Half-Life 4: Garry's Mod

Half-Life 4: Garry's Mod Garry's Mod (commonly abbreviated as also known as HL4 GMod) is a sandbox physics game developed by Facepunch Studios and published by Valve Corporation. Garry's Mod was originally a mod created by Garry Newman for Valve Corporation's Half-Life 2 but was later made into a standalone release in 2006 for Microsoft Windows. Later updates saw an OS X port, added in 2010, and a version for Linux in 2013. Gameplay The base game mode "sandbox" has no set objectives, and gives the player the freedom to spawn non-player characters (NPCs), ragdolls or objects (called props), such as furniture, shipping containers, dumpsters and explosions, and interact with them in various ways.

A variety of props, NPCs, and ragdolls can be selected and placed into the sandbox from any installed game running on the Source game engine or from the community-created collections, such as PHX3 for props and Civil Protection model packs for ragdolls. An important tool offered to the player, the Physics Gun (sometimes called the Phys-Gun), allows the props and ragdolls to be picked up, rotated, and frozen in place. Another important implement, the Tool Gun, is a multi-purpose tool for performing various tasks, such as constraining props together, creating interactive buttons, and creating controllable winches and wheels. It can also be used to change the facial expression and pose the digits of a ragdoll. The Tool Gun can also be used to control and use add-ons created by the community, which can be accessed through the Steam Workshop.

The game uses the Source engine's modified version of the Havok physics engine, which allows players to build contraptions that follow the laws of physics, allowing realistic simulations of structures and experiments.

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 own scripts, which expanded potential user modifications by enabling the creation of scripted weapons, entities, vehicles, tools, game modes and NPCs that weren't possible in the game before.[3] Multiplayer game servers will automatically attempt to send any custom content to the client when they connect.[4] Most users prefer to download the Server Data from the Steam Workshop. Popular game modes include Trouble in Terrorist Town, DarkRP, Deathrun, Jailbreak, Prop Hunt, and Murder.

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 (E2) 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".[6] 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.[7] The winners of the contest range from a recreation of the Mafia party game to an aerial combat game mode.[8] The contest winners have been included in Garry's Mod with their own Steam Achievements.[9]

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

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 add-ons for game modes other than Sandbox, with nearly 1.3 million Steam Workshop items.[10] 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 as a paid game on Valve's digital distribution service Steam on 29 November 2006.[11] Before this, earlier versions of the game were released for free between 2004 and 2005, with the last free version released on 27 November 2005.[12] As of January 2016, the game has sold 10 million copies.

Possible sequel
In September 2015, a sequel based on Garry's Mod was confirmed. The attention surrounding the sequel took off when Newman took to Facepunch Forums to ask users ideas for changes. From the thread, confirmed changes/features include a new hook system for add-ons, sandboxed add-ons, permissions to access local hardware on the player's PC, in-game Workshop browsing/spawning, and Lua modules.

However, in March 2016, Newman revealed that there had been little progression on the planned sequel and suggested it "might never come out."[15] When asked about when the game could possibly release five months later, Newman stated that the game would release on 16 September.[16]

The following year, Newman revealed Sandbox (stylised as S&box), a game that could "possibly become Garry's Mod 2".[17] It features a hotloading C# layer on top of Unreal Engine 4. It is not known if Sandbox is the sequel mentioned above, or an entirely separate game.

Reception
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Garry's Mod won Computer Games Magazine's 2005 "Best Mod"[18] and PC Gamer US's "Best Mod 2005" awards. The latter magazine's Dan Stapleton called it "ingenious".[19]