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22 February 2023

Source Film Maker

Some new features for SFM and our future plans for it.
matt
Programmer
UK
chattwitter
Source Film Maker
matt
We've neglected SFM for a while now, it was pretty unusable, but it's clear it's an incredibly powerful tool and it'd be a shame for us to not be able to utilize it.

So we fixed it up a bit, and have some thoughts to share on the future of it.

What's new
matt
We've done a few things to make it usable.

Cloud map support which works the same as the game, you can load straight into any of our UGC maps without having to subscribe or install anything. 😊

Added an embedded asset browser where you can drag and drop assets straight into your scene — this also has asset.party support, so you can put any UGC models into your scene just like Hammer 😲
Future Plans
matt
SFM is a great tool and a lot can be achieved with it, but in its current form the potential is always going to be severely limited.

So we're going to prototype our own film maker made with our C# editor API.

With the recent addition of the IM3D API and SceneMaps we're in a great position to achieve this without needing any C++.

Which means it'd be open-source, incredibly extensible and we could allow community contributions to the tool itself, pushing the potential far beyond anything if we committed to updating the native C++ version.