Garry's Mod
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Steam Deck support status:
Unknown - More info on ProtonDB Overview
GMod / Garry's Mod. Template:V
A mod that is able to use the physics engine as a fantastic cooperative toy. Garry's Mod was born on the Something Awful forums. Everyone had been playing JBMod and really enjoying it. Production of JBMod had slowed down so Garry went about making his own small mod. Garry wanted to be able to rope things together - this was what interested him most. So Garry created Garry's Mod, a simple mod for Half-Life 2 in which the crossbow could rope things together and the pistol could shoot out manhacks. Everyone loved it, so Garry continued to make new versions.
Since then, Garry's Mod has advanced through 9 versions, each with more features. The latest version, Garry's Mod 10, is distributed through Steam for $9.99 and has a massive host of features, such as easy ragdoll posing, keypads, doors, buttons, dynamite, welding, and just about everything needed to create so-called "contraptions" as well as comics and machinima. It is no longer just a Half-Life 2 mod, now working on any Valve Source game.
Garry's Mod itself has a large mod base. It has support for Lua, which is used by fans to make SWEPs (Scripted Weapons), SENTs (Scripted Entities) and gamemodes. The gamemodes range from roleplay to survival, to sports, and even to SpaceBuild, a popular gamemode which requires players to build spaceships in order to travel between planets in huge maps.
Garry's Mod is by far the most popular Source mod, and was the first mod ever distributed through Steam.
Garry's mod as a development tool
Garry's Mod is interesting for developing purposes, and can greatly fulfill some task needed to make new mods.
Here is a list of suggestions about that:
- As a way to place and or move props in MAP_EDIT mode.
- As an interactive chat
- You can chat with other mod members, and share ideas through text and usage of GMod tools. You can even create decoration, or prof that the engine support foo or bar about physics. Mappers may join and use building blocks to cooperatively share ideas about scenarios with not-mappers. May even use GMod to show a new map and discuss features without mobs. You can setup Source windowed, and fortunately enough use a reasonable level of CPU, so you can still work on code, or chat on other applications.
- As a Scenario Maker for pimping purposes
- You can recreate scenes you want to capture to pimp your mod, model or map.
- Fresh ideas
- As you can create "artifacts", maybe you can create stuff you can recreate on your mods. GMod's mini-games can be expanded to full mods.
- Stress-test Source
- Invent creative methods to crash Source. Maybe you can to push the limits of Source?.. You can use GMod's sand arena to test abusive usage of Source, like spawning a thousand zombies, spamming a billion explosive barrels, flopping a hundred ragdolls around, etc. Will it crash or freeze? Will the video corrupt? Will the network buffer overflow?
- Scripting new game modes
- With the implementation of
Lua scripting in versions 9 and later, you can create new game modes and weapons without using the HL2 SDK and make things much easier.
Distribution
- Garry's Mod is available for purchase on Steam for $9.99. Garry and Valve split the profit 50/50.
- Garry has said that there will most likely be no retail version of Garry's Mod.
