Garry Newman is a video game developer based in the UK. He is best known as the owner of development studio Facepunch and games Garry's Mod and Rust.
A couple of months ago I was driving down a country road and came to a traffic light. It was red. I sat there for a couple of seconds.<br/><br/>A thought snapped into my mind. Why am I obeying the lights, why are they in control. There is no-one here. I can see for miles, I would know if anyone is coming. So why am I sitting here, obeying the lights? Because I've been told and taught that it's the…
Every now and then someone tells me that their child loves video games and wants to get into the game industry, then asks me how they do it. So here's a blog that I can paste a link to. 
 I don't know 
 I've got to say first of all that I don't know if I ever got into the game industry. It's my main job but I don't know how a real game studio works. I've never worked in a proper game…
When I was a kid my dad was always doing home improvements. Redecorating, moving a wall, replacing the doors, installing radiators, re-laying a driveway. <br/><br/>I remember this phrase he used. He'd have the water off, re-plumb a bunch of radiators, turn the water back on and there were leaks everywhere.. and then my mom would nag him that dinner was ready - and then he'd shout "<strong>I'M IN…
You know when people spend 2 years making games and when they release, they don't sell anything, so they stop selling it and throw it all in then bin..<br/><br/>What happens to all those sounds and models and animations they made? Do they just go in the bin?<br/><br/>I guess there's reasons they don't just slap an open license on them and release them for free. Like time, storage, bandwidth, and…
I spent fucking ages coding a whole cloud workflow to process videos on Azure Media Services. Like, a week or something, making it so when you uploaded a video it got turned into a thumbnail, a thumbnail video, and 3 different sized of video, then uploaded to our CDN. <br/><br/>I was really happy to get it working, I was really happy that I could press a button and re-process 300 videos within a…
You know what's weird. We've been making games in c for like half a century.. and there's still no consensus on Vector2, Vector3, Quaternion, Angles. Everyone re-makes these things for their own engine, or their own middleware. <br/><br/>Then when you use a middleware library for physics, or audio etc, you end up converting between their <strong>Vector3 </strong>and your <strong>Vector3</strong>.…
The handshake game is something that lives in my head as a reminder of how small the world is and how we're all connected within the brief time we're on it together. <br/> <br/>What you do is try to work out how many handshakes you are away from someone. So you pick someone, like King Charles, and then work out how many shakes you are away from them.<br/> <br/>For example, I met people at Valve,…
When I was in school, in the mid 90s, I got on the internet for the first time. Our school had one computer that had the internet. It was dial up. The computer was a mac, even though every other computer we used was a Windows PC.<br/><br/>This computer also had Encarta, which was an encyclopedia. We were amazed that it had really obscure things on it. Even though in retrospect those things aren't…
I thought it would die down, but I'm still getting a ton of dms, voicemails, emails and actual physical hand written letters about this.. so I thought it would be a good idea to present evidence to shut people up.<br/> 
 The Domain 
 There's a claim that the DMCA takedowns are fake because the domain isn't Nintendo's domain. the "-mm" on the end proves that its fake, because a Nintendo…
Something we've come across a few times at Facepunch, especially with artists, is that they want to use some software, and it seems useful so we pay for it. It's always super expensive and is always per user, and that's fine because it's worth the price.<br/><br/>So all the lawyers do their things, you sign the agreements, you're paying enough to buy a small house for this software for your team,…
I like doing scopes in c#. I like that pattern. I always used to write an IDisposable class for each scope.. but then I saw this pattern.<br/> 
 
 So how this works, is you can do something like this.. 
 
 Then in your normal every day code, you can scope push shit. 
 
Yesterday Unity announced that starting next year, all games that use their engine will pay a tax per user install. The tax has a high-profit threshold before it kicks in, which I think they assumed would make it okay.<br/><br/>Over the last 24 hours there have been many reasons pointed out why this is a bad idea. Tracking installs is messy. Piracy, reinstalls, new computers, giveaways, bad…
We moved offices this year. It's been a bit of an adventure. Our <a href="https://garry.net/posts/facepunch-bloxwich">old office in Bloxwich</a> was a convenient thing - it was close to our houses.<br/><br/>This new office is for the staff. It's in Birmingham City Center, right by the train station, right by hotels and restaurants and bars, which is all relatively close to an international…
We just got back from a two week family holiday in Mexico. It was a pretty good break. The resort was Moon Palace, which like 20 minutes away from the airport.<br/><br/>Before we flew out people started telling me how dangerous Mexico is. Linking me to news articles about tourists being murdered and stuffed in wardrobes by hotel staff. It made me wonder whether it was the right place to…
When I was a kid, making websites, you'd find some library that you wanted to use, then you'd either copy the .js file to your website or use a cdn host and add the .js to a &lt;script src&gt;on your webpage and you'd be using it. 
 It seems like now you find a library that you want to use and the expectation is that you're using npm. 
 Now let me just say, I get the point of npm.…
We have left out Bloxwich office and moved to Birmingham. We'd been there since about 2012. 
 We took this office because it was close to our houses. It was convenient. 
 It was originally a gym or something. They had mirrors on the walls. 
 
 
 Then we came in. 
 
