The September Update is now live, with our first addons in Sandbox, workshop cosmetics, a Natural Selection 2 mount, optimizations and more. Here's some highlights from this months update.
Check out the September Update dev blog to read everything!
Addons
One of the few big question marks we had with Sandbox Mode was how addons would work. Would it even be possible? Would it be horrible? Would you have to pre-install addons like in Garry's Mod?
So this month I looked into that. I wanted to make it so you could open the spawnmenu and create an entity from the cloud, without pre-installing, or restarting. And after some hard work and refactoring.. it works just fine.. like you'd expect.
Here you can see we're spawning a prefab from the workshop, which has a particle system that is controlled by custom code.
This is the kind of powerful UGC system that has huge, huge potential. I can't even imagine the things that are going to be possible in Sandbox Mode with this.. but it's exactly the kind of thing that I love.. being able to jump in and see what people have made possible.
It's early days. I'll write some docs up this month to allow people to jump in and start experimenting with making Sents and Sweps and Npcs and Vehicles and whatever else they can come up with.
Mounts
You can now spawn assets from supported games you have installed in the Sandbox mode. There's no categories or real discovery here yet, but you get nice thumbnails.
The Natural Selection 2 mount has been shipped. This is a good addition because unlike Quake, it has ragdolls. If you own the game, you'll now be able to spawn all of their models in Sandbox by installing it.
Workshop Cosmetics
This month, we're accepting our first community-made cosmetic. It's the Shark Head hat by Shadowbrain, and is available in the store. It'll be sold for a month and then removed from the store.
We're not sure how frequently we'll accept new community items, or how long they'll live on the store. This is an experiment, and will be experimented with for a while, until we find the right balance between price, store length and revenue share.
You can see all workshop cosmetics on the avatar screen now. You can try them out, rate them and review them.
The money from these items goes to the author of the item and the Play Fund. So this is a win-win. There are comprehensive guides here on how to make cosmetics and add them to the workshop.
Check out the September Update dev blog to read everything!