S&box as a Game Engine. What do you think? #4012
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Why would people want more "exporting support" now? Because Unity will start charging for more of their licenses? |
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Hi guys here is my idea for the sand box. You should be able to write what you want to be a game in the s8 box and AI or another person (real person ) will make the game automatically. |
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Just give us an option to base our games on set versions of s&box like Unity does so we actually have a choice whether or not we want to be a part of the rodeo. This development cycle is slightly crazy from an outsider perspective and when you've got an infinite money machine like Rust there's little incentive to start calling things finished, released, or done, because the scope can expand indefinitely. Please don't be the Star Citizen of game engines. Having the ability to lock yourself into builds of the engine like Unity Hub also gives us a better chance of finishing stuff before things get wildly shaken up again. I love this engine but I really wish we had a choice as to whether we can stop our projects getting completely wrecked. These are just my thoughts and feelings at the end of the day too. I can't argue too much because the current concept of s&box is really unique, and is very attractive to people who love Quake derived games. But maybe I'm just after more security. Perhaps then I can really start taking things seriously and stop worrying if something I do is going to be a huge mistake in the near future. |
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I think in terms of standalone games letting the games version lock what engine they're running makes sense to a degree. I also recall Garry saying in the past that on full release updates won't be as frequent, likely not per-commit, and pain-day refactors will be incredibly rare. That being said, in sbox's current state of launching or joining game servers from the menu I don't think allowing engine version locking is a good idea from a security standpoint. When you're choosing a game from the menu there is an implicit trust that the engine and whitelist are working to keep you safe from exploits/whitelist bypasses. Allowing games to specify engine version opens an easy way to leverage that trust by producing games on known vulnerable engine versions and locking to that version. I believe there's a major difference in implicit trust between standalone games that someone has to seek out and install versus a server list based system like we have currently. It makes sense for the latter to be enforcing the latest stable release of the engine. To level the chaos for server list based games I personally think the best way of handling potentially game-breaking updates from the engine that aren't security-related would be to have a pre-release branch for developers to test on and fix their game prior to an update releasing. That way developers can check if their game will break, update what needs to be updated, and not have their game go down when the update releases sending them into a scramble to fix it. Another potential solution would be always enforcing security updates on games, but making non-security updates opt-in. But this can get quite messy when a security update is dependent on an opt-in update. |
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While you bring up a good point, when a game is uploaded to asset.party that game would not itself include the engine version. It would be very wasteful to have every game store the same version of the engine, and like you say, it would open games up to distributing un-trusted binaries. Instead the game would simply have a reference to the version number it's using, and the engine versions are authored completely by Facepunch. There would also have to be a blacklist for certain versions that have known security vulnerabilities... But I (personally) think developers should still be allowed to develop games for those versions and export standalone games. I do also think opting in to non-security updates would be a fantastic option to allow for the preservation of older games that weren't released as a standalone, but I totally understand if FP doesn't want to do that :) |
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One of the must-have features for me is the ability to export my game. Especially since some of the games I've worked on are encroaching on levels of effort that most small indie games have. Why choose s&box when I could pick something else and not be locked to a platform? Well, right now, the appealing factor is my game will actually get played by others. I also think that only certain types of games will be successful on the s&box platform. Mostly, multiplayer games with experiences that are quick and easy to jump into. These types of games are also perfect to monetize with cosmetics and such. The ability to export would entice more varied games since they could be thrown up on some external platform. I don't have any opinions on the specifics like versioning. I'm sure the FacePunch staff have some good ideas on how to handle this. What is important is to have exporting in mind when s&box is being built. As a member of the community since ~2021, I genuinely do think s&box is something special, and having the ability to export would enhance the engine tenfold. |
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I couldn't agree more with it being very important to keep exporting in mind sooner rather than later. Both for the infrastructure of the engine and for the developer base. I also think that you raise a fantastic point about the types of games that will do well on s&box (the platform). Single player content/experiences will very rarely be in the top percent of games, so people have no incentive to make those types of games knowing that those games don't get eyes. However, there are other marketplaces where games like that do a lot better, and being able to release your game on those platforms would make creating those games worthwhile. This could also open the doors to being able to publish your game within s&box AND releasing a separate standalone version on other platforms. |
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Just switch to mocha 🙄 |
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What is mocha? |
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For many months, s&box has made me question what I consider to be a "good" engine. Although s&box is in a very early developer preview state, I believe it to be a better engine than Unity, Godot, or Unreal by a LOT of metrics. However, it's undeniable how fantastic those other engines are for the things that they CAN do a lot better (mostly due to them being established for so long). The last 5 games I've made in s&box have left me astonished at how easy it is for me (a 2D game developer who has never really touched 3D before s&box) to make both 2D and 3D games with little-to-no effort in a dev environment that is far less bloated than any other engine I've used to date.
In light of a recent announcement from a certain game engine, I think that more people than ever are going to want exporting support from s&box. Garry has expressed interest in this before, saying it's the best way for developers to profit off their work in the long-run, but it also seems as though they need permission (presumably from valve) before they can support such a thing. I think it's in their best interest to start exploring this avenue sooner-than-later as it would make it a much more viable platform to develop games on while also having a much more open community. This comes with some things to consider of course:
While I know changes are over the horizon that will ultimately benefit s&box for the better (which I am very much looking forward to), I think that there is something to say about the state that it's currently in. People have made incredible things, and many have poured years into projects that will soon be rendered unplayable unless previous versions of the engine remain accessible. Many engines such as Unity, Unreal, Godot, and GameMaker allow you to download any version of the engine that you'd like, to prevent having to deal with pain days if your game relies on certain features or even develop for legacy hardware. This would be an essential feature to have for developers of standalone games and would allow developers to preserve/maintain their games without sinking even more time into them. This also has it's own things to consider:
At the end of the day... these are merely my own thoughts and opinions, but I make this post not to ask for all of my problems to be magically solved or all my demands to be met... But I instead ask because I believe in s&box as a game engine/platform and I'm really interested in what everyone else has to say. Do you have any interest in using s&box as a standalone game engine? Would you appreciate engine versioning? Do you have any potential answers to the many questions that I posed? If so, please let me know what you think :)
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