Host migration keeps s&box multiplayer state alive when the host leaves

Update 26.09.15 adds host migration to s&box. When a host leaves, their snapshot state is restored on the new host, including host-only objects, snapshot state, and replicated ConVars. State that survives a late join should survive host migration. Running code does not carry over, so mid-flight behaviour needs resuming on the new host. Analyzers check whether state and behaviour are migration-safe. Details: host migration documentation.

Painter replaces HudPainter and the panel rendering system with a shared drawing API for panels, HUDs, world panels, textures, and command lists. It renders antialiased SDF shapes, paths, fills, strokes, and clipping, including arcs, arrows, Bezier lines, capsules, circles, polygons, and stars. Strokes support inside, center, and outside placement plus solid, dashed, and dotted styles; fills can be colour, image, or radial, linear, and conic gradients. Line miters support bevel and round. Batching keeps performance high; the demo renders in one draw call. IPanelDraw is redundant; override OnDraw(Painter painter). HudPainter is deprecated for Painter.Begin, CameraComponent.BeginHud, and BeginOverlay.

GPU text rendering uses the Lengyel algorithm while keeping the current API. Curves are passed to the GPU and drawn in the shader, so no action is needed. It supports CJK, emojis, and everything the previous system supported, stays sharp up close, and is significantly faster. UI, HUD, TextRenderer, and particle text render from glyph outlines in one draw call.

Hover cards show a game preview with play, rating, favourite, review, and hide actions. Game modals and toasts were reworked so reviews, favourites, and hiding games are more visible. Modals put rating, favourite, review, and hide beside Play, with a write-review prompt; the right-click menu adds like, dislike, favourite, and hide. Jam nominations work from hover cards, the game modal, and the end-of-game toast, with minimum play-time checks, and favourite, vote, and nomination buttons update immediately and reconcile with the server.

Editor quality presets switch from the viewport controls. Editor and MCP multiplayer testing tools can host sessions, spawn local instances, and migrate the host. Selected meshes can be flipped; holding Shift while dragging creates a surface-aligned block. A pivot picker sets the pivot without changing the selected mesh. Movie Maker export defaults to AV1. Shader feature values can be read by name as an integer without extra declarations. Storage settings show usage and type breakdowns, scan progress, cleanup recommendations, and removal confirmation.

GameObject cloning is about 2.6x faster with roughly 38% fewer allocations in synthetic tests. Real tests show less impact because spawning models and collisions is the main bottleneck; serialization overhead was already low. Network snapshots are cheaper on the host: scene state is still captured on the main thread, but JSON, blob, and packet encoding run on workers for join, scene-load, and migration snapshots, preserving send order.

Mac and Linux fixes cover game-view input, editor DPI scaling, Finder folder opening, scene staging, code editor detection, and publish/export controls. Geometry shader support fixes Highlight crashes on Mac, plus a procedural render callback lifetime fix. Linux native builds use Steam Linux Runtime 4.0 with updated libcurl and bundled ICU, and colour emoji fallback uses Twemoji. Open-source setup adds Setup.bat and Setup.sh, download progress, Git hooks, and platform-specific artifacts.

Block Party is a new game using the 2D sprite system, with leaderboards and replays, a level editor with workshop support, gif exports, and more: sbox.game/facepunch/blockparty.

CSS overscroll-behavior is implemented, disabling scroll edge bounce and preventing scroll cascading to the parent panel, with per-axis controls (MDN). Scroll bounce now enforces a hard boundary.

Other fixes cover Connect Vertices validation, Asset Browser layouts, publish hotload recovery, Doo edit undo, mesh mirroring, Hammer materials, and FBX imports. Networking fixes address connection serialization, recursive targeted messages, BytePack nesting limited to 32 levels, and loopback restrictions. Navigation and physics fixes improve crowd steering, agent transforms, navmesh rebaking, and Character Controller StepHeight. Rendering and UI fixes cover collider cleanup, a refractive VRAM leak, Clutter LOD, Razor outros, stale drag state, bitmap text, colour emoji alpha, and female skin textures.