative with their game engines are happily using their creation without trying to turn it into a community or business model to the point where you would have heard of it.

wasd is that, and then 1-9 (tho 9 and such is hard to reach) for the weapons/spells/tools, with keys near wasd for other binds, and the mouse for free look, autorun, shoot, and alt with scrollwheel for swapping weapon, too. This way, you use practically only the left side of the keyboard, but that is because keyboards aren't even an ideal input device for gaming. Something like an Azeron device (think: Orbweaver) would be far better.

BG3 has F5 for quick save and F8 for quick restore. Like the old ways.

As for game engine, who cares how things look in-game? Just make it theme-able and mod-able. Cheaters gonna cheat anyway, no way to hold that back on the client-side.

Emacs and Vi were both born from an era when industry standard UX had not yet been developed, so they were both explorations in relatively uncharted UX space. This kind of thing only happens anymore when you get a project lead by somebody ignorant/indifferent to established conventions who sets out to make something new without caring if anybody else uses it.

So the projects you desire almost certainly do exist, but they're languishing in the obscurity they earned with their indifference to convention.

https://bevy.org/

>even though Valve wanted Source2 to be a VR platform

I don't think this is true. The first Source2 game "released" was Dota 2, and currently it's used for CS2 and Deadlock as well.

Fair point. Maybe I should've said SteamVR environments instead, it never took off like SourceSDK did, partially due to incomplete tools. SteamVR as a whole is very healthy though.

Good, great even. The more the better. Even if the ecosystem gets seriously fragmented I'll take this over your only real choice being UE and Unity (t. Godot enjoyer).

If someone builds an export pathway to console/mobile then I think it could really become a powerful third choice. Even Godot has that!

Could assume that.

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.

i miss the old facepunch. on gmod i have a couple dozen IP mods. on s&box i made call of duty zombies gamemode and was perma banned. all cause they can make more money, but they forget mods like that is why their games are popular

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