July 2021 Developer Update for s&box

After days of waiting, a new developer update for s&box for the month of July has been released. In the update includes news, updates on development progress, and more! Below you can find a summary of the news.

Lighting Updates

Sam from the Facepunch team has been working on lighting and shaders this month. First, Cookies for lighting have been implemented. If you're familiar with Unity Cookies, they are a component of light that act as a mask or projection of a texture onto a light. In Source 1, these existed as projected textures.

Next, Sam worked on Volumetric Lights, trying to improve their banding patterns without any sacrifice to performance. Lastly, Sam added dynamic shadows to static lights, which will add a lot of depth to maps without significant performance changes.

Developer Preview Queue

Garry wrote a little blurb about the Queue system he wrote which allows expanded access for developer preview. Sadly, Garry has stated that he has no plans to change the system anytime soon, despite previously stating that he would put the game up for sale right now if he could prevent s&box from showing up in the store.

Many developers may be disheartened to hear that access to s&box is still a long wait away, but rest assured that Facepunch is working hard on making the game the best it possibly can be!

Source 2 Tools Improvements

Layla has been working hard on improving the Source 2 Tools based on feedback from developers who have access to the game. Hammer can now have grid dots instead of grid lines in the 2D view. Animgraph has a new viewmodel camera to help preview animations. Lastly, Modeldoc model dragging was broken, but is now fixed!

And lots more!

To see the rest of the updates for yourself, check out the blogpost below!