Last week I added a new review system which contains positive and negative tags. This week we started using those reviews and their tags to help out with discovery.

First of all, you can now filter by the rating. The star rating is generated from a combination of thumbs up and down and the actual review ratings. My hope here is that it's intuitive for people to find games that other people have enjoyed, instead of having to fight their way through games that no-one loves.

You can also filter by the prominent review tags. For example, you might want to play a game where everyone agreed universally that the story was standout, or where everyone liked the graphics. Hopefully that's a lot easier now.

I think this gives some good community-led discovery options that we didn't have on launch, but obviously we'll keep improving this stuff over time. 

I've been making a lot of changes to our Workshop so we can identify and discourage the AI Slop.

Our moderators can now mark packages as having AI thumbnails, which will reduce their prevalence in lists and searches. I can understand why people would want to use AI to generate these thumbs, since it makes generating them easy and fast, it does have the massive downside of making everything look like the same shit. So we're actively discouraging it.

I've added a warning to the thumbnail page about this.

I've added three upscalers this week based on the ones that ship with Valve's Deadlock. Upscalers let you render the game at a lower resolution to your display. They're useful if you're trying to play on a high resolution display, or simply have lower end GPUs. Onlythe 3D rendering is upscaled, UI elements are still rendered at native resolution.

They're not going to improve performance in every game or on all hardware, and they're not a replacement for real optimization work that needs to be done. But they are a good option for some people.

The most straight forward, no tricks, just renders the image lower and stretches it bilinear to your native resolution. This is the fastest, for older GPUs, but makes zero effort to add to the image quality.

This is the FSR1 and it's a solid option still, it uses spatial upscaling instead of temporal upscaling. This means it's great for fast camera movements and games with heavy particles/effects where temporal usually shits the bed.

This is the big one. FSR3 is a temporal upscaler, it accumulates detail across multiple frames, this produces a great looking image quickly, but comes with a big caveat - ghosting.

Fast moving cameras, translucents, particles and 3D world UI are all going to look a bit shitty, this is the nature of temporal and why we don't want to use it in our core rendering tech. However it's the expectation of many to be able to use this, so it's here as an opt-in but clearly labelled for what it is.

We're looking to add DLSS next, but it'll more or less be the same as FSR3. And absolutely no frame generation.

We added an Open Microphone option to the sound settings. If active it will automatically transmit your voice if you are in agame that supports voice chat.
For anyone paranoid, we also added an option to completley disable microphone input.

Our steam reviews obviously aren't great. They're painful for us. They are showing us where we have made missteps in the release.

Around 35% of the reviews compare the game to Garry's Mod. They point out the differences between s&box and Garry's Mod, they wish it was more like Garry's Mod. I understand this, they wanted an iteration of Garry's Mod onto the Source Engine. They didn't want an engine and a platform. They wanted a Source 2 SDK, they didn't want a modern c# engine built on top of Source 2. I don't think we can win in that argument, it's going to be an expectation and preference thing. My only real hope is that eventually everyone will realise that this is a much better way to work for developers, and we'll end up with much better content because of it.

Around 27% of reviews think we're missing Workshop integration. They liked the way you used to subscribe to stuff out of game and then join the game and have all those mods. There is probably something in that, for certain types of mods, and we'll look into it. We have a system in our Sandbox Mode where you don't need to subscribe to anything. If you want a weapon or an NPC you click on it, and it downloads and spawns it. I guess this appears like we're shipping all this stuff with the game.. but we're not. Anyone can make these entities and publish them for anyone else to use.

Around 24% of reviews complained about AI Slop. I think I addressed this before. It's not our intention to encourage games created using AI. It's not our intention to encourage people making shit no effort games. But it's a UGC platform, there is always going to be dog shit. What we need to do is remove obvious trolls, discourage it and make sure it doesn't keep floating to the top. We are developers and this is our platform. Of course we don't want it filled with shit.

Around 20% of reviews complained about performance. This is a legit greivence, we have the data to back it. We're working on it constantly, and have made some big strides this week.

Around 12% of reviews complained about NFT's. I have no idea what this shit is about. Of course we don't have NFTs or blockchain stuff, and never will.

About half the people that reviewed negatively went on to play more. 6% of them played for over 10 hours. One French guy played for 280 hours after posting their negative review. 

What I'm getting at is that we're listening and it's appreciated, so please keep the feedback coming, it's extremely useful to us.

Box3D has been updated to the latest version. In this version is misc changes and bug fixes but the biggest feature added was something called contact recycling. This enables much more stable stacking of objects ontop of each other.

Boolean tool lets you quickly cut, combine, and shape your mesh work in the mapping tool.

We had one last topology operation hammer has that we didn't - Extruding vertices.

Another feature from hammer, selecting vertex loops.

One of the biggest complaints with our mapping tool is that we split face editing and texture editing into two seperate tools. This ended up not being a good idea because mappers usual workflow is to edit face geometry and adjust uvs straight after, so they would have to keep switching tools.

We reworked the UI to combine face and uv editing in the same tool while minimizing the amount of UI shown in the single tool.

The Fast Texture Tool now let's you move vertex points, allowing for even more precise adjustments.

Clutter now will commit their collider to the physics world. Any model that has their collider setup in model doc will be solid. 

Really obvious one, punting an explosive barrel wouldn't explode it. Now it will.

Some users had scenes where lots of gizmo handles would get in the way, to help them with this we added a bunch of editor preferences like Scale, Render Distance, Depth Testing, Worldspace/Screenspace.

We have a bunch of different trace types in the API but something that was missing that was requested was cone tracing, so it has been added.

Three new parameters:

Although "Animgraph 1" is on its way out, these parameters will, for the time being, allow you to make characters' legs adjust to terrain. This is what most people think when they hear the term "inverse kinematics"!

Our player characters are actually using IK nearly all the time, but there hasn't been a system in place that can pass ground height offsets.

Additionally, there was a small bug that was preventing shoes with heels from adjusting the legs of your player character if you had never customised your height. That's fixed now.