Description
This addon allows you mounting any source-engine games in Garry’s Mod including default VALVE games, Steamworks content like D.I.P.R.I.P, Left 4 Dead and every installed SourceMod.

Prerequisites
You need to have MSVC 2010 Redistributable x86 installed, or it will not work.

Download

The full version includes spawnicons for some models (several MB). The light version doesn’t, so it is much smaller. But you have to generate the icons yourself.

SVN-Repository

Url: http://svn.daggeringcats.com/mount2
User: anon
Password: anon

Annotations for Left 4 Dead 1/2:
Left 4 Dead maps are not compatible with Garry’s Mod. Don’t try loading them – This will only cause GMod to crash.

Why another mounting addon?
You may know the orginal mounting addon and it’s extension for sourcemods. They work well but I wasn’t really satisfied with the way they work and I disliked their messy sourcecode so I wrote up my own from scratch.
My addon directly integrates into GMod and works on dedicated servers which is not possible without many modifications of the old gm_mount addon.
It also can mount Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 which is the main purpose of this addon, which took me over 3 weeks, around 2000 lines of C++ code and much coffee to figure that out.

Steam: Verify E-Mail

Today, during a party of L4D‘s new campaign “Crash Course” my pal Stealthrider suddenly disconnected. Well, I thought he just doesn’t want to play anymore but: It was worse. Some idiot hacked his steam-account. They switched his password and E-Mail. He now has to contact VALVE fixing it. Another strange thing was Zidane’s account just got hacked ten minutes after Stealthrider’s. And the frightening part now is: We all three played on the same server at the same time when all this happened. I suspect this server to cause havoc with our clients and read out the PW somehow (e.g. by downloading the ClientRegistry.blob, which stores all account relevant data such as autologin signatures)

After both got their accounts hacked (Zidane got his back, because he acted fast before the hackers could change the E-Mail. This made him able to reset the changed PW), I switched my login password and made my account verified. This seems to be a new feature of VALVE/Steam to verify an E-Mail address. After you did that, your account is bound to that Mail and if someone (or yourself) tries to change the Password,Mail or Security-Question, a Mail is first sent to your address. In it, you’ll find a link you have to click before the actions take place. This is a very good security feature in my opinion. So you all better do this soon! Right click on the Steam-Try-Icon and go to Settings/Account/Verify email address. This should keep the idiotic crackers out.

The main hosters of YaS, including Flamehaze,Neic0, W0rf0x and me are thinking about to get a new server.

We aren’t sure yet which, but we thought about at least of getting a root-server with 4GB ram and a Core 2 Duo or a 8GB ram with a Xeon CPU. The prices are quite high but with 4 people paying for it, it’s cheaper than any virtual server you could otherwise get (which has a much worse performance).

Example: My server costs around 30€ a month and it’s a virtual server. Sharing the best root server we think about to get would only cost 25 € a month for each of us – while having a around 10 times better performance than my server has.

The idea is, to run a linux host system on it with the virtualistion Xen and then install (at least) one Windows Server via Xen. The pros for this are we don’t need to pay the monthly higher fee due to the Windows license general server-hosters take. We can use our own license. And luckily I have one laying unused around here at home

Edit:

We deiced to buy this baby here. Intel Xeon Dual 2x 3.00+ GHz, 8 GB DDR2, 2x 750 GB.

Edit:

The new server is now available but still needs to be configured.

Today I created a vison I had months ago: Placing HTML-based “adverts” ingame in order to tell people to register on YaS or playing videos ingame.

Coding it was quite hard because I had to use the very poorly documented cam.Start3D2D() function to draw VGUI elements in the world. Well I had success and here is how it looks like. The panels have “animation”-modes in which you can play e.g. youtube videos. But this mode is really expensive and lowers you FPS from 200 to 70 (without animation-mode you have 160 fps if you see such a panel and 200 if not).

It is already well known that Garry tends to be hypersensitive to bugs or exploits on his game Garry’s Mod. He removes malicious code which can be exploited to crash servers. This is good so.

But his latest change was truly hypochondric: He disabled the ability to write to subfolders.

But let’s stop for a moment now and find out why this change is unecessary bullshit:

When Garry’s Mod first came out on Steam, you were only able to write to the /data folder and only to .txt files (reading was possible in the whole folder of garrysmod and you could create subfolders in /data such as /data/myaddon/). This was good so.

Recently an individual named Chrisaster came (I don’t want to blame him how for what he did) and used Garry’s command cl_lua_datafolder. This command can change the /data folder to any location on your computer. So he did create several fake-servers. People who joined got their /data folder changed to e.g. their desktop and Chrisaster spammed it with textfiles. (Truly annoying).

After Chris reported this, garry did not only decide to remove this exploitable command (which would be really sufficient to fix this issue), he also disabled the ability to write to subfolders (reading is still possible). The problem now is, that since Garry’s Mod has been released on steam (over 2 years ago) there have been many many many addons using the ability to write to subfolders. With this change, suddenly they become incompatible over night (those who used subfolders – And 90% of all addon which used the /data folder had their own subfolders in it)

Just some few addons, which are reall popular and now became useless:

• Advanced Duplicator: Saving of files will not work properly anymore. People will not be able to see that file.
• Expression Gate (Part of Wire): Same count’s for this. You are unable to save and load new files
• ULib/ULX: An admin mod. It’s now unable to save new bans as it could before (bans still work but all additional data such as “Reason” and “Banned by” in future bans will be unavailable)

This is just a short list (I don’t know all addons) and I did not list my own addons (SySLib,Stargates) which suffer from the same issue.

