s&box from Rust developer Facepunch is now open source

s&box from Rust developer Facepunch is a modern game engine built on Valve's Source 2 and the latest .NET, and now it is open source! Quite a big surprise and it's using a proper permissive license too (MIT).

Facepunch say s&box is a "spiritual successor to Garry’s Mod and a love letter to Source 2". So it's a mixture of a game engine, and a platform to launch and play games. A bit of an all in one solution, a little like Roblox too in that way.

In the announcement on the official site they said:

Obviously this isn't the Source 2 code, that's up to Valve to open source if they want. For us Source 2 is providing lower level systems, all our high level systems are C# like the entire editor, networking, scene system, UI, and way more..

What this means is you can view, modify, copy any of our code to help improve s&box with pull requests, or maintain your own fork for your standalone games, or even just take the code for your own engine.

It might seem odd from a business perspective to make an engine and give it away for free with no royalties and to give all the code away under open source. But we're a bunch of nerds that love what we're creating, we want everyone to use it in whatever way they want, we want to provide opportunities.

Open source is great for the game dev ecosystem, engines like Godot are awesome, we should have more of it because everyone wins.

I agree with basically all of that. Open source is awesome and it's nice to see another major developer get on board.

They also recently opened up their finances to the public to see, which is a really interesting step as well. Allowing anyone to go look at how much s&box pulls in, and how much is being paid out to creators. Love seeing things like that too.

Pretty amazing to see them do all this. It doesn't mean s&box will get Native Linux support though, as even if someone submitted code for it - they don't have to accept it. But what it does mean is anyone can fork it and turn it into something else, learn from it and even improve how it runs in Proton as developers can see exactly what it's doing.

You can find the open source code on GitHub.