Sorry for the wait!

This update took a lot longer than expected. There's a fair bit to talk about, so bear with me!

Feel free to skip the preamble and check out the TL;DR right below this section.

This year, in the process of rebuilding the game and while working on this update in particular, I kept coming back to one question: What makes a TTT remake on s&box worth playing instead of just going back to GMod?

A big part of the answer, for us, is taking advantage of the fact that we are building TTT on a modern platform with a modern engine. Within that branching set of opportunities, one of the most important is the chance to expand upon ideas and features that were historically limited by the platform it was built for, functionally and otherwise. The goal, still, is to preserve what makes TTT iconic while improving and modernizing everything around that. But on the other hand, we're not trying to just clone the gamemode here. New ideas can be welcome, too... Ideally, TTT gets to retain the same crisp, familiar gameplay at its center without being permanently bound to the technical, visual, and usability limitations that surrounded it in the late 2000s and early 2010s on GMod (and elsewhere) for both players and addon developers or map-makers.

With that in mind, I'll walk through what changed today and briefly cover what will change in the future.

TL;DR

For players, the big changes are available maps, custom rule presets and the addition of the Newton Launcher and Disguiser in the Traitor shop. Many of the other changes will not be immediately visible post-update, because they are tools for creating rather than features being immediately added.

TTT can now be played on nearly any map on the platform.
When a map doesn't contain TTT weapon spawns, the game will generate them automatically and sprinkle them around the playable area. As long as it has generic player spawns on it, you can now load up pretty much any map that looks interesting and see how well it plays.
Note that if TTT finds a weapon spawner in the map, it disables this. Maps like https://sbox.game/bolt/nacht and strangely, one or two others on s&box that I ran into while testing that have one or a couple of TTT loot spawns on it will only spawn the ones on there... which isn't exactly ideal!
The Newton Launcher & Disguiser
are Traitor weapons that most are probably familiar with. If you're not, the Newton Launcher is a weapon that can shoot players and props and launch them with a physics impact. It's a lot of fun on maps with loads of props or maps where you can fall to your death. The Disguiser masks your identity from other players by reverting clothes to default if you're wearing your s&box outfit and hiding your name from other players on hover or radio commands. It also hides you from the Detective's radar scan.

...Plus improvements, polish, bug fixes and even more features. The longer I spent working on the bulky parts of this update, the more I noticed in the game that deserved polish and the worse I felt about not adding stuff that would be playable right off the bat after a month-long drought without any changes to TTT. They're all down at the bottom in the full changelogs.

Changes for Server & Lobby Hosts

Game rule configuration has been a focus over the last few months of development so that everyone can enjoy the game in the way they like. A lot of that work was oriented around server hosts in particular, and although the lobby creation screen had access to most of the options server hosts did, it wasn't quite as fine-tunable.

Custom rule presets

are now available from the creation screen. After choosing the options they like, players can save their selection as a preset for easy reuse next time they want to start up a lobby. This also includes custom map vote rotations, so you can specify exactly what set of maps you want to play or not play, including maps that are outside of the official pools.

Hosts and server/lobby admins can also browse a list of maps or choose a specific map while in-game from the tool menu and switch to that map at the end of the round or end of the current map.

Mapping Tools

For current and prospective mappers, however, this update is much larger.

I've added a large collection of mapping tools inspired by Hammer’s input/output system, along with several entirely new capabilities. These allow map authors to create bending and twisting paths, counters, object-based puzzles, breakable and explosive props that interact with them, custom damage behavior, ziplines, slides, and more. The full list of new tools is below in the changelogs, and the full list of everything available is below on our new wiki page.

Maps and their widely varying dynamic elements are the lifeblood of TTT in a lot of ways. We think to give the game room to grow and flourish in the modern landscape, map authors need a significant amount of additional freedom to create interesting, dynamic behavior. At a minimum, we're providing the capabilities that existed in Garry’s Mod, but this update already goes beyond that in several areas. If they so choose to, a mapper could set up a zipline for players to ride down a mountain or have a giant python slither across a map killing Innocents when a Traitor opens its cage. Again- taking advantage of the modern platform we're on and doing things that weren't really possible in the original game, while keeping it opt-in depending on how you want to play.

These tools and their value depend on what people choose to build with them. There's a lot of room for creativity here, too, so I'm pretty excited for the long-term prospects. My hope is that they give someone the missing piece or the bit of confidence to finally attempt a map idea they previously didn't know how to create.

Wiki and Documentation

Our documentation was largely incomplete and pretty barebones before, so I took the time to set up a much more detailed and user-friendly wiki for server hosts, map authors or just advanced/curious players. It contains references for:

Lobby and server host settings, commands and configuration
Moderation setup, commands and behavior
Mapping guides, tool reference and how to configure them
Player commands and how/when to use them

If you still have questions, notice something missing or behaving in a way that is unexpected, reach out to me on the Three Thieves Discord or feel free to submit an issue or pull request on the GitHub.

What else?

Moving more towards compatibility with the native API, bit by bit.

TTT has been around a while on the platform, which unfortunately means it has a good amount of outdated baggage internally. A lot of my work over the last 8-9 months has been about trying to remove and rework systems to get us up to speed. As s&box updates and adds tools which make sense for TTT to use or that offer a function we already have, I try to either use them directly or at least get us aligned with them (even if they often seem to come just after I've set ours up already 😭). I believe this is good practice as a generality, but it's also in preparation for more intuitive addon creation in the future. At some point, most developers on s&box are going to be used to doing things in a certain way if there are native components for them. TTT wants to be in line with that so it's as seamless & simple as possible.

This update, one of those alignments was native components like Door or TriggerHurt colliders. Since TTT can be played on maps that don't target the game now, we don't want to be unable to do things like open doors just because they aren't our TTT-specific, I/O compatible doors or not get killed when we fall out of bounds. On the flipside, TTT doors now align themselves player input-wise, so our maps shouldn't be annoyingly half-playable due to doors not being compatible with other games using IPressable.

Starting formal versioning for TTT with v0.8.0

TTT has already been publicly available and actively updated for some time, so this is not intended to represent its first release. Instead, v0.8.0 establishes the current gamemode as our versioning baseline as we continue working toward the larger 1.0 milestone. All future updates will now include consistent version numbers and changelogs, making it easier to track new features, fixes, compatibility changes, and the overall progress of the gamemode.

What's next?

As usual, updates will have a sprinkling of features, fixes, tweaks and improvements. I'll be adding new traitor weapons, new gameplay features and functionality with each update.

The bigger milestone updates will be shaped around larger systems, the next of which is leaderboards, player stats and achievements.

The next smaller bit of work I'm doing is setting up prop buoyancy and implementing eEight's incredible water visuals library.

As always, if you run into any issues, reach out on our Discord.

I sincerely hope you all have as much fun playing, hosting or mapping with these new changes as I had making and testing them. Updates after this should come with a bit more frequency. Until next time!

Mapping Overhaul, Compatibility & T Weapons

0.8.0

21 July 2026

Newton Launcher, a Traitor weapon that launches players and props with a physics impulse
Disguiser, Traitor equipment that masks your identity visually & on radio messages + hides from detective's radar
Maps without TTT weapon spawns now generate weapons automatically, supporting most platform maps
Custom rule configurations can now be saved as presets from the main menu
Custom map vote lists can be chosen when starting a lobby and saved as part of a preset
"Goomba stomping" redirects fall damage to the player you land on
"Last seen" data on corpses, displays who they last saw before they died
"Activate equipment" input (H key by default) for using or toggling certain shop items (disguiser & radar, currently)
New and expanded external TTT documentation wiki
Interaction support for native doors and damage volumes (TriggerHurt)
Mapping: Full support for scene-based maps and their map objects
Map I/O: Movement paths now support splines for curved, rotating and dynamic motion
Map I/O: Ziplines and slides for I/O-controlled player movement
Map I/O: Logic Counter fires an output after receiving a set number of inputs
Map I/O: Object Sink detects tagged props inside, fires an output and optionally destroys them
Map I/O: Object Spawner creates weapons or props when triggered
Map I/O: Prop Damage Surface defines custom or I/O-activated prop damage
Map I/O: Prop Break Output fires when its prop is broken
Map I/O: Explosive Prop supports standard, I/O-triggered and role-triggered explosives
Map I/O: Breakable Glass adds basic and I/O-controlled breaking for meshes, models and props
Map I/O: "nofalldamage" tag on a collider prevents fall damage within its area

Role Buttons now have clearer visuals and better alignment with parent objects
Shop menu for Traitors and Detectives have input hints for item use and behavior
Radar ping cooldown 30s -> 20s, can be manually pinged with "Activate Equipment" input
Hover interaction hints were polished for visibility & clarity
Lobby creation UI was changed for new features & clarity
Corpse inspection UI was polished for new features
Spectator UI was adjusted for better visibility
Improved broken-glass VFX
Map titles replace idents in more UI locations
Improved prop damage and collision behavior
Prop pickup eligibility now uses mass alone rather than mass and arbitrary size calculations
Specific Weapon Spawners now use a dropdown instead of Weapon Data
Specific Weapon Spawners no longer bundle weapon files with maps, reducing package size
Map I/O: TriggerHurt and new Prop Damage Surface can now target specific roles
Map I/O: TriggerHurt and new Prop Damage Surface support custom active or on-hit damage VFX
Map I/O: Explosive Prop component optionally reads model-defined explosion values if available & enabled

Props no longer occasionally stop mid-air after being thrown or dropped by clients
Breakable props no longer, occasionally, reset incorrectly when broken while held by a player
Rare local prop duplicates appearing after a physics prop breaks
Light prop tosses and other minor impacts now apply chip damage correctly
Dropped props now damage players even without initial velocity
Occasional player body stuttering/twitching/rotating slightly when their health changes
Rarely, from the main menu, lobby settings reverting a different setting in the same row when being configured
Body armor icon visuals not activating when receiving damage
Some misaligned weapon icons in corpse inspection and the buy menu
Lack of warning prompt when selecting Quit from the main menu
Map I/O: Path Point labels now render clearly and correctly
Certain weapon spawn placements changed to reduce geometry clipping
Opening a scene or map directly in the editor now bootstraps it as an in-game load
Many of these fixes also improve performance

Weapon Data selection from Specific Weapon Spawners
Model previews from placed Specific Weapon Spawners

TBD, this was a big one & I'm sure we'll hear about something!

people

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