Features

Your installed games and addons, found and loaded the way Garry's Mod loads them.

• Automatic Steam detection

  Finds Garry's Mod and Half-Life 2 in any Steam library folder.

  Windows, macOS and Linux, with manual path overrides for installs Steam doesn't know about.

• Garry's Mod mount order

  Loads content in Garry's Mod's priority order and skips Workshop items you disabled.

  Game archives, legacy addon folders, .gma addons, subscribed Workshop items, gamemode content, mount.cfg folders and mounted depots.

• Half-Life 2 and its episodes

  Each game mounts separately through Garry's Mod's depot list.

  Half-Life 2, Episode One, Episode Two and Lost Coast.

• Mount config

  mounts.cfg turns each kind of content on or off.

  It also points at game folders and adds extra search paths. Bad values show up as warnings instead of crashes.

• Live remounting

  Mounts change while the engine runs.

  Each addon or game mounts and unmounts as one unit.

Source engine files read directly, with no conversion step.

• Archives

  VPK archives and Garry's Mod .gma addons.

  VPK v1 and v2, including split archives. GMA v1 to v3.

• Maps

  BSP maps from Half-Life 2 through Garry's Mod.

  Versions 18 to 22, compressed lumps and content packed into the map itself.

• Models

  MDL models with their vertex and mesh files.

  Versions 44 to 49. Skins, body groups, levels of detail, skeletons, attachments and physics hulls.

• Textures

  VTF textures in every common format.

  Versions 7.0 to 7.5. DXT1/3/5, ATI1N/2N, 8-bit, packed 16-bit and HDR floating-point. Compressed textures go to the GPU as they are.

• Materials

  VMT materials with shader fallbacks and patch materials.

  Two-texture blending, tint, translucent, additive and alpha-tested surfaces, self-illumination and player color tinting.

  Not yet: bump maps, reflections, animated or scrolling textures, water refraction.

• Sounds

  WAV, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.

  WAV in PCM, float, ADPCM and MP3-in-WAV, with Source loop points.

• Game scripts

  KeyValues game data, read from the mounted games.

  Soundscripts, soundscapes, reverb presets, surface properties, weapon scripts, spawnlists, decal lists and localization files.

Maps drawn and lit as Source draws them.

• World geometry and lightmaps

  Brush geometry with its baked lighting.

  HDR when available, switchable lights in their starting state, and tool textures like nodraw, clip and trigger hidden.

• Displacement terrain

  Sculpted terrain with blended two-texture painting.

• Static props

  Every prop placed in the map.

  Skin, scale and baked per-vertex lighting.

• Skies

  2D skyboxes, 3D skyboxes and Garry's Mod's painted sky.

  3D skyboxes draw to scale behind the world. The painted sky has gradients, dusk, sun and stars.

• Model lighting

  Props, NPCs and players are lit from the map's baked light.

  Baked ambient light plus the four strongest nearby lights, which fade as they become blocked.

• Flashlight

  A Source-style shadowed flashlight cookie.

  Falloff and shadows on world surfaces.

• Brush entities

  func_ entities are drawn and collide.

  Not yet: moving doors, platforms and entity logic.

Half-Life 2 movement and Garry's Mod player features.

• Source-accurate movement

  Movement follows Half-Life 2's own movement code.

  Walking, air strafing, step-up, wall sliding and getting unstuck.

• Crouch, jump and sprint

  Source crouch timing, crouch jumps and sprint on Shift.

  Half-Life 2's forward jump boost.

• Swimming and ladders

  Swim, surface and climb out of water, and climb, jump off and push off ladders.

• Noclip

  Fly through walls with V.

• Surfaces and platforms

  Each surface type changes friction, speed and jump height.

  You ride moving objects and keep their momentum.

• Health and fall damage

  Hard landings hurt and punch the camera.

  Death is followed by a respawn at a player start with your loadout.

• View feel

  Head bob, strafe roll, smoothed stairs and screen punch from weapons and landings.

• Player models

  Pick any Garry's Mod player model, with matching first-person hands.

  Player and weapon colors.

• Player animation

  Garry's Mod's base animation logic.

  Walk and run blending, aiming and head turning, jumps, landings, noclip pose and per-weapon hold types with attack and reload gestures.

• Flashlight

  F toggles Garry's Mod's shadowed flashlight with Half-Life 2's sounds.

• Pick up props

  E picks up light props to carry, throw or drop.

• Footsteps

  Step, jump and landing sounds for each surface.

  Water and ladders included, with Garry's Mod's timing.

Half-Life 2's arsenal and Garry's Mod's physics gun, driven by the games' own weapon scripts.

