This week we've made it so you can sit on chairs.. We've added high fidelity terrain displacement, more stability metrics (crashes), addressing cosmetics and a bunch of other stuff
We want to sit on stuff in Sandbox Mode. It's a common thing, so I built it into the engine's PlayerController.
To use the new sit mode you need to add the SitMoveMode component to your player controller. Then add a Chair component to something, configure it, and you're done.Their chair is quite an important piece of the puzzle here. It unlocks a lot of stuff when you think about it. A lot of things are really just chairs. Like beds. Or toilets. Or cars. Or bikes. Or arcade machines.
You're basically locking the player in a place and playing an animation. You could be redirecting their input into something else, which would create vehicles, or sentry turrets, or grabber machines. This is the key to a lot more functionality down the line.
Editor Config
BaseChair is a component you can use straight away in the editor to create chairs (you can also derive from it to create your own chair components easily).
Future
Like I said, there's a lot we can build off of the chair stuff. We want more sitting animations (like lying down etc). More functionality (flags to restrict weapons etc). And then eventually, this is where vehicles are going to easily come from.
Terrain materials now support displacement. This helps making flat looking surfaces more detailed by varying the height of the geometry based on a displacement texture.Instead of this being parallax it's moving actual vertices, which means you will also see shadows interact nicely.
Each collider can have flags now. There are currently two flags.
IgnoreTraces - this collider will never be included in any traces, even if you want it to.
IgnoreMass- this collider won't contribute any mass to the object, which means that in a rigidbody it won't change the center of gravity or anything like that.
These are both quite useful in the context of chairs. I use them to create a non-traceble, no-mass sphere where the eye point is. This means that the eye point won't be able to fall through the world, but you won't have this invisible sphere that blocks bullets.
Last week we added Workshop Integration, which involved a popup to publish to the workshop. This works great but it was never visible in the editor. This meant that if you wanted to test this, you had to publish your game and test it live.
Now these overlays can appear in the editor too, so you can test it completely end to end without having to publish.
There are some other benefits to this:
Console
You can toggle the actual in-game console with F2. Whether or not this is better or easier than the editor's console is debatable, but it has all the stats too.
Console Overlay
You can enable the console overlay - which makes it harder to miss warnings and debug logs.
Profiling Tools
All the in-game profiling overlays are easily available via the console.
Pause Menu
I don't think a lot of people realise that there's a built in pause menu until after they actually ship their game - by which point they've usually made their own. This now shows when you press escape while playing in the editor. While you can override it, I always kind of prefer that you don't.. it's kind of nice to give players a consistent experience.
We've added two new export modes to Movie Maker, image sequences and image atlases. These let you export the frames of your movie as either lossless PNGs (which support transparency), or lossy JPEGs.Image sequence mode will write each frame to a separate image for easy importing in your video editing software of choice. Image atlas mode lays out all the frames in a grid within a single image, which can be used for flip-book animations.
You can now re-color sprites with an Overlay Color (alongside the Tint Color). This means you can flash your players/enemies red when taking damage, green when healing, or even pure white for fun.If you've used the SpriteTools library before, this was previously called "FlashColor"
When we first added Visual Studio Code support the only option was OmniSharp, which only just about worked and only when using code workspaces. It wasn't a good experience.
Since then the C# Dev Kit has replaced OmniSharp, providing a much smoother out of the box experience.
We've reworked our editor integration to work with folders instead of code workspaces as you'd expect, as well as adding C# Dev Kit as a recommended extension on new projects.
Stability (crashes) are a big concern for us, so I've added a Stability page to the metrics section of the site. This shows the number of crash reports we've received in a day, along with our best guess for the % of sessions that didn't end in a crash.
We were getting a few crash reports from people on very old CPUs related to them not having AVX instructions enabled. The game will now not open if your hardware is unsupported. (we already did this with GPUs)Whilst we want to support as much hardware as possible, we also have to draw a line in the sand somewhere.
AVX is supported in any generation after the i7-2600k (2011) or AMD FX 8000 (2011).
Generally these are our recommended minimum requirements:
As mentioned in a previous blog, when you crash you get sent to a crash page, which aims to explain the crash a bit by showing a crash log. These crashes are grouped, so if someone is having the same crash, it'll show the number of times that crash has happened and the number of affected users.
This week I added a forum for this groups, which enables you to tell us and discuss each crash. Our hope is that this will help us diagnose and fix these crashes a lot faster than we have done previously.
I wanted to address the cosmetics situation, since we're seeing a lot of hostility towards it because we have fell into a reliable schedule with it all now.
We're making our own seasonal clothing items that are limited sale. They're only ever going to be for sale during that period, and if you missed them, you missed them. You have to try to pick them up on the marketplace if you really want them. Otherwise you missed them. We do a set of these every few months as the season dictates.
