Braxnet Online 2

From the ashes of the first Braxnet Online, a new one rises. Using s&box on Source 2 instead of Garry’s Mod on Source 1, this new iteration will be a lot more stable, fast, easier to develop for, and support a lot more features. It’s also a fun way to learn C# and the Source 2 SDK.

Cozy apartments in Newcity, the main map for Braxnet Online 2

Work began in July 2021, with very little knowledge about C#. I mostly did mapping, racking up about 500 hours in Hammer 5.

I got apartments semi-working around September, along other various features like furniture and a rudimentary inventory system. It was very rough, having to use a lot of workarounds to get things working and copy-pasting a lot of code from the s&box wiki and C# tutorials. Even though I had a lot of experience with other languages and Visual C#, the very strict nature of C# was a bit of a challenge to get used to.

Garage — A garage underneath the car dealer, with place for suspicious activities

After drama in the s&box Discord, I took a break from October 2021 to January 2023. I came back with a fresh mind and a lot more knowledge about C#, having used TypeScript a lot in the meantime, which has similarities to C#. s&box now using newer versions of C# also helped, as it allowed me to use newer features like JSON polymorphism for the inventory and prop persistence system.

Gnome — The apartment system, where furniture and other props will stay when you leave

Development picked up, and I started to implement a lot of new features. Everything from unique mailboxes to cash registers to a completely refactored inventory system.

Towards September-October 2023 I had the business system up and running for the most part, with the addition of customer NPCs and a cash register with barcode scanner.

Adding buyable items to the business and welcoming an NPC

Then the news came from Garry that s&box would be getting a new scene system, and that all old code would be incompatible. Since then, I’ve been slowing down development, waiting for the new scene system to be released. I hope it’s not that bad to port everything over. Having followed the development for a while, it looks really interesting. I’ve never used a visual editor like Unity/Godot before, so it’ll be a new experience for me. Using scenes instead of hardcoding vendors and other entities might make it easier to make seasonal updates perhaps?

A physics simulation of boxes, from the s&box devblog

Braxen