 
 And turned it into our office.. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Then came our exit.…
We went to Finland just before Christmas. I meant to post about it a while back but I forgot that I had a blog. 
 Why 
 Going to Lapland is becoming a thing that brits do. It's like going to Spain was when I was growing up. It's turning into a bit of a tourist thing to do in winter, where traditionally you stayed at home. 
 The real answer is kids. You go to see where Santa is. Because…
I haven't done a mailbag for a long time, but this is a common enough question that I thought I'd explain my thinking here. This particular email was fair and level headed and I'm hoping that my posting it as a blog I can redirect future generations here. Hello, I played Garry's Mod for a couple thousand hours and yadda yadda you've heard all that before. Big fan. Just learned about s&box and I'm…
I did some reading on holiday. I read three game development related books as cased on recommendations from twitter . Here's some of my favourite quotes. Ask Iwata Not gonna lie, I didn't know who Satoru Iwata was before getting this book. When you're in the game industry a lot of the time it feels like you're expected to know everything about it. I don't know who anyone is. The short version is…
We're plan to move our office soon. We're going to be moving from Bloxwich to Birmingham. Right now it's just a big empty shell. So we're getting a firm to design and turn it into a real office. I haven't been to many game studio offices. In fact, I think I've only been to one.. and that's Valve's office. Their office design is nice and clean, nice contrast, industrial but warm. So I didn't really…
I like Blazor, and I like Razor and ASP stuff. I've been coding stuff in it for a while but I refuse to learn about their built in authorization APIs. I come from the world of PHP where cookie/session management was always really handled manually, so I always feel more comfortable handling all this myself. So here's how I do my own access control without using their whole AuthorizeRouteView stuff,…
Why did he need a share in the company to access the patent, aren't they all open and freely available? How can you be granted a patent that isn't explained in any way? Was he really controlling atoms with a Casio keyboard wtf If the first alien has this second powerful company, with people running around doing his bidding, why didn't he offer the scientist woman a job and do it all himself? Why…
You know, I rag on Unity a lot. They've made a lot of mistakes. Deprecating features while the replacement isn't ready. Creating multiple new implementations of features from scratch instead of improving what's there. Abandoning their own features in favour of acquiring community made versions, and then abandoning them. Splitting the whole render system into two incompatible, contrary versions,…
I got a 3D printer. I never saw the point before.. because from what I've seen people mainly use them to print little figurines and whistles off.. and while that's cool.. I always think you might as well just buy them from Amazon.. it's cheaper and easier. I printed a whistle I always liked making stuff. Manufacturing is something I'm always amazed by. The design work and the processes to create…
You might remember Foszor from the GMod community a while back. Like, 13 years back or something. His game Zinger came second in the fretta game contest we did in about 2010. I was really sad to hear that he'd passed away a couple of months ago. I was even sadder to read that he leaves behind his wife and two young kids . Back during my main development period of Garry's Mod I'd speak to Foszor…
Quick follow up to My Tesla Broke . It's now fixed and back at home, so about a month and a half in the end. They changed the HV and the 12v battery. Spotify A funny thing is that I knew they had started fixing it. My spotify kept stopping, and when I looked into it, it showed that it was playing in my car. This was the first time it'd done that since I sent it in. After that, in the app I could…
I've had my Model 3 for less than 6 months, and I've put about 500 miles on it. When I came off holiday I got in it at the airport and it had a buttload of errors.. I googled the errors and the common theme seemed to be the whole battery pack replaced.. not something you can reboot the car and fix. So I put it in for service. They didn't have any courtesy cars so they arranged for a taxi for me…
Having used Steam nearly every day for 19 years, both as a developer and a gamer, there are a few things that annoy me. These things have become more apparent since I've had kids and other game launchers have come out. Friend Requests I'm sure normal people don't have this problem, but people add me to their friends list all the time. So for the last 5 years or so I've regularly gone in and…
Game Idea Every game starts with an idea. The best game idea is the one that's popular right now. Get a list of games up, order by the number of concurrent players and make a game like that first one. Yes, that game was made by 500 people, over the course of 6 years, but they already did that work. They worked out what works and doesn't work. You don't need to do that work again so it's a million…
A big part of s&box is calling c++ from c#, and calling c# from c++. So while that's easy enough to do manually for a few functions, using DllImport and all that noise, it's not really that feasible with the amount of stuff we want to bind. Plus there's downsides to DllImport. The automatic marshalling can be really sub-optimal. When doing this stuff with a game engine everything counts.. so you…
I've had a frozen shoulder for about a year. For the longest time I was unable to lift my arm higher than shoulder height. I couldn't put my coat on properly because I couldn't bend my arm backwards enough to get it in the arm hole. Worst of it all is that I did this to myself. Whenever you google what causes frozen shoulders, it always says that no-one knows, it just happens, and it's mostly…
There s something that has started happening over the last few years that annoys the shit out of me. We went to Dubai last week on holiday. So while we were there we went up the Burj Kalifa, the tallest building in the world. We went as high as you could go, the 154th floor. Up the top there are photographers. You sit down with your family, they say do this with your arms, look suprised, point at…
When we advertise for jobs we get a lot of applications. It can be frustrating to go through job applications and to be honest I really hate it, but I love finding new talented people to work with so I do it. We don t have a job application email address now because they are frustrating to go through. It s easy to be flippant and annoyed, but each application is a person aspiring to move forward…
Someone asked me a while back where I get my motivation. It s spite. Garry s Mod I d have probably lost interest in Garry s Mod within a couple of weeks. There was one thing that drove me forward. It was called HL2World. It had a forum full of people that hated me and hated GMod. They were big fans of another mod called JBMod and were pretty militant about it. So a lot of my motivation came from…
Me and Sarah got married this year, finally, after 11 years together. I’ve stopped blogging as much as I used to, because it’s hard to believe that anyone gives a fuck, but I’ve documented every other major relationship event here, so I should probably do this too. I used to be militant against marriage. I find it hard to remember exactly why now. I think it was something about how everyone just…
Palm Spings Like groundhog day. We liked it a lot. Ted Lasso American guy comes to England to coach a premier league football team. We like it a lot. Future Man Really enjoyed it. Wolf s love of cooking makes it. Extra Ordinary Enjoyed, especially when he morphed into his wife. Flipped Watