Sandbox: Contraption Weapons

By

This is a feature I added a few weeks back, but it really shines now with the addition of the Rocket Launcher, and support for the Physics Gun.

This means your contraptions can shoot rockets..

Or grab things like a tractor beam..

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Sandbox: RT Screens

By

devultj

You can link cameras to TVs now, great for contraptions, or just generally messing around.

You've been able to do this for a while, but I thought I'd show how you can do this yourself in your own games. You can create a render target texture with a specific size, and just link it to a CameraComponent's RenderTarget.

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Auto LODs

By

Lorenz

We added the ability to auto generate LODs directly in modeldoc.
Under the hood Arseny's meshoptimizer does the heavy lifting.

Video courtesy of Northbound RP

The system is designed to be as easy to use as possible, and you should get decent results with the default settings. However, you can also fine-tune individual settings and even mix handcrafted and auto-generated LODs.

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Spritesheet Importer

By

Carson

You can now import Sprites from a Spritesheet without the need to manually split them all up. Just set the rows/columns and select which frames you want to import:

When importing a sprite strip (vertical OR horiztonal) it will automatically set the rows/columns and select all the frames for you, so they can be imported without and fiddling :)

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Mapping Bridge Tool

By

Layla

Another big tool from hammer brought over to the mapping tool. Bridge edges and faces.

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Better disconnect feedback

By

solwllms

Sometimes, when trying to join a game, you'd get thrown back to the menu without really knowing why or at what point things went wrong. So this week, we've straightened out the connection flow, formalised things under the hood, and added a bunch more feedback.

Players will now see big new message boxes when they're disconnected from a server, or when a connection attempt fails, with fairly descriptive reasons. This is how we show kick messages now too, and we've fixed an issue that would sometimes make these messages appear garbled, so you'll know when you've been kicked for RDMing and to hang your head in shame.

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Bindless AMD Artifact Fixes

By

matt

After merging UI batching and new shadows we've been seeing some minor to intense artifacting on AMD cards.

We switched all these shaders to use bindless textures, which are great but needed explicit marking with NonUniformResourceIndex to work in non-uniform cases (which were 99% of our cases...). Whilst we were marking these like Bindless::GetTexture2D( NonUniformResourceIndex( TextureID ) ) they weren't actually doing anything as a function parameter, they needed to be done on the descriptor heap itself.

The solution was simple, if 99% of the time we needed to be doing NonUniformResourceIndex we might as well do it inside Bindless::GetTexture2D( TextureID ) so people don't have to bother with what it means. If we have justification to we can do a variant for when you know you have a uniform resource index.

No more artifacts on AMD.

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Media Framework Rewrite

By

Lorenz

We used FFmpeg from the beginning as a quick and easy way to get media players working, but we've always known it's a big pandora's box when we release with licensing issues around all the codecs.

So we've removed our dependency on FFmpeg, whilst it could handle just about any codec or file format you could throw at it, we've favoured a restricted selection of the most commonly used codecs and file formats such as AV1, WebM and Opus.

Going forward, we will support the following formats and codecs:

Video

Decode: VP9, AV1, animated WebP, H.264 (Windows only via MMF)
Encode: VP9, AV1, animated WebP
Containers: .webm, .mp4

Audio

Decode: Opus, FLAC, MP3, WAV/PCM, AAC (Windows only via MMF)
Encode: Opus, WAV/PCM
Containers: .ogg, .wav, .flac, .mp3, .opus

Networking Playback: HTTP/HTTPS

Note: H.264 decode and AAC decode are provided through Windows via Media Foundation, if you're adding video content to your games, we recommend AV1 or VP9.

More documentation can be found here: https://sbox.game/dev/doc/media/

If you feel like something major is missing, feel free to open an issue. If it's a widely used format/codec, we might add it, but we won't support every codec under the sun.

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AV1 Encoding on backend

By

matt

Following the media framework changes in engine, we've looked at how we encode videos on our workshop. Previously these were all H264 in an MP4 but we've swapped over to AV1 in a WebM and have started re-encoding all existing videos.

Here's some of the video sizes from our featured games.

