The New Gmod
You may remember certain posts in which my friends and I seemed to enter a different world. There, we were ‘associates,’ we were ‘colleagues,’ and we were scientists. There, we worked with sober enthusiasm on projects which can only be described as utter madness. The three of us ventured to the inky depths of an endless sea, over impossibly flat plains, beneath surreal mountains, into the equally inky – nay, inkier – depths of deep space, experimented with mind-bending, reason-defying devices and, in all of these pursuits, died. We died quite frequently, but that never slowed us down.
This world is Garry’s Mod – the physics sandbox in which the imaginations of nerds such as myself can run absolutely wild. The community has suported this mod so strongly that there is almost nothing conceivable that one cannot build. The only limitation besides one’s own talent, patience, skill and vision is the power of one’s PC. So many adventures have been had in Gmod that I consider it a facet of my own life.
Well, I abandoned it a little while ago. Thoughts of thruster calibration and weight adjustment on hovercrafts were taking up brain-time which I ought to have been devoting to schoolwork. I set Gmod aside, I forgot about it, and thankfully was able to invest my interest in school. Well, finals week is creeping up, and for the first time in a long time I cracked Steam open and loaded it up. You see, I’d known that when my friends and I got together this summer, Gmod would be on the agenda. I also knew that Gmod 11, using the improved Source engine packaged in Orange Box games, would vastly improve my performance as a host. I decided to get my hands on that engine ahead of time, and so I did.
What I didn’t expect was that, in the process of simply installing and ‘testing’ this game, I’d get sucked in with such incredible force. I’ve only put a few hours total into Gmod since the long hiatus, but have already discovered how to import VMF files from Hammer. (Suffice it to say, I’d spent months last semester trying to figure that out.) I’ve also begun taking a serious interest in airships and creating custom props (for use in airships). Here’s my first VMF import:
Lads and ladies, I am going to need to break this habit now, and for two weeks. There’s so much left to explore in Gmod that I am truly ashamed for feeling as if the life was running out of it – but I can’t focus on that right now. I’ve got all of my finals right in front of me. Come on, self, you need to stop thinking about the ideal design for an airship propeller and start writing that term paper…
