Post Release

A new update has been released, you can view the full changes on our blog post.

https://sbox.game/news/post-release

The release went pretty much exactly as expected and has put us in profit for this month. We've enjoyed seeing people play on twitch and youtube and hearing all the feedback from you guys. A lot of it has already started to be implemented.

The backend went down once or twice. One time we accidentally DDOS'ed ourselves, and one time we had to scale some services to meet demand. As it usually is in these scenarios, the services that got overwhelmed weren't the ones we had considered at all.

Our current mixed review status (44%) wasn't unexpected. It's the reason we didn't want a frontpage takeover or any other push from Valve, because we wanted people to find this organically - not have it sold to them. The main complaints are AI Slop, Performance and This Isn't Garry's Mod. Not forgetting of course, our biggest fans got the game for free - so can't leave a review.

I want to talk through some of these complaints below.

We released yesterday and made a bunch of money and got a bunch of new players, so we've doubled the play fund to $1,000,000 a year. 

It's our hope to grow this more over time. We'll review it in a month to see what we're able to do.

The huge majority of games are created by smart, dedicated humans. So when the games are dismissed as "AI slop" it's really an injustice to the work those developers have put in. 

Some games have their thumbnails created by AI and so get dismissed too. I don't think these guys are doing themselves any favours, but it's easy, so people do it. 

AI is the teacher now. It's how people are going to learn how to program from now on. They're going to be generating their own examples and have it explain the code to them. I feel that outright banning the use of AI is a bad thing, because I'm not worried, I think human creativity is always going to win out.

We're not an AI based product in any way, but we live in the real world, so we're not anti-AI either. We're not going to put a pointless AI Assistant button for no good reason. We're not going to shove any AI tools down your throat. We're not gonna have a "make game" wizard that generates code for you. But if the best game in the world is made using the help of AI we're not going to tell you that you can't post it.

Our discovery algorithm isn't perfect right now but we're improving it every day. The main aim is that the good games float to the top and the bad games float to the bottom, while offering new, fresh content to people all the time.

One of the biggest things we're getting nailed on is performance, so I wanted to share where we are with it, what we're doing now and what our long term plans are.

If you're coming from Garry's Mod, things are going to feel different. Garry's Mod runs on a 20 year old engine that'll hit 300fps on a toaster - we're not there yet, and it's a fair comparison to make. We're aware that mid-range hardware in particular is having a rougher time than it should.

This is the worst the performance will ever be, we've been improving and will continue to improve. We know what the bad stuff is and we know how to solve it. We have a roadmap full of things we're actively working on to do it.

We sample performance data from the players across all varieties of hardware, and we display it all https://sbox.game/metrics/game/performance, this means when we fuck up you can hold us accountable, and when we improve we can gloat.

Here you can see we've improved from a 17ms average to a 12ms average in the past 6 months, this is from looking at profilers, seeing the worst thing and improving it. Rinse and repeat.

Here's our average frame times we're seeing on the most popular low -> high hardware:

• Ryzen 5 3600 + RTX 3060 = 54fps

• Ryzen 7 7800 + RTX 4070 = 108fps

• Ryzen 7 9800 + RTX 5080 = 125fps

There's a lot to improve on here across all hardware tiers, but it's not completely tragic. Each combination will have it's own set of limitations we'll have to solve.

Most modern engines spread rendering work across multiple frames. Temporal upscaling, temporal AA, amortized GI - it's fast but it all adds up to a blurry, ghosty mess that falls apart the moment you move.

We're not doing that. We render one frame every frame. It should look great in motion, not just screenshots. We're doing forward rendering, MSAA and everything in one frame.

This is a challenge, there are problems that are harder to solve, but we'd rather face those challenges than take the shortcuts other modern engines do.

A release to a wider audience always brings focus onto the most important things that we need to do.

We have development challenges ahead of us but this is what we're here for. This is what we love. We love it when things break because then we get to fix them. We want the opportunity to show everyone what we can do, we want that fight ????????.

???? Added

• Server Browser groups games instead of a flat list

• Server Browser shows ping

???? Improved

• Marked loads of convars as cheats

• Networking.QueryLobbies filters out disbanded lobbies

• Hide hidden items unless they're owned

• Performance analytics are sampled to 1% of users now

• Update GameObject enabled status when changing parent

• Call TransformChanged on inactive children too

• Display org thumbnail next to org name in Game Modal

• Optimize TypeDescriptor.Create

• VideoPlayer: Support ctts 1 in MP4s

???? Fixed

• Crashing during model hot-reloads (e.g spawning models from Sandbox)

• Play Fund

• Text rendering on top of blurred

• Game.Render NRE

• Modeldoc LOD UI fixes