We have finally released our major update 0.2!

Major changes:
– New ‘Featured Creations’ system. Loads a list of the best workshop content that players can download ingame – both for mods and creations.
– Complete UI overhaul
– New ‘Main Menu’, which is the menu button the Vive controller
– New Mods: Sports pack, Target Practice
– Mod system with workshop support! First mod available thats not auto-installed is a FBX Exporter to export your creations to FBX models
– Wiring System expanded to be a general visual scripting tool
– Tons of new entities for the core mod: spectator camera, signs that you can set text to, sound effect entites that can be triggered to play sound/music, timer entity that can be wired to events, player start location, play area restrictor (set where player can teleport to)…
– Haptic feedback and completely new grabbing system for play mode. When playing creations you are now given hands
– Steam Leaderboards can now be added to your own creations

This is a large update so let us know any issues on the forums.

Modbox Website now live: http://www.modboxgame.com/ With a few tutorials on basic playing/building, but mostly tutorials for our ModboxSDK (which we are releasing to developers over time). You can also browse featured creations / mods there – or see current issues/feature requests in our issue tracker.

We are still working on the Dungeon Mod. After this update we plan to have smaller and more frequent updates expanding on content / gameplay, which includes getting the dungeon mod ready in the next few weeks.

New featured creations:

The direction for Modbox is to become a general game building tool – so a few of the new creations are much more game focused than just sandboxes. This includes scoring, leaderboards, music, and challenges. We are still working on expanding this with more advanced visual scripting (including AI).
Both the Western level and Castle level are Target Practice creations were you can compete on the leaderboards for the best score.

You can now make your own weapons! Add one of the blank toy handles and build on top of it. You can then wire the input to be for a spawner to launch entities, or to move a hinge joint for a catapult, or move a piston…

Check out the ‘Wacky Weapons’ creation to try the piston soccer ball extender, a sword launcher, and a bowling ball catapult.

Mesh Editing
With a primitive entity selected you can now hit ‘mesh edit’ on the radial menu to edit it’s vertices:

We plan to expand this to allow polygon adding/removing and other advanced features.

Other Changes / New features:
– New Color Tool with complete color palette
– Upgraded to Unity 5.4 beta
– Can now teleport onto static entities in play mode
– Switched world scale from 10x to 1x
– Uniform scaling options: Use the sphere scalers to scale all sides at once
– ‘Autoconnect’ option. By default all primitives are set to automatically connect to other entities. You can now turn this off for them – and also turn it on for other entities. Like connecting a Chainsaw to wall.
– ‘Clone Tool’ – Point at a entity to clone it and bring it to your hand
– Game Mode System. Right now the only active game mode option is the Sandbox. Game modes will also have options that can be set – like setting if the spawn menu should be active for the Sandbox.
– ‘Build New Creation’ menu
– Crossbow now auto reloads
– A lot of fixes to the Group system
– To place Entity inside Spawner you now hit the touchpad when inside to place it, to prevent accidental use

 

 

With this update finally out we are going to start distributing the ModboxSDK to select developers. Eventually it will be public, but we are releasing it slowly since Modbox is still heavily changing and breaking things. Apply here if you want to check it out!

thanks,

– Lee

We are still working on the next large Modbox update – coming mid June. Largest change is the expansion of the mods system – including a Dungeon mod with a completely different entity set:

Large new changes coming:

– Haptic feedback! For when shooting / hitting stuff
– ‘Game mode’ system. The default game mode for creations is ‘Sandbox’, where there is no health / inventory, and you can spawn whatever while playing. We are adding additional game modes that you can choose for your creation to have to set it’s rules. Rules like allowing teleporting, default tools and options, and eventually additional systems like health / inventory. Eventually you should be able to join a server running the ‘deathmatch’ game mode with a score/health system, that uses a variety of mods for its level
– New ‘Main Menu’ – the current Modbox menu is the UI cube that comes up in edit mode. We decided we needed to make a simple ‘main menu’ for loading creations, going from edit to play mode, joining online games, and setting options, and the UI cube is now just the ‘edit menu’ for editing. This is part of the change in making it easier for people to consume content, without having to dive into the complexity of editing creations.
– New Mods: Target Practice (with scoreboard/highscores), and new ‘sports pack’ mod. We are hoping to get the Dungeon mod released for mid June, but we are still working on the actually game mode gameplay for it (along with working on what a ‘game mode’ is).  Our goal for our own mods is to develop stuff thats fun to build levels for – so we are planning a Dungeon mod and a possible ‘Escape Room’ mod to develop internally
– Hopefully some tutorial videos on advanced building

Multiplayer:

I was expecting a open beta of multiplayer to launch this month, but it has been delayed. I think it’s important the game has depth and is incredibly fun when just playing by yourself – so I am focusing on that before focusing again on multiplayer (core of the networking works, it’s just a matter of a ton of polish and bug fixing). The last version of Modbox had a lot to offer players who wanted to edit and create their own content – but not enough for people who wanted to just consume, so I am hoping to address that with this next update (with a lot of new content / game modes). The date I am aiming for the multiplayer beta is now end of June

ModboxSDK

To create mods modders will use the ModboxSDK. As an example Brian Lindenhof created a spectator camera and a twitch chat window all with the SDK:

Messing with the #ModBox SDK 😀#VR #Gamedev #HTCVive
(@Alientrap) pic.twitter.com/pYbq6UtHck

— Brian Lindenhof (@TheShadowBrain) May 10, 2016

We’ve developed Modbox entirely with modding in mind, ‘eating our own dogfood’ to develop the modding tools while we developed the game from the start, so modding the game really allows you to add anything.
We will be keeping the ModboxSDK closed for the next 2 months so we can better refine how modders can make content, and decide what to include/exclude. If your interested in trying out the SDK – and have a lot of Unity/C# experience – use this form to apply to check it out.

Thanks for the interest / support of Modbox! This is a long term ambitious project for us – so any feedback at this early stage definitely helps. Let us know what you think on the Steam forums,
– Lee