s&box Just Went Open Source because Facepunch Are Absolute Mad Lads
In an industry obsessed with extracting every penny from developers, the creators of Garry's Mod just gave away the keys to the castle for free.
We have been waiting for s&box, the spiritual successor to Garry's Mod, for what feels like an eternity. It has been rebuilt, delayed, and pivoted more times than I can count. But today, Facepunch Studios did something wild. They opened the hood and let everyone take the engine home.
In a blog post dropped today, developer Matt confirmed that s&box is now open source under the MIT license. You can literally go to GitHub right now and grab the code.
This is a massive middle finger to the current trend of engine royalties and "runtime fees." (Sure they canceled it and apologized, but that doesn’t change the facts) Facepunch is basically saying that if you want to build a game, fork their engine, and sell it as a standalone product without paying them a dime, you can.
The "Valve" Caveat
Now, before you get too excited thinking you have the source code for Half-Life: Alyx, let’s clarify one thing. This release does not include the base Source 2 code. That belongs to Valve, and Gabe Newell isn't sharing that vault anytime soon.
What Facepunch released is everything they built on top of it. That means all the high-level C# systems are yours to play with. This includes the entire editor, the networking code, the scene system, and the UI.
It is the framework that turns Source 2 from a renderer into an actual game-making tool. You can view it, modify it, or copy it to fix bugs yourself instead of waiting for a patch.
Nerds Being Nerds
The reasoning behind this move is refreshing. They aren't doing it for a tax write-off. Matt stated simply that they are "a bunch of nerds that love what we're creating."
They explicitly shouted out Godot as an inspiration, saying that open source is great for the ecosystem because everyone wins. It is a philosophy that feels like a relic from a better era of the internet, and I love it.
Oh, and the Ground Looks Better
Buried under the headline news about the engine being free, they also dropped some visual updates. They fixed the terrain LOD chunks to remove those ugly seams that pop up in open-world games.
They also added a new anti-tiling technique that rotates texture segments so your grass doesn't look like a repeating wallpaper pattern. It makes the ground look "20% cooler," according to the update.
But let's be real. The textures are nice, but the fact that I can now legally fork the entire engine for my own project is the real story here. Facepunch just changed the game again.
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