We're getting there. This has been slower than our other games because we're working methodically. Approaching one thing, evaluating it, seeing where we can ease the process.. if it takes a bunch of work to make the player respawn, we're doing it wrong. 

I think a lot of people don't get what Deathmatch is trying to be. It's not trying to be a twitch-shooter or 900u/s movement madness. It's meant to be nice and simple.

We're precaching prefabs, and their contents now - so that first time hitch is gone. Makes the game feel so much better.

We've added a lot more diagnostics for dedicated servers, so we can pinpoint areas to improve in the coming weeks. We've been running daily playtests lately too, and we're inviting you guys to tag along.

Following on from the work on the Play Fund earlier this month, we managed to get a system in place to pay out to developers.

If you have more than $10 in your account now (check your profile page), you'll be able to enter your payment and tax information.

We'll be doing the first ever payout in the second half of March 2025.

Our input was one frame behind. At some point last year I refactored a bunch of code to move more stuff into the control of c#.. but I'd left the code that polled the input in c++. That was lumped in with the frame rendering code, and ran right before rendering.

Unfortunately all the game logic had already run by that point, so those inputs were used after the frame render.

I added forums as a hackweek project. I've said it before, but I hate that we use discord so much, and after a day all the information is just flushed down the toilet. I tried to add some forums before, using discourse, but I hated how they worked.

These forums solve a bunch of website problems for us. Obviously it gives people a place to discuss and ask questions in a place where it doesn't all dissapear in an hour. We can also make bug reports/suggestions use a forum, so the ideas can be replied to and discussed better. And it replaces the comments system.

Another hackweek project was using the localization. If you're viewing this on desktop, you'll see an option on the top right to change the language. 

This is AI generated. Everyone hates AI generation, and as soon as you mention it people want to kill you. But it seems like translation is one thing it should be able to get right. You should be able to give it a bunch of words, and a bunch of context, and it should be able to get it right 99% of the time.

Improvements have been made to the in game modal popup. It now lets you see and write reviews, and view the latest news. It's overall a better, more expandable layout.

As part of this I  fixed and updated a bunch of UI things, including getting Yoga to the latest version, which fixes some bugs and adds display: contents.

Lots of progress on the Motion Editor this month.

Added recording, which gets stored in your clipboard to let you reposition / blend the capture in the timeline. You can also just copy / paste arbitrary sequences from the timeline too.

You can also record in play mode, letting you puppet characters in your scene using your game's movement code. Additive blending now works with clipboard data, so you can easily layer on tweaks to your recorded gameplay.

While recording is the single biggest new feature, but there's a bunch of smaller improvements too.

You can snap the cursor to timeline objects, or individual frames.

Timeline selection has been completely rewritten, and fully works with snapping.

Tracks can be locked so modifications don't affect them, including clipboard data.

Added a playback speed slider, and in play mode the playback controls sync with the MoviePlayer component.

Priority now is to nail down the core stuff that would need to be in the engine, then we can move this to be a built-in tool. For now you can play around with it in the testbed project, but it's very work-in-progress still.

I've added support for multiple audio listeners so that sounds playing from multiple scenes will be heard by the correct listener. The bonus is this can be used in the same scene for split-screen or portals.

Continued porting mesh operations from Hammer to the Scene Map Editor.

Added bevel tool

Added weld uvs operation for vertex and edge

Added quad slice operation

Add vertex merge operation

Flip faces operation

ScenePanel lets you render scenes directly into a UI panel, previously this could only use low level renderer objects.
Now you can use any standard scene created in the editor.

Navigation Links have been finalized and are now available.
Their primary use case is to allow Nav Agents to move vertically and seamlessly traverse gaps in the navmesh.

How agent's traverse these links can be customized via code. You can read more about that here.

Links are just regular components and can be created and placed in the scene editor.

We've always used Horizontal FOV as it's how Source 1/2 has worked and because it's a good default for FPS games. But not everyone is making an FPS game, and a few other engines tend to use a Vertical FOV by default. So now you can choose whichever you wish to use right from the Camera Component.

During hack week I wanted to prove out a VR toolkit for devs to use. I didn't get it finished, but I made a lot of progress on it. Including interactions, full body IK and hand posing.

We shipped the valentines bear this month, as a limited edition skin. We really enjoy putting these skins together.

The head sold 2,900 items, and the trousers and top sold about 2,200 each. We're pretty happy with these numbers considering our release status and low player numbers. Our hope is that eventually a good chunk of the profits from these skins will go into the play fund.

We plan to create more of these limited period skins periodically throughout the years. It feels like a win-win for everyone. We'll also be inviting the community to submit skins.

Now that we’re working on Deathmatch, we need a map to go along with it. We’ve chosen a classic map we love and are pushing it into the art phase.

This process is incredibly helpful for identifying missing assets and determining what’s needed most. Creating assets without a clear use case can be challenging, so having an environment to place them in helps guide our priorities.

Our goal is to keep the map clean, well-lit, and engaging. Once complete, it will be available for any game that wishes to use it.

We're consistently updating our asset libraries with props and materials for the community  to use.

Reminder that you can access our libraries through the Cloud Browser in-engine by favouriting the collections on sbox.game.

The common ones I'd recommend are:

We're pushing in a few different areas right now, and making steady progress in each of them. First of all, monetization, it's important for the survival of our community that monetization options are available and apparent. Then we have Deathmatch, which is pushing the usability and stability of all the systems in the engine before we create Sandbox Mode. Then we have Movie Maker which I feel is going to be very important to the video creation community, but will also serve functions for doing simple animations in games.

I'm quite happy with where everything is right now, how everything is progressing. The play fund has undoubtedly injected some motivation into the community, it feels like the community games and maps are all getting more polished.