Update 26.04.22

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

https://sbox.game/news/update-26-04-22

Here's some highlights from the blog.

Sandbox: RT Screens

You can link cameras to TVs now, great for contraptions, or just generally messing around.

Sandbox: Contraption Weapons

This is a feature I added a few weeks back, but it really shines now with the addition of the Rocket Launcher, and support for the Physics Gun.

This means your contraptions can shoot rockets..

Better Disconnect Feedback

Sometimes, when trying to join a game, you'd get thrown back to the menu without really knowing why or at what point things went wrong. So this week, we've straightened out the connection flow, formalised things under the hood, and added a bunch more feedback.

Players will now see big new message boxes when they're disconnected from a server, or when a connection attempt fails, with fairly descriptive reasons. This is how we show kick messages now too, and we've fixed an issue that would sometimes make these messages appear garbled, so you'll know when you've been kicked for RDMing and to hang your head in shame.

Bindless AMD Artifact Fixes

After merging UI batching and new shadows we've been seeing some minor to intense artifacting on AMD cards.

We switched all these shaders to use bindless textures, which are great but needed explicit marking with [c]NonUniformResourceIndex[/c] to work in non-uniform cases (which were 99% of our cases...). Whilst we were marking these like [c]Bindless::GetTexture2D( NonUniformResourceIndex( TextureID ) )[/c] they weren't actually doing anything as a function parameter, they needed to be done on the descriptor heap itself.

The solution was simple, if 99% of the time we needed to be doing [c]NonUniformResourceIndex[/c] we might as well do it inside [c]Bindless::GetTexture2D( TextureID )[/c] so people don't have to bother with what it means. If we have justification to we can do a variant for when you know you have a uniform resource index.

No more artifacts on AMD.

Media Framework Rewrite

We've removed FFmpeg and replaced it with our own implementations of a few codecs, we now only support the following formats: VP9, AV1, animated WebP, H264.

We've also reworked our workshop to serve videos in the AV1/WebM format, this means videos are about 50% smaller and load faster.

Finance

I've updated our open finance metrics to be even more detailed, adding our costs for running s&box as a company, salaries, server costs, taxes, play fund, it's all there.

People will say it's crazy to be this transparent, showing how much we're making or even losing - I think the benefits outweigh the negatives, it's important people see the sustainability of the platform. We're not after short term financial success here, we're here for the long haul.

UI Batching Fixes

We got UI Batching in last week which came with a huge drop in draw calls and a big increase in FPS. This was a huge change for the huge amount of things we could do with our UI system and all the various ways you can layer and blend your panels together - obviously some things broke, but we've fixed them. 💪

Blend Modes

The most noticable bug was blend modes weren't being set correctly, our text renders should've been rendering in a premultiplied alpha blend mode but weren't, creating very unappealing text. This was also noticable in the Sandbox mode inventory.

Deferred Batching

But fixing this had broken our batching all together, we