Monthly Update - February 2026

Arena Shooter progress, updated glTF support, MoonJuice enhancements, dedicated server package and more!

Arena Shooter

Most of my time on TASBox in February was spent working on the Arena Shooter game. In fact, most of the new features listed below were added as and when they were needed for the Arena Shooter.

glTF Support

glTFs were the first asset format supported by TASBox over a year ago, however support gradually wained throughout development as it was far more convenient to leverage existing Source Engine assets while testing (which already support things like physics).

The glTF loader has been all but rewritten to work across server and client realms, and supports everything in the base glTF spec for which TASBox has support (so no animations yet). TBD how we support defining physics properties like colliders and rigid-bodies, however there are a number of semi-official extensions we could use.

The weapons, darts and targets shown in the video above are all glTF assets provided by kenney.nl.

MoonJuice Enhancements

There's still a long road ahead to turn MoonJuice into the type-safe and immutable-first language I want it to be, but I did implement a few quick wins this month.

Also, Denneisk wrote a great guide for getting started with MoonJuice, go check it out!

Optional Operators

-- Optional coalesce:
-- resolves to c if b is nil
-- otherwise b
def a = b ?? c

-- Optional index:
-- resolves to nil if b is nil
-- otherwise the value of b.c
def a = b?.c
def a = b?.["c"]

-- Optional call:
-- resolves to nil if b is nil
-- otherwise the result of calling b with c
def a = b?.(c)

And these operators can of course be combined, for example:

def notNil = { .baz = fn(n) n * 2 end }
def keyNil = {}
def variableNil = nil

print(notNil?.baz?.(123)) -- Prints 246
print(keyNil?.baz?.(123)) -- Prints nil
print(variableNil?.baz?.(123)) -- Prints nil

Table Definition Shorthand & Comma Fix

-- Verbose:
def foo = 5
def tbl = { .foo = foo }

-- Shorthand:
def foo = 5
def tbl = { .foo }

And a small fix to allow trailing commas in table unpack expressions (were already supported in table definition):

-- Note comma after 3. This already worked
def tbl = { 1, 2, 3, }

-- Note comma after c. This previously errored
def { a, b, c, } = tbl

New Scripting API Features

While working on the Arena Shooter game, I found a couple of gaps in the TASBox scripting API that made it difficult/impossible to implement basic features such as a projectile system.

Events

The Event library provides a simple interface for creating event dispatchers, which can be used to build event-driven APIs in TASBox. This library is actually how the built-in events work now!

def dispatcher = Event.createDispatcher({ "event1", "event2" })

def handle = Event.addListener(dispatcher, "event1", fn(a, b)
  print("event1 called:", a, b)
end)

Event.dispatch(dispatcher, "event1", "first arg", "second arg")

Event.removeListener(dispatcher, "event1", handle)

Calling any of the methods taking an event name with a name that was not present in the list passed to Event.createDispatcher will result in an error.

Scene Query Enhancements

A few additional Physics library features for working with scene queries:

• get/setSimulationEnabled and get/setSceneQueriesEnabled to include/exclude a specific collider from collisions and scene queries respectively
• setSceneQueryResponse to configure how a collider responds to scene queries on a given SceneQueryChannel (block, touch or ignore)
  • Note that block has no effect for overlap queries
• New options for raycast, sweep and overlap queries to select which SceneQueryChannel to use
• Another new option for those queries to exclude specific colliders from the query (e.g. to avoid bullets hitting the player who shot them)

The SceneQueryChannels are defined by TASBox and semantically named, so that user-generated maps, games and addons are more interoperable.

Dedicated Server

As part of releasing on Steam, we need to produce a dedicated server binary which contains only the assets for the server. This can then be published as a "tool" on Steam, to be downloaded by SteamCMD on servers.

After some tweaks to the release CI/CD pipeline, we now publish a dedicated server binary to Steam alongside the client, and it's already available to download from SteamCMD! It's not really usable yet though, as it will try (and fail) to load GMod assets in a server environment, and has no way to change the loaded game/addons/map.

Networking Fixes & Improvements

• Deleted entities are now networked (not removed components yet)
• Primitive physics geometries (e.g. boxes) are now networked
• Increased jitter, input and delta buffer sizes to accommodate latency up to ~300ms