Garry's Mod

Garry's Mod

Logo of Garry's Mod
Developer(s) Facepunch Studios[lower-alpha 1]
Publisher(s) Valve Corporation
Programmer(s) Garry Newman
Engine Source
Platform(s) Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux
Release date(s)

Microsoft Windows

  • WW December 24, 2004

OS X

  • WW September 23, 2010

Linux

  • WW June 6, 2013
Genre(s) Sandbox
Mode(s) Single-player, multiplayer

Garry's Mod (commonly abbreviated as GMod and typecased as garry's mod), is a sandbox physics game created by Garry Newman,[1] and developed by his company, Facepunch Studios.[2] Garry's Mod was originally a mod for Valve Corporation's Half-Life 2, but was later made into a standalone release in 2006 for Microsoft Windows, published by Valve Corporation. Later updates saw an OS X build added in 2010, and a Linux build in 2013.

Gameplay

Screenshot from Garry's Mod showing a player posing Heavy and Soldier from Team Fortress 2

Although Garry's Mod is listed as a full game, it has no objectives and instead gives the player a sandbox to manipulate items free of restrictions, although most multiplayer servers offer original game modes created by players. Garry's Mod allows players to manipulate items, furniture, and props – various objects that players can place in-game.

Props can be selected from any installed Source engine game or from a community created collection. The Physics Gun allows objects to be picked up, adjusted, and frozen in place. The Tool Gun is a multi-purpose tool for performing tasks, such as constraining props together, creating interactive buttons, and creating controllable winches and wheels. The Tool Gun is also used to control add-ons created by the community. The game uses the Source engine's modified version of the Havok Physics Engine,[3] which allows players to build contraptions that follow the laws of physics, allowing for very real structures and experiments.

Another popular concept in Garry's Mod is ragdoll posing. The player can instantiate a ragdoll model from a Source game and pose it using a variety of tools.[4] This is a popular tool for making fan-made videos and machinimas.

User-created content

Garry's Mod allows users to take advantage of the extensibility of the Source Engine through the spawn menu which enables users to spawn models and maps imported by the user. Since Garry's Mod version 9, Lua scripting has been a notable feature added to the game which allows players to run their very own scripts, which expanded potential user modifications by enabling the creation of scripted weapons, entities, vehicles, tools, gamemodes and NPCs that weren't possible in the game before.[5] Multiplayer game servers will automatically attempt to send any custom content to the client when they connect.[6] Popular mods include Trouble in Terrorist Town, DarkRP, Deathrun, Jailbreak and Prop Hunt.[7]

Wiremod

Wiremod is a user-created mod that significantly expands the sandbox capabilities of the game by adding a large number of pseudo-electronic components such as microcontrollers, logic gates, buttons, radios, gyroscopes, screens, GPS modules, sensors, laser rangefinders, speed sensors and much more. Wiring these components together allows the player to create a very large variety of electronically-controlled machines. It also features Expression2 general-purpose controllers, which allow the player to program the chip with a high-level programming language to compute inputs and outputs to control a wide swathe of elements. CPU modules, which use a Low-level programming language, allow similar capabilities, as well as the capability to render graphics on a digital screen, to be able to fully simulate a virtual computer. The use of Wiremod allows the creation of very complex contraptions, and everything from virtual computers to missiles, aircraft, spaceships and space probes, robots and drones; all constructed from components available in-game without the use of modded entities.

Fretta contest

In winter 2009-2010, a contest was held for Garry's Mod by the game's developers to create the best new game mode using a programming framework called "Fretta".[8] Fretta, Italian for "hurry", allows developers to quickly and easily create new game modes for Garry's Mod with commonly required functionality already implemented so the developers can focus on unique aspects of their game modes. Fretta was inspired by a similar fan-created framework "Rambo_6's Simple Gamemode Base". However, for inclusion in Garry's Mod, Newman decided to rewrite it with input and contributions from the original author and other developers.[9] The winners of the contest range from a recreation of the Mafia party game to an aerial combat game mode.[10] The contest winners have been included in Garry's Mod with their own Steam Achievements.[11]

Three of the winning games have been shipped, Trouble in Terrorist Town, Dogfight Arcade Assault, and Prop Hunt.[12]

Toybox and Steam Workshop

Garry's Mod 12 added a function called Toybox into the spawn menu (in Sandbox) that allowed players to share and download user-created content. After 2012's release of the Steam Workshop feature, Garry's Mod 13 replaced the Toybox feature with Steam Workshop. With the Steam Workshop feature came more addons for gamemodes other than Sandbox, with nearly 800,000 Steam Workshop items. A deeper connection to dedicated servers using "collections" (a feature called FastDL for its faster download speeds than downloading directly from the server itself), and other small improvements.

Development

Garry's Mod became available on Valve's content delivery service Steam on November 29, 2006.[2] In the past, playing Garry's Mod was free from 2004 to 2005, with the last free version released on November 27, 2005.[13] As of September 2014, the game had sold over 6 million copies.[14] As of January 2016, the game has sold 10 million copies.[15]

Sequel

A sequel based on Garry's Mod has been confirmed and is now under development. Attention surrounding the Garry's Mod sequel took off when Newman took to Facepunch Forums asking users what they could change. From the thread, confirmed changes/features include a new hook system for addons, sandboxed addons, permissions to access local hardware on the player's PC, in-game Workshop browsing/spawning, and Lua modules.[16]

References

Notes

  1. ↑ At release credited to "Team Garry", re-credited to "Garry" in 2006, re-credited to Facepunch Studios in 2013.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ "Garry Newman's presentation". Retrieved 2015-05-05.
  2. 1 2 "Garry's Mod". Steam. Valve Corporation. Retrieved 2010-06-24.
  3. ↑ "List of Available Games". Retrieved 2010-05-05.
  4. ↑ "Rag-doll Posing – GMod Wiki". Retrieved 2010-05-05.
  5. ↑ "A Brief History Of Garry’s Mod: Count To Ten". Rock, Paper, Shotgun. August 29, 2012. Retrieved May 16, 2015.
  6. ↑ "Garry's Mod Lua Wiki – Resource.AddFile". Team Garry. October 2008. Retrieved 2008-10-05.
  7. ↑ "Garry's Mod Review". Retrieved 2015-05-14.
  8. ↑ "Garry’s Mod – Fretta Game mode Contest". Retrieved 2010-06-06.
  9. ↑ "Fretta Gamemode Base". Retrieved 2010-06-06.
  10. ↑ "Fretta Contest Winners (2)". Archived from the original on July 10, 2011. Retrieved 2010-06-06.
  11. ↑ "Fretta Contest Winners". Retrieved 2010-06-06.
  12. ↑ "Two of the game modes are being shipped.". Retrieved 2010-08-03.
  13. ↑ "Garry 's Mod History". Garry's Mod. Retrieved 5 October 2014.
  14. ↑ Prescott, Shaun (12 September 2014). "Garry's Mod has sold 6 million copies". PC Gamer. Future plc. Retrieved 2014-09-12.
  15. ↑ Hillier, Brenna (January 3, 2016). "At 10 million sales, Garry’s Mod is still going strong". VG247. Retrieved January 3, 2016.
  16. ↑ Chalk, Andy (September 9, 2015). "A Garry's Mod sequel is in the works". PC Gamer. Retrieved February 13, 2016.

External links

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