S&box could become Garry's Mod 2 but is 'nowhere near that yet,' says GMod creator

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"There's a lot of 'is this Garry's Mod 2', the honest answer is 'maybe'—but nowhere near that yet."

Yesterday, Garry's Mod creator Facepunch Studios unveiled S&box—a prototype that aims to "take a powerful game engine (UE4 right now) and build a hotloading C# layer on top of it". 

In turn, so reckons the developer, this will allow users to sidestep using C++, waiting for things to compile, and closing games while developing. Overnight, a handful of Reddit threads reckon S&box is Facepunch's way of announcing Garry's Mod 2.    

We reached out Facepunch's head honcho Garry Newman to ask what exactly S&box is, if it is in fact Garry's Mod 2, and when we might expect to learn more about it.  

"So this might be a bit complicated," Newman tells us via email. "There's a lot of "is this Garry's Mod 2", the honest answer is "maybe"—but nowhere near that yet. We've basically built our own game engine on top of UE4. We're really using UE4 for its core features, rendering, networking, physics. It's all done in an engine agnostic way. We can lift our system off and put it on the source engine (it actually started on the source engine).

"It's too early to say whether this will turn into a spiritual successor of Garry's Mod, or whether it will even be released as a moddable platform (we might use it internally to make our own games on). But at the moment we're enjoying playing around with it and that's enough right now."

Newman also links to this—something he describes as "one of the many prototypes [he and his team] are working on."

Joe Donnelly
Deputy Editor, PC Gaming Show