A new update has been released, you can view the full changes on our blog post.
https://sbox.game/news/update-26-04-01
Here's some highlights from the blog.
We overhauled the third person camera to be a lot smoother, so being in a vehicle feels great.
You can now stick hoverballs on your contraptions to fly around!
There are now Saves in Sandbox so you can save and load entire play sessions. These work in singleplayer or multiplayer, and will keep track of the map, players, all props and entities, ect.
We had no ways to configure the performance settings of shadows, now we have a shit ton of convars to control max shadows, max number of cascades, shadow filter quality, max resolutions, and more.. These are globally configured in the graphics settings menu now too.
We've made our input system use scan codes now, which standardizes input keys based on position instead of name. Meaning when a game binds something to the W key, if you're an AZERTY keyboard that will be bound to the Z key automatically.
Everything is continuing to come together, we've been playing Sandbox everyday, it's starting to feel very well rounded. Building contraptions, messing around, taking screenshots for our Steam page.
We tried to quietly announce our release date — 28th April, but it seems everyone has got excited. Before then we'll be revoking anyone who hasn't played a lot recently, developed games or bought skins.
And we'll then go on sale for $20. It's April — we've got the month left to really beat out the worst of the rough edges. Don't expect too much fanfare in the upcoming updates, we're doing the boring stuff before we can get to the fun stuff again.
🎁 Added
New C# shadow mapper, fully replacing Source 2's native shadow mapper
Bindless per-light shadow maps
Directional light configurable cascade counts
Per-light shadow hardness
User quality settings for shadows
ModelDoc hulls from meshes now supports per-mesh and per-element hull generation, allowing better collision when saving map meshes with mixed hull and mesh collision types
HtmlPanel now supports ordered and unordered lists
Footstep sounds for glass surfaces
Mesh element selection now supports undo/redo in the editor
New hub page layout with smarter game cards showing upvotes/downvotes and active players, condensed friend activity grouped by game, and achievements sorted by completion percentage
Movie recordings can now be imported from any game into a blank project, and games can disable demo recording on clients
🧼 Improved
Input system now uses scan codes for gameplay input, making the game usable on non-QWERTY keyboard layouts (e.g. AZERTY) without rebinding — key glyphs are translated to local key names
Vulkan per-thread data rewritten with a dynamic slot pool that bounds memory usage and eliminates potential out-of-bounds access from unbounded thread indices
Pixel shaders are now stripped for opaque objects during shadow and depth passes, reducing GPU work
Physics hull creation is more robust, routing through CQuickHullBuilder to avoid potential infinite loops with coplanar points and adding support for planar geometry
Network broadcast now encodes the wire payload once instead of per-connection, and large messages are compressed before chunking — client decompression is ~3.4x faster
Network serialization omits null values, reducing JSON processing overhead and improving compression/decompression speed
Sprite system optimized to perform a single GPU upload instead of one per group, eliminating upload overhead
RadiusDamage batches and parallelizes LOS traces with reduced allocations, improving heavy explosion processing from ~10s to ~2s
Heartbeat ping/pong switched to unreliable channel, eliminating head-of-line blocking under packet loss
Movie recording performance improved by avoiding reflection in hot paths, reducing per-frame recording cost
🪛 Fixed
Potential infinite loop in PolygonMesh.Rebuild with fractional/coplanar vertex positions
Memory leak in DeltaSnapshotSystem where pooled snapshot IDs were not cleared before returning to the pool
OutOfRangeException in Rigidbody when Bodies and BodyTransforms sync lists arrive independently
"Lobby Disbanded" spam, lingering socket, and stuck loading screen when host disconnects mid-join
Modals not closing when joining a game, server, or lobby
Lingering error toast popups not dismissing across game/menu context switches
Atmosphere sky shader not using the new single sunlight path
IgnoreGameObjectHierarchy not applying to child objects
Client hotload not clearing reflection type cache, causing errors after server-side code changes
Damage falloff being inverted in RadiusDamage
Movie recording of TextRenderer, NaN rotations, and target creation edge cases
🚯 Removed
Deprecated OnDirty, MakeDirty, and OnPropertyDirty in favor of field-backed properties