• Half-Life 2 weapons

  Crowbar, stunstick, 9mm pistol, .357 Magnum, SMG, Pulse Rifle and shotgun.

  Half-Life 2's fire rates, spread, recoil and reloads, including the shotgun's double blast and shell-by-shell reload.

  Not yet: damage (hits push props only), SMG grenades and AR2 energy balls.

• Ammo and inventory

  Clips, reserve ammo, numbered slots and reloading on R.

  Weapons spawned from the spawn menu go into your inventory.

• View models

  First-person weapon models with your player model's hands.

  Half-Life 2 bob, lag and sway, and animation sound events. Other views show the weapon in your character's hands.

• Physics gun

  Grab, move, rotate and freeze props.

  Up to 4096 units away. Mouse wheel pulls and pushes, E rotates, right click freezes, R unfreezes one and a double-tap unfreezes everything.

• Physics gun effects

  A curved animated beam and a glowing outline on the held prop.

  Burn marks along surfaces and a core that glows in your weapon color.

• Weapon effects

  Muzzle flashes, tracers, impact decals and ejected shells for each weapon.

  Impact decals match the surface, and brass shells bounce with sound.

Collision and surface data taken from the games.

• Map collision

  Brushes, terrain, brush entities and props all collide.

  Player clips, NPC clips, grates, windows, ladders and water.

• Model collision

  Props use their own physics hulls, mass and surface type.

• Surface materials

  Every surface on a map knows what it's made of.

  Concrete, metal, wood and so on, which drives footsteps, impacts and movement.

• Impact and scrape sounds

  Props sound off when they hit or slide against something.

  The world, other props or the player, louder at higher speed.

• Bullet force

  Bullets and melee hits shove props with Half-Life 2's per-ammo force.

Spawning, building and game modes.

• Spawn menu

  Hold Q for Garry's Mod's spawn menu, built from your mounted content.

  Spawnlists, Weapons, Entities and NPCs tabs, search and rendered model icons.

• Placement

  Things spawn where you aim.

  Flush against the surface, facing you, with the right skin and body groups.

• Undo

  Z removes your last spawn with Garry's Mod's undo sound.

• NPCs

  Spawn any of 38 Half-Life 2 NPCs.

  They stand on the ground and play their idle animation.

  Not yet: AI, movement, health and death.

• Menu bar options

  Garry's Mod's menu bar with working options.

  Draw HUD, physgun beam and halo, noclip, god mode, weapons, realistic fall damage and player-vs-player.

• Sandbox mode

  The full loadout with the physics gun, spawn menu, noclip and undo.

• World saves

  Save every spawned prop and NPC from the pause menu.

  Frozen state included. Load a save later from Host Server.

Source's sound system, rebuilt on the games' own sound data.

• Game sounds

  Sounds play from the mounted games through their soundscripts, with random pitch and volume.

• 3D sound

  Source's distance falloff and sound channels, with up to 64 voices.

• Soundscapes and ambient sounds

  The map's soundscapes and placed ambient sounds.

  Looping ambience and random sounds crossfade as you move between soundscape areas.

• Room reverb

  Source's room effect presets, crossfading between rooms.

  Presets come from the game files, with automatic room detection where the map asks for it.

• Underwater sound

  Sound muffles when your head goes under water.

• Music and mixer

  Music with crossfades, and menu sounds.

  Separate World, Interface and Music volumes.

Menus and HUD in the style of Half-Life 2 and Garry's Mod.

• Loading screen

  Half-Life 2's loading box and progress bar, moving through each stage of map loading.

• Pause menu

  Escape opens the pause menu while the world keeps running.

  Resume, Character, Save World, Settings, Main Menu and Quit.

• Character screen

  A searchable player model list with an animated, turnable preview.

  Player and physics gun color pickers.

• Half-Life 2 HUD

  Health and ammo panels and crosshair, laid out by the game's own HUD files.

  Low-health and low-ammo brackets.

• Weapon selection

  Garry's Mod's numbered weapon slots on the number keys and mouse wheel.

  Laid out by the game's own HUD files.

• Settings

  Audio, look and movement options.

  Volumes, mouse and controller look, crouch, sprint and jump options, and first-person body and physics gun preferences.

• Game text and icons

  Interface text comes from Garry's Mod's localization files, and icons load from mounted content.

• Themes

  Each part of the interface has its own skin.

  Garry's Mod's Derma skin for the spawn menu, a dark engine theme for menus, and a Half-Life 2 HUD look read from the game's scheme files.

• Launch options

  Command-line options that jump straight into a game.

  --map, --gamemode and --world, plus --fastlaunch to skip fades.