Then we have community workshop items. We were doing 2 of these a month. We're going to do one a month now - at least until after release. These are limited sale items too. The creator gets a cut of the profits. As backwards as it sounds, they make more money for the creators being limited items than being for sale forever.
Our Money
When you pay us for these items, some goes to valve, some goes to the creator, and some goes to us. We use our cut to pay for the play fund. The more items we sell, the more money we make, the more money we can put in the play fund. This is all money that we're paying directly to creators.
The playfund has been running since February this year and we've paid out over $180,000 directly to the community. We hope to put a couple of extra decimals on the end of that number over the next 10 years.
FOMO
The people who act like we're fucking them with FOMO have never truly been fucked. We're not doing loot boxes. We're not doing shit where you get a crate and have to buy a $10 key. We're creating a viable long term economy where rare, hard to come by items are worth more.
This is how economies work. If gold fell from the sky it would be worthless. There has to be scarcity to create value. There has to be value to encourage purchases.
I want to create an economy where the people that have played for 5 years have an inventory worth more than they paid for it. I don't see anything wrong with that system. I see only winners.
Market Prices
Market prices should always be higher than the purchase price. If not immediately, then they should be after a year or so. This is what we should expect, this is what we should encourage. This isn't a bad thing at all. This is a healthy economy.
25.11.05
25.11.05
2 November 2025
🎁 Added
More packages to the GameCache
Editor can use menu overlays in games
Add references to editor libraries from editor compiler/csproj
Lootboxes and Crates + Keys system is just gambling, not even related to FOMO. Which both suck by the way. While I understand that the money that goes from these cosmetics, go back into the play-fund for the games, the whole economics in the game in the development as early as it is, feels just wrong, as it immediately sets the standart for incoming games to aim for the money and not for the passion of development that a lot of people came for in the games like GMod in the first place. Economics and games just don't mix well and it starts making a corporate hell like Roblox is, where slop is made just with the aim of getting on the front page. I have incredibly high faith in S&Box as essentially an engine that allows to both publish games on it's platform and let people who enjoy this platform play them AND allow developers to export their game for stores outside, that all is honestly truly awesome. But this weird feeling of concern for the game standing so aggressively on making actual FOMO cosmetics, which you can only get for a normal price when they launch and then it's just the marketplace folks gauging prices, make it feel pretty icky. I honestly don't know any other idea for a reliable way to make money for the play-fund, so I guess we have to settle for this, but it still just doesn't feel so good, as well as the explanation for it feels a little too aggressive, when you could have explained in a simpler, calmer way that you need this money to fund more games.
Economics and games just don't mix well and it starts making a corporate hell like Roblox is, where slop is made just with the aim of getting on the front page. I have incredibly high faith in S&Box as essentially an engine that allows to both publish games on it's platform and let people who enjoy this platform play them AND allow developers to export their game for stores outside, that all is honestly truly awesome. But this weird feeling of concern for the game standing so aggressively on making actual FOMO cosmetics, which you can only get for a normal price when they launch and then it's just the marketplace folks gauging prices, make it feel pretty icky.
This. I get what Garry means and all the economy stuff (I mean look at TF2, my friend makes a lot money of that he throws back into buying games on steam), but I also don't want it to turn into a slop fest like Roblox. Cus that's not what a spiritual successor to GMod should be, it should aim to be better and improve what was already a good game, like how City Skylines improved on Sim City or how SCP Unity aimed (before it died) to improve SCP: Containment Breach.
thank you garry
While I understand that the money that goes from these cosmetics, go back into the play-fund for the games, the whole economics in the game in the development as early as it is, feels just wrong, as it immediately sets the standart for incoming games to aim for the money and not for the passion of development that a lot of people came for in the games like GMod in the first place.
Economics and games just don't mix well and it starts making a corporate hell like Roblox is, where slop is made just with the aim of getting on the front page. I have incredibly high faith in S&Box as essentially an engine that allows to both publish games on it's platform and let people who enjoy this platform play them AND allow developers to export their game for stores outside, that all is honestly truly awesome. But this weird feeling of concern for the game standing so aggressively on making actual FOMO cosmetics, which you can only get for a normal price when they launch and then it's just the marketplace folks gauging prices, make it feel pretty icky.
I honestly don't know any other idea for a reliable way to make money for the play-fund, so I guess we have to settle for this, but it still just doesn't feel so good, as well as the explanation for it feels a little too aggressive, when you could have explained in a simpler, calmer way that you need this money to fund more games.
This. I get what Garry means and all the economy stuff (I mean look at TF2, my friend makes a lot money of that he throws back into buying games on steam), but I also don't want it to turn into a slop fest like Roblox. Cus that's not what a spiritual successor to GMod should be, it should aim to be better and improve what was already a good game, like how City Skylines improved on Sim City or how SCP Unity aimed (before it died) to improve SCP: Containment Breach.