Remember what Unity did last September? Yeah, people didn’t quite like that. Sure, they made an apology, but the runtime fee sill exists, and they haven’t quite won back people’s trust…
Conveniently, Facepunch (creators of Garry’s Mod and Rust) has been working on a successor to Garry’s Mod called S&box, and it just released into open beta and I love it.
S&box is effectively an entire game engine made in Source 2. It’s the Source 2 SDK Valve never made. The reason I brought up Unity is that S&box is very similar to Unity. The reason I haven’t tried switching to Godot is because I’m not a huge fan of GDScript. (I’m aware it supports C# as well, but its implementation feels kind of icky to me, can’t really pinpoint why.) S&box uses C# almost exactly how Unity uses it, which makes it a very easy transition. Another great feature is how networking is supported out of the box, and there’s also an entire asset host available for free assets and libraries. Unlike Unity’s Asset Store, this doesn’t have an outlandish download time.
S&box is also a platform, akin to Roblox, meaning publishing your games is basically done for you. I’ve also heard that they’re working on making an exporting feature so you don’t feel like a Roblox developer, confined to the platform.
I’m still using Unity
So if S&box is so great, why am I still using Unity? For one, S&box isn’t done yet. Far from it. Another reason is that, at least for now, it’s Windows only. (Proton is supported but they said they have no plans for a native Linux version.) The main reason, though, is that I’m just more used to Unity. And chances are, my game development hobby is not going to make me any money, let alone enough for the runtime fee to impact me. However, I will still be using S&box a lot. It’s just a fun tool to use and a fun game to play. Great job Facepunch, I’m excited to see where S&box can go.
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