  Dark Descent (1080p 60fps, 27.8s)
   ║ Variant │ MP4 Size │ AV1 Size │ Saving │ MP4 SSIM │ AV1 SSIM ║
   ║ High    │  41.80MB │  16.29MB │  -61%  │  0.9719  │  0.9538  ║
   ║ Medium  │  17.65MB │   9.93MB │  -44%  │  0.9598  │  0.9535  ║
   ║ Low     │   3.41MB │   3.02MB │  -11%  │  0.9284  │  0.9499  ║

  Sausage Survivors 2 (1080p 30fps, 24.6s)
   ║ Variant │ MP4 Size │ AV1 Size │ Saving │ MP4 SSIM │ AV1 SSIM ║
   ║ High    │  12.94MB │   5.99MB │  -54%  │  0.9889  │  0.9603  ║
   ║ Medium  │   6.11MB │   3.31MB │  -46%  │  0.9835  │  0.9551  ║
   ║ Low     │   1.39MB │   1.00MB │  -28%  │  0.9638  │  0.9479  ║

  Sandbox (720p 50fps, 21.2s)
   ║ Variant │ MP4 Size │ AV1 Size │ Saving │ MP4 SSIM │ AV1 SSIM ║
   ║ High    │   8.45MB │   6.49MB │  -23%  │  0.9328  │  0.9760  ║
   ║ Medium  │   8.45MB │   5.65MB │  -33%  │  0.9328  │  0.9741  ║
   ║ Low     │   1.53MB │   1.46MB │   -5%  │  0.9135  │  0.9700  ║

Summary

File sizes: 5–61% smaller across the board, biggest wins on high-bitrate 1080p content
Quality: All AV1 variants stay above 0.95 SSIM (excellent). Sandbox actually sees a huge quality improvement
Worst case: Sausage Survivors 2 high drops from 0.989 -> 0.960 SSIM - noticeable in metrics but still well above the perceptual threshold, at half the file size

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Finance Charts

By

garry

I've updated our open finance metrics to be even more detailed, adding our costs for running s&box as a company, salaries, server costs, taxes, play fund, it's all there.

People will say it's crazy to be this transparent, showing how much we're making or even losing - I think the benefits outweigh the negatives, it's important people see the sustainability of the platform. We're not after short term financial success here, we're here for the long haul.

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UI Batching Fixes

By

matt

We got UI Batching in last week which came with a huge drop in draw calls and a big increase in FPS. This was a huge change for the huge amount of things we could do with our UI system and all the various ways you can layer and blend your panels together - obviously some things broke, but we've fixed them. 💪

Blend Modes

The most noticable bug was blend modes weren't being set correctly, our text renders should've been rendering in a premultiplied alpha blend mode but weren't, creating very unappealing text. This was also noticable in the Sandbox mode inventory.

Deferred Batching

But fixing this had broken our batching all together, we were doing immediate mode batching, every bit of text was causing a flush and breaking the batch.

We needed a new approach. Deferred collects it all first, sorts it into groups with a sort key derived from the z-index, the layer, the blend mode, then flushes in the new sorted order.

The images show:

Immediate batching with improper blend modes
Immediate batching with proper blend modes
Deferred batching with proper blend modes

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Party Time

By

solwllms

Parties have been a thing in S&box for ages, this week we've given them a pass to refresh the UI, better integrate them with newer systems and features, and cut the faff.

Before now, parties were a bit tucked away, accessed from a creation menu on the main menu footer. Now, you're basically always in one. You can invite a friend right off the bat, and we'll automatically set up the real party behind the scenes.

There's been a bunch more changes to buff up the party experience, too: You now need to be party leader to be able to start and join games. You can kick players from your party. You can invite friends and accept their invites directly from the Steam overlay. Party voice chat is back. And just like for game servers, we've added more player-facing feedback when joining and creating a party - maybe it doesn't exist anymore, maybe it's full, now you'll know.

Parties are a quick and easy way to experience games on s&box, and they work just like you'd expect. Invite your mates, and they'll follow you right into any game on the platform. Give it a go! 🥳

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AO Optimizations #2

By

Sam Pavlovic

Done the second part of AO optimizations, AO runs at half resolution now, so it's 4x faster while keeping same sample count as previously, 16x if on low preset (quarter-res), the upscale makes it look pretty much the same, going in line with what others do.

The optimizations from previously made spatially denoised AO look like shit, so I've completely redone the denoiser it uses, and it looks as good as the temporal approach.

We deprecated temporal denoising, it's all done in one frame - we want to prioritize pleasent gameplay experiences by focusing on image clarity and stability instead of photorealism and excess graphics fidelity.

Oh and we also made it so turning AO off actually turns it off. 🙈

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