I've been tooling around in the Garry's Mod 13 beta, with some mixed feelings on the update and added enhancements. For once the UI is given some attention this time around, using more stylized menus that separate themselves from the default Source Engine 2 UI. Unfortunately the UX does not transition as well, with elements randomly dropping out of the rendering queue, textures not being referenced properly, or with buttons rendering over others.Â
With the update many popular game modes that have been created over the years are now considered broken due to code base optimizations. For the die-hard Garry's Mod enthusiast it leaves a bit of a sour taste seeing your favorite zombie construction survival mode being destroyed by a client update. Fortunately users are working hard at converting compatible game modes for the latest beta. There are good things coming along with this update, don't get me wrong. Changes have been made to the physics gun that allow for more refined adjustments, a huge plus that used to require a modification to achieve. The snappiness of the spawn and context menus seems to be enhanced as well, preventing the hangs of old that would accompany browsing a prop folder without pre-rendered icons. I should also mention that the shadows in Garry's Mod 13 look signifigantly better than those in previous gmod releases. Did I forget to mention the Poster command? Open your console (~) and type "poster x" with 'x' being a multiple of your monitors resolution. With the right amount of memory you can create images large enough for higher-end printing or photo manipulation.. just know that the feature, like the rest of the beta is experimental. You can see how stitching failed when combined with the quick depth of field plugin, and as of now there is no support for the advanced depth of field plugin. Overall I'm excited about this release. Better stability, a more noob-friendly interface, tight integration into the Steam Workshop, all tied up with effortless add-on installation. Forget the Toybox folks, this is the future of GMOD.