All over, this is the (let’s guess) third update by garry, which totally breaks addons for no reason just because he became hysteric about issues, which aren’t any (Just remember, when he removed the ability to change your name ingame with no reason – From that day, all RP Gamemodes got broken).

Well, what does that mean after all? Well, if he doesn’t reverts this change, I will quit GMod, including my Server and all my addons I did so far.

I know, there is a way to get something similar as before via binary modules, but this way is hacky.

Edit:

He fixed it.

There was an update again for the orangebox engine today with the following changes:

Orange Box Engine

• Fixed stats and achievements not working in Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Portal
• Fixed incompatibilities with MODs

This again rendered Garry’s Mod useless on the serverpart. People again were unable to join due to the “Invalid Steam Key Size” issue. The cause is, VALVE probably forgot to update the serverfiles too.

If this hasn’t been fixed yet (I’ve been busy the whole day), there is a temporal solution for serverhosters:

Open Steam on your client computer and go to steam/steamapps/<username>/garrysmod/bin and copy the files engine.dll and steam_api.dll to your server’s scrds/orangebox/bin folder. Make sure, you have shutdown srcds before.

Now people can join again.

Some of you may have noticed the issue of not being able to connect to gameservers due to Invalid Steam key size after the last update anymore with any of your OrangeBox games (Team Fortress 2,Day of Defeat:Source,Garry’s Mod,… and Left 4 Dead.

The reason is VALVE changed the way the SteamID is denoted, which was actually supposed to be a unique ID per steamaccount before (At least everyone thought this).

Before, mostly every ID started with STEAM_0:Y where X and Y are various numbers. Now it changed to STEAM_1:Y in the mentioned games above.

You may think, this is quite a tiny changed (which it actually is), but it has far reaching consequences, if you didn’t had a STEAM_1:Y ID before.

• If you own games, which do not run on the OrangeBox Engine, you now have two SteamIDs.
• Every ban on a server is purged.
• Every routine using SteamIDs is now obsolete. This includes Statistics, AdminMods and for Garry’s Mod even more: Here, SteamIDs are widely used for saving any kind of data per steamaccount. Such as various Wire stuff or Duplicator Copies (= savegames)
• Because of the issues above, serveradmins now have to change every steamid to STEAM_1:Y in order to make their server work as before. This is serious work!
• For those serveradmins who changed all the IDs already: We can’t be certain if VALVE changes this back again. So we get twie the work

So you see, the recent update was more like a fuckdate. We generally know this from other well known gamedevelopers (I’m not going to name now), but VALVE hasn’t made such a update yet, which renders much stuff incompatible just for bare arbitrary.

Edit:

I just got from here, it’s a bug and VALVE is going to fix it:

—–Original Message—–
From: hlds_linux-bounces (AT) list (DOT) valvesoftware.com
[mailto:hlds_linux-bounces (AT) list (DOT) valvesoftware.com] On Behalf Of Jason Ruymen
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 7:36 PM
To: Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list;
hlds_linux (AT) list (DOT) valvesoftware.com
Subject: [hlds_linux] Update coming for SteamID change

We’re hoping to have a fix for the SteamID change live within about an hour.
This will be an optional update.

Jason

Edit 2:

How expected, valve fixed it. Thank you!

The last days, I was testing the puddle jumper of Votekick and LightDemon I was coding on so I uploaded a modelpack for the folks of my server. Someone must have leaked these information so now every MingeBag on Facepunch knows and tries to join my server for “testing” the jumper. My server got filled up all slots, people spammed five billion jumpers and my server crashed again and again and again just because they used unfinished, beta software in a way it wasn’t supposed to be.

So the download is gone and I have shut down my server for at least one day.

Just for clarification:

• The jumper is on my server for me, and only me, testing it in multiplayer.
• The jumper is not meant for those kids “who can’t wait until it’s finished” for testing on my server. (Yes, even my other Admins/VIPs etc on my server should not use it)
• If you find a bug, don’t tell me. It’s unfinished software. It has bugs of course. I know all of them cause I’m quite using it much longer now (weeks) than you.
• And for all those people adding me on steam-friends: I reject now anyone of you. I got about 16 steam-friends invites in the last 6 days just because of the jumper.
• And last but not least: If I’m on my server, I generally don’t wanna talk about my work. It’s a gameserver, so I like to play there. Not talk.

I know I’m an asshole, but just get along with it.

Edit:

Server is up and running. Anyone now trying to spawn the jumper but me will be automatically slayed. So don’t dare just joining my server for a “sneak-preview”. Wait for a release.

This sounds strange but it’s the truth.
If you still remember my post about the lua garbage collector causing fps drops in Garry’s Mod every five minutes, you know what I’m talking about.

Now I asked garry if he took any review to this issue and he just answered the following:

It’s was an option between a constant smaller FPS drop or a periodic fps drop, I chose the periodic one.

So instead of running the garbage collector constantly in background, lowering the FPS from e.g. 250 to 230 (which is acceptable), he runs it periodically when there is too much garbage. Depending on installed lua addons, this can be every 5 minutes. Then your FPS drop from 250 to 5 – And that can take up to 10 seconds.

This is annoying and nearly made me stop playing Garry’s Mod. I don’t know why he thinks this is better, but he probably didn’t want to get the people with shitty PCs excluded from GMod (which he actually did with the Orange Box update, but this is another point).

So I see no real point why he did it. For me, I’ll still use my little fix which I have posted in the comments of my first rant about this issue. A public fix (downloadable for anyone) will follow too.

This video is basically one of the best Machinima I have ever seen yet. The story is consistent, funny and really wide range. I love to share it with you