The long-awaited spiritual successor to popular Garry’s Mod gamemode Parasite, Morbus certainly has big boots to fill. But will it live up to it’s predecessor’s fame? Creator Remscar certainly intends to prove so.

The concept is simple: the Humans must attend to their basic needs, such as eating, sleeping and urinating. Oh, and keeping yourself as far as possible from a pack of murderous aliens, one of whom may or may not be your best friend in disguise. And if that wasn’t draining enough for you, you’re stuck in an isolated location with the aliens until you’re either extracted, dead, or in the most unlikely of cases, graced with the miracle of defeating the aliens.

A classic team-based gamemode, players can play as both parties. Lucky players may even find themselves tasked with the role of a  Brood Alien, capable of cloaking as a human and deceiving the other humans into a sense of trust. And when said beast manages to kill a human in it’s beast form, more of it’s kind are spawned.  Unfortunately, a swarm of lesser aliens with an infinite numer of respawns will prevent humans taking the time to seek out the Brood Aliens.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Morbus is the constant theme of fear and the deep unknown. Remscar makes great use of lighting to keep players in pitch-black darkness. So much so, that they can barely see the barrel of their weapon. However, night-vision is not a department the aliens are lacking in, and if plunging humans into darkness isn’t quite as effective as the aliens might wish, the constant needs system means that each human will be isolated across the map, fearful for their life around every corner, easy pickings for an alien crawling in the vents above.

The gamemode is certainly impressive visually, with a jaw-dropping 3D HUD which showcases Remscar’s talents. But Morbus isn’t finished yet, and as shown in the WAYWO thread on Facepunch, there is still plenty of eye-candy to come.

Interested in trying out Morbus? You’ll be happy to know that there’s a test server up at 66.85.147.170:27015 for public use, though it’s status us a test server means that it’s not too populated unless 1-2 people join first, so for the best experience, invite your friends! The server is equipped with FastDL and so the downloads are indeed swift.

You can track development on the Morbus  Facepunch thread or on the modDB page.

Ownership Change and the Future

Constructive News may have lay dormant for 13 weeks, however readers will be pleased to know that the site is now being updated and maintained by DeathByKittens and the community is urged to contribute their own news to the site. There will be no major changes to Constructive News and the content will still remain focused around Garry’s Mod projects and happenings.

General overview

By now everyone is aware that Garry has been working on a huge update for Garry’s Mod in the past few weeks. He’s been giving us hints on his blog and in other places as to what we can expect. However, it wasn’t until today that we finally got an overview of what’s coming up. Garry posted an obfuscated changelog on his blog. In an effort to confuse us even more, he translated the changelog to German and back and added random capitalization. I went through the trouble of cleaning it up for you.

Updated menu screen.
Updated PHX model pack.
Fixed HTTP connection crash.
Fixed physics penetration warnings.
Changed the map icons to use PNG images.
Fixed HL1 grunt NPC using the wrong gibs.
GUI now uses GWEN skin.
Fixed voice related error.
Fixed missing crossbow sounds.
Added new spawnicons to the spawn menu.
Fixed/improved spawnicon system.

…

You can find the full changelog including Lua features and fixes here. I’ll be discussing the changes that matter the most to casual players here.

New spawn icons

About a month ago Garry posted about a new isometric spawn icon style. One of the important changes in the update is the support for PNG images as materials and textures. Spawn icons are now also rendered to PNGs instead of TGAs, which means that they have full transparency now. That’ll make them look a lot nicer!

As of yet, no pictures of the new spawn menu are available.

New GUI

In the past few months, Garry has been working on a GUI library for games called GWEN. This library allows you to create a graphical user interface and use skins with it. These skins are simple PNG images with the controls laid out. Now that Garry’s Mod supports PNG images natively, Garry has added a way to use them with the Derma GUI system in the game. This feature will provide players with neat new skins.

New menu

As seen in the screenshot above, the menu has been completely redesigned. Instead of a static background that is difficult to customize without some knowledge about Valve’s toolchain, it now supports PNG background images and might even be able to load them from Toybox!

With the fantastic community backgrounds, Garry’s Mod will once again feel like a game that’s all about creativity.

Final words

Because this is a huge update with a lot of changes and new features, Garry says it’s going to break a lot of addons and gamemodes without a doubt. There will be a beta for at least a month before the update is pushed to the regular build.

The bright side is that addon and gamemode developers will be given a lot more tools to work with, to do amazing things that weren’t possible before or required the distribution of binary modules. The best developers in the community will be invited to join this beta and prepare their work for the release. They will also be able to update their content to use all of the new features in the update right when it’s launched!

To keep up with the latest changes, follow Garry on Twitter, read his blog and watch his Steam screenshot page!

technicolour together with Divran started working on an challenging project a while ago and they finally have something to show now. The project they’ve been working on is all about developing emulators for Garry’s Mod with just Lua. They’ve currently working on a Gameboy and Intel 8080 emulator. They’re already able to run games like the original Tetris and Space Invaders without any issues. It works in multiplayer, but it isn’t synced, so everyone will own see their own game on a single instance.

Unfortunately due to restrictions in Garry’s Mod they’re unable to read the original ROM files, but they solved that problem by converting these ROMs to special text files. Their code currently supports MBC3, MBC1 and ROM games without any limits. The graphics code is still prone to glitches, but there are no major problems known at this time. Speed is still an issue, but content should run in real time or at least close to it on any modern processor. The developers are currently focusing on optimization.

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Download

You can try it out yourself by getting it via SVN. You can find more information and an updated status on development in the thread.

A while ago, garry asked the community to come up with concepts for a new main menu for Garry’s Mod. We didn’t hear anything from it anymore for a long time – until yesterday. Garry posted a few previews of a new main menu that is presumed to be available in the next update.

Not much information has been released yet, but it is already known that JPG images will be cycled in the background. So it will be much easier to customize your background now. This post will be updated when more information is released.

SuperLlama has done what no one else has accomplished to date, he made a localized physics mod. People say it will change GMod forever and according to the creator, that’s what it’s designed to do. So, what does this addon do? Remember building that vehicle you wanted to walk around in, but you bounced around instead? Well, this is the solution for that, have a look.

The creator has said that a beta release is scheduled for tomorrow (May 6th), which will miss a few features that will be added later on. Those are listed below:

• Fix weapons so that bullets can travel into/out of ships
• Fix the in/out algorithm so it doesn’t crash when trying to bring in a complex constraint system
• Redo the hull scanner so that it can handle doors and other moving parts.
• Add the ability for the effect to be (adv)duplicated, including objects welded to the inside of the ship.
• Add support for nested gravity hulls, which will be useful for things like docking.
• Continue to improve rendering, hopefully fixing lighting on players/ragdolls/vehicles.
• Work on making major mods work flawlessly with the mod, especially wire and spacebuild.
• Implement a gravity percentage slider (0% to 500%).
• Implement a dampening percentage slider so that values below 100% will allow some inertia through.
• Implement a dampening threshold slider so that only velocity changes above the value will obey the above.
• Recode the physgun beam in Lua so that it renders.

Items like “Fix weapons so that bullets can travel into/out of ships” suggest that it isn’t as easy to do as you might think. The addon actually creates an invisible room outside the map, which functions as the interior of your vehicle! When the beta is out, a link will probably be posted in the thread.

The Vman doesn’t release a lot of content for Garry’s Mod, but when he does, he delivers. This time he made a fancy new particle effect that replaces the boring default explosion effect. He hopes to make more particle effects in the future and eventually release them as a big package with many different effects.

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If you aren’t convinced yet, you can also watch a video of it here. Finally we’re in for some Hollywood style explosions in machinimas!

Download

Let the creator know what you think of it in the thread. Hopefully we’ll see more effects by this genius soon!

It isn’t a common occasion for an addon to really change the experience of playing Garry Mod altogether. New prop packs are released almost daily, we have all kinds of fancy user interfaces to administrate servers nowadays and it’s hard to keep up with all of the fancy maps. There is no denying that it’s hard to run out of content to play with in Garry’s Mod, but at its core, Garry’s Mod is still the same old sandbox game it already was years ago.

Recently, Source engine games have started to adapt different means of playing them. It started out with the Novint Falcon and it was shown that Portal 2 will support the Razer Sixense controller. Garry has shown interest in the Novint Falcon, but other than that all of this technology was never applied to the game. All of that changed when a comment was left on this site by John Boiles, a software engineer from San Francisco. As he explains, it’s no surprise that a game like Garry’s Mod appeals a lot to an engineer.

Here at Yelp, we’re passionate about building things; it’s at the core of our engineering philosophy. In fact, we enjoy it so much that many of us keep on building after we finish work. I recently found some spare time to work on an interesting project with the Microsoft Kinect. I think it’s a cool start and I’ve open sourced the code so that others can build something even cooler.

He thought it would be neat to interact with a game engine that supports physics using Microsoft’s Kinect controller and he chose Garry’s Mod because it can be scripted so easily using Lua. For the technical details, you can read his awesome blog post, but most of you probably just want to see how it turned out. As you’ll see, I’m not exaggerating when I say that it’s turned out absolutely spectacular!

The best part is that the project is completely open source, so Lua coders on Facepunch can help expand on this project. I can’t begin to enumerate the possibilities this technology opens up. A few of the applications I can think of right now are

• Fighting gamemodes
• Construction advantages
• Easier menu navigation
• Amateur motion capturing for machinimas

It’s awesome to see people outside of Facepunch coming up with innovative stuff like this! If you have any comments or suggestions, you can send him an e-mail or post in the thread.

Garry has just added Half-Life 1 NPCs to the Garry’s Mod Beta, which means that they will be in the next update of Garry’s Mod!

What do I need to be able to use them?

To be able to use the NPCs, you will need to own the game Half-Life: Source on the same Steam account as Garry’s Mod. If you haven’t done so yet, you need to mount the game’s content from the Extensions menu in the main menu.

Which NPCs are included?

The NPCs have been copied directly from Half-Life: Source, so most – if not all – should be present.

• Assassin
• Baby Crab
• Big Momma
• Bull Chicken
• Cockroach
• Gargantua
• Grunt
• Houndeye
• Scientist
• Snark
• Zombie

What are they like in-game?

See for yourself!

Lua coder Entoros has organized the first edition of the Lua Scripting Awards. They are meant to recognize (and award) the most awesome people in the Lua Scripting community for their work and accomplishments. Two weeks ago, the nominations began and today the voting for the greatest gamemode took off!

Ultimate Chimera Hunt by Aska49

A round based gamemode based off of the Chimera Lab section of the GBA game MOTHER 3. Every round a random player is chosen to be the Ultimate Chimera, a big pink monster who wants nothing more than to kill everything in its path. The Pigmasks (soldiers in pig outfits) are there to put a stop to him. To do this, they must turn him off by pressing the big white button on his back. Getting close enough to do that however, is not an easy task

The Ultimate Chimera can roar when surrounded by too many pigmasks, it causes them all to flee in terror giving him ample time to track a few down.

Tiramisu by Big Bang

Tiramisu is a modification of Cakescript G2, with the intent of bringing it up to today’s roleplay standards, and to enhance it’s usability and level of detail by overhauling almost everything VGUI wise, as well as structurally, with the intent of making life for roleplay developers without the will or money to buy a gamemode by providing a free alternative of the same quality

It is primarily aimed at small/medium sized communities, and conserves the ease of installation and set up to any server that Cakescript possesses.

TF2 Gamemode by _Kilburn

This gamemode is aiming to be a perfect replica of Team Fortress 2 in Garry’s Mod, this means that the gameplay should be extremely similar, if not identical to TF2, but with the numerious advantages of Garry’s Mod. Ever wanted to run through Ravenholm as a Pyro? Alright. How about going on a decapitating spree in City 17? Why not. Building forts out of cargo containers and then deathmatching on them? Go for it.

Once this gamemode is completed, it will be basically an open source, Lua version of Team Fortress 2, with all the additional advantages that Garry’s Mod can offer.

OpenAura by somescripter

OpenAura is a versatile roleplaying gamemode framework which can be adapted easily into different roleplaying environments using ‘schemas’ and ‘plugins’.

It has a variety of different schemas, including:

• HL2 Roleplay
• Fallout: New Vegas Roleplay
• Severance (Left 4 Dead Roleplay)
• Cider 2 (Real-Life Roleplay)
• Phase Four

Although community recognition and fame is great, a contest wouldn’t be a contest without a reward in the form of some money! The first place winners will receive $200+ worth of Steam games of their choice with the current amount of donations. The second and third place winners will earn a spot in the Hall of Fame and of course an internet cookie.

There is currently $642 in the pot, with donations from Entoros, Lexic, Llamalord, Overv, |FlapJack|, thejjokerr, Dwatring, somescripter, Megiddo and garry. That’s right, Facepunch Studios has donated no less than $500 to this contest!

The voting period for each category is listed below:

• Great Gamemode: February 5th to February 26th
• Awesome Addon: February 12th to March 5th
• Super Scripter: February 19th to March 12th

That means you have 20 days to vote for each category. You can vote for the Great Gamemode in this thread.

The new Lua coder Athos has debuted with an addon that allows you to play a game of billiards in Garry’s Mod! The mod has been tested in both single player and multiplayer, so you can play a game by yourself or compete with your friends! The included tables and balls are scaled to their real world size and use high quality models and materials.

Features

• Full single player and multiplayer support
• High quality models and materials
• Custom VGUI style
• Three table sizes (9ft, 10ft and 12ft) and three table colors (green, light blue and red) are available
• 8-Ball, 9-Ball, Snooker and Rotation game types
• Training mode for playing by yourself without anyone bothering you
• Mingebag protection for preventing people from messing with the game (e.g. walking over it)
• Uses Source engine physics

When you are about to spawn a billiard table, you get a nice options screen to configure the table and game.

BFH (Ball Flying over Hole) is a setting that prevents the ball from bouncing back when its shot into a hole with a high velocity. Disabling this option may increase performance, if that’s a concern. Also note that you can’t play Snooker on a 9ft table.

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Download

You can download the addon through Subversion using this link:

http://mbilliards.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/MBilliards/

If you don’t know how SVN works, have a look at this guide.

Information

For more information, have a look in the thread!