I can't talk about the development of Physbox without being transparent about the issues that I've been encountering over the last month.

Physbox continues to grow and mature with each passing day, but there are a few growing pains due to limitations within the engine. The biggest hurdle is the inability of MapInstance components to load scene maps due to an arbitrary restriction made by Facepunch. I've created a pull request on GitHub to address this behaviour. I would like to see s&box adopt scene maps in a similar way to Half-Life: Alyx's Map Extensions feature, where extra content can be applied on top of a read-only map/scene.

Another limitation that I'm facing is that map properties for packages are not being updated on the s&box client. I've tried to revert to the old behaviour of Physbox launching straight into a startup scene after the addition of a new main menu, but this change doesn't appear to be registering on the backend or on the main menu. To access the main menu, you have to first launch into Street, then disconnect, and then you're in the main menu. I hope Facepunch can resolve this in the future.

As a result, if you try to launch the game right now, it might not be playable. I'm very sorry about that!

Despite the doom and gloom of engine limitations and bugs, Physbox development has been going very smoothly! Here's what I've gotten up to!

Physbox now has a proper main menu! (The background scene is still a work in progress.)

Creating a new lobby is much easier, and new settings are exposed to the host.

I've reworked how custom maps are supported in Physbox. Custom maps are now contained within their own scenes with hand-placed breakable props and other elements (e.g. clip brushes, thrusters). This is a similar approach to the Map Extension system from Half-Life: Alyx that I mentioned previously.

As of writing, three maps are supported:

Chat messages now fade away after a few seconds, instead of remaining on screen forever.

Fall damage has been rewritten to harness the built-in functionality of the Player Controller. I also added a nice bone-breaking sound to signal that fall damage was dealt to the player.

I've started working on a standard prop library that's included with Physbox. If people want to make custom maps for the game, they can use a collection of pre-made props and prefabs to decorate the environment with.

I've added basic support for executing ActionGraphs when a prop is broken. This means special props like exploding barrels are possible! I would like to add flames to the barrel in the future, but my programmer-art skills are extremely limited.

Despite some of the growing pains of the last month, Physbox is shaping up to become something great! I would like to work on adding one or two more maps to the game and improving the Bot AI before removing the work-in-progress tag.