S&box is an in-development sandbox game/engine designed as a sequel to the legendary Garry’s Mod (2006), a game that turned Valve’s Source Engine into a multiplayer playground and content creation tool which has spawned games, memes, and machinima. In the latest s&box development update the studio revealed significant additions to the software’s VR support.
Update (September 1st, 2021): In the latest development update for s&box the team highlighted the latest VR developments being built into the engine.
The team has added VR controller and tracker tracking allowing basic hand tracking and full body tracking via additional tracking pucks. Tracking can be used to animate characters inside the game, as demonstrated by developer @gvarados, who has also added early support for VRChat avatars inside of s&box.
The addition of VR controller tracking includes support for finger tracking from Valve Index controllers.
The studio says VR input in s&box is currently built around the input paradigm of Rift, Quest, and Index controllers (as they share a similar button/stick/grip layout), though both SteamVR and OpenXR have clearly identified the need to abstract the input layer so that developers don’t need to create custom bindings for every VR controller out there. S&box might ultimately need to do something similar down the road.
The original article, which details the background of s&box and initial VR support added back in June, continues below.
Original Article (July 28th, 2021): Released way back in 2006, Garry’s Mod is still a massively popular multiplayer sandbox game that allows players to create and share content built with a combination of in-game tools and modding extensibility. Conceptually it’s similar to something like Roblox or Rec Room, where players have significant flexibility in building their own universe of fun things to do together. The game still finds itself regularly among the 100 most popular games on Steam.
The Garry’s Mod development studio, Facepunch, is also behind a little-known game called Rust (2018), which has become a phenomenon in its own right.
Creator Garry Newman has been pondering a sequel to Garry’s Mod since at least as far back as 2015. And while development has been on-and-off over the years, things have picked up considerably since 2020, with Newman and other developers at the studio posting detailed updates on the game’s development, now called s&box. The Facepunch team says its goal is to “create a worthy Garry’s Mod sequel.”
In the latest s&box development update released earlier this month, developer Sam Pavlovic says he worked to ensure that the game’s rendering would handle VR correctly.
“I fixed VR rendering, since starting the project we had worked a lot on improving some rendering flexibilities for Source 2 and adapting it to work for what we want but never validated for VR until now. Getting VR in a good state has always been a concern for us and I’m glad now that I’ve tackled the initial work to have it supported,” he wrote.
Pavlovic admits that proper rendering for VR is only the first step in truly adding ‘VR support’ to the game. For now that means it’s pretty much a ‘see-only’ experience, but going forward he notes that the work “opens the door for us to experiment with [VR] and build something that everyone could enjoy and build upon.”
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