Garry's Mod

Garry's Mod (commonly abbreviated as ***GMod***, stylized as ***garry's mod***) is a sandbox game created by Garry Newman and later as a stand-alone game, Facepunch Studios on December 23rd, 2004. A month after Half-Life was published. *Garry's Mod* was originally a modification for Valve's *Half-Life 2*, but was later made into a standalone game. It is available for Microsoft Windows, OS X and Linux.

## Gameplay

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.

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, 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. 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. Multiplayer game servers will automatically attempt to send any custom content to the client when they connect. Popular mods include Trouble in Terrorist Town, DarkRP, Deathrun, Jailbreak, and Prophunt.

### 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". 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. The winners of the contest range from a recreation of the Mafia party game to an aerial combat game mode. The winners of the contest range from a recreation of the Mafia party game to an aerial combat game mode. The contest winners have been included in *Garry's Mod* with their own Steam Achievements.

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

### 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, 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.

## History

*Garry's Mod* became available on Valve's content delivery service Steam on November 29, 2006.  In the past, playing *Garry's Mod* was free from 2004 to 2005, with the last free version released on November 27.  As of September 2014, the game had sold over 6 million copies.