How in the FUCK is this the first time I’m hearing about this? It’s been over a decade since I browsed them last, but those were a massively important component of the whole Garry’s Mod community.
I think a big part of the failure, beyond the absolutely massive amount of mismanagement, is that a lot of the stuff that made GM awesome has had it’s “lunch ate” by other development engines and sandbox game systems. Facepunch was never going to be big enough to fully challenge Second Life, or Roblox, or Unity, etc. They had a niche that they should have focused on.
On top of that, there’s a problem that commonly happens with games that have deep modding communities that get “sequels”: All of the awesome stuff that the community spent years building on the last game won’t work with the new one, so there’s not any real reason to switch until the amount of content in the new game (from the devs or the community) passes a critical threshold.
And then changing the underlying creation tools so drastically from the last game by jumping from Lua to C#? Yeah, let’s just throw away most of the skills the community built up!
Oh yeah, he nuked that massive repository of technical information, memes, artwork, addons… etc… like, … over a decade ago now?
EDIT:
Sorry, just realized this is a high enough level comment that I shouldn’t wall of text the entire thread.
Commentary!
There are now you know, new Facepunch forums, and I am 99% sure if you talked with Garry or a dev or a forum mod on the new ones, they would just gaslight you and act like the old Facepunch forums never existed, or weren’t important, or that happened eons ago why do you care, etc.
And yes, yeah, Garrys Mod did completely get passed up by other platforms/games.
Back in the early-mid 201x’s, you had a large number of GMod servers, running gamemodes, that also talked to some kind of mySQL server, that then also talked to a website/forum/storefront.
You sign up on the website, give your SteamID, and then either through paypal on the website or something, purchase access to some kind of on server in game content or ability or player class or whatever.
People made all that shit on their own, I helped a few people with their own / my own API layers amd DB configs … my initial idea was to just use a secondary SQL database to be able to have like uh, a bunch of items on the map or in container objects in the map, or player inventories and stats… it just made more sense to handle dormant but potentially usable/interactable items … not actually constantly in the main server think loop (especially not as physics objects JFC).
It was basically an optimization, from my point of view, to run a large/complex map/gamemode.
But others quickly figured out that you could literally monetize in game items via basically further developing a bridge between the game server and not the game server.
(Hilariously, you could maybe say that this constitutes a precursor to the NFT-ingameitem paradigm that would later at least be ‘theorized’ by a bunch of even less technically competent people, lol, as very often, those in game items could be stolen from a player in game, or traded for some other in game item, via basically rp or a runescape-esque player trading system, etc)
I’m… still pretty sure that was all illegal, running a server that accepts real money… you don’t own the rights to the game in that way, but oh well I guess!
Anyway yeah, Garry hated that other people were making money this way, but then eventuslly decided that… he wanted to do that!
So everyone with a pioneering method is now either part of his clique and working with him… or all their shit gets nuked.
He is a massively unscrupulous incompetent hypocrite asshat.
Garry is fundamentally a troll.
Like… he’d very often spend more time in flame wars on his own forum… than doing actual development.
How in the FUCK is this the first time I’m hearing about this? It’s been over a decade since I browsed them last, but those were a massively important component of the whole Garry’s Mod community.
I think a big part of the failure, beyond the absolutely massive amount of mismanagement, is that a lot of the stuff that made GM awesome has had it’s “lunch ate” by other development engines and sandbox game systems. Facepunch was never going to be big enough to fully challenge Second Life, or Roblox, or Unity, etc. They had a niche that they should have focused on.
On top of that, there’s a problem that commonly happens with games that have deep modding communities that get “sequels”: All of the awesome stuff that the community spent years building on the last game won’t work with the new one, so there’s not any real reason to switch until the amount of content in the new game (from the devs or the community) passes a critical threshold.
And then changing the underlying creation tools so drastically from the last game by jumping from Lua to C#? Yeah, let’s just throw away most of the skills the community built up!
What a shitshow.
Oh yeah, he nuked that massive repository of technical information, memes, artwork, addons… etc… like, … over a decade ago now?
EDIT:
Sorry, just realized this is a high enough level comment that I shouldn’t wall of text the entire thread.
Commentary!
There are now you know, new Facepunch forums, and I am 99% sure if you talked with Garry or a dev or a forum mod on the new ones, they would just gaslight you and act like the old Facepunch forums never existed, or weren’t important, or that happened eons ago why do you care, etc.
And yes, yeah, Garrys Mod did completely get passed up by other platforms/games.
Back in the early-mid 201x’s, you had a large number of GMod servers, running gamemodes, that also talked to some kind of mySQL server, that then also talked to a website/forum/storefront.
You sign up on the website, give your SteamID, and then either through paypal on the website or something, purchase access to some kind of on server in game content or ability or player class or whatever.
People made all that shit on their own, I helped a few people with their own / my own API layers amd DB configs … my initial idea was to just use a secondary SQL database to be able to have like uh, a bunch of items on the map or in container objects in the map, or player inventories and stats… it just made more sense to handle dormant but potentially usable/interactable items … not actually constantly in the main server think loop (especially not as physics objects JFC).
It was basically an optimization, from my point of view, to run a large/complex map/gamemode.
But others quickly figured out that you could literally monetize in game items via basically further developing a bridge between the game server and not the game server.
(Hilariously, you could maybe say that this constitutes a precursor to the NFT-ingameitem paradigm that would later at least be ‘theorized’ by a bunch of even less technically competent people, lol, as very often, those in game items could be stolen from a player in game, or traded for some other in game item, via basically rp or a runescape-esque player trading system, etc)
I’m… still pretty sure that was all illegal, running a server that accepts real money… you don’t own the rights to the game in that way, but oh well I guess!
Anyway yeah, Garry hated that other people were making money this way, but then eventuslly decided that… he wanted to do that!
So everyone with a pioneering method is now either part of his clique and working with him… or all their shit gets nuked.
He is a massively unscrupulous incompetent hypocrite asshat.
Garry is fundamentally a troll.
Like… he’d very often spend more time in flame wars on his own forum… than doing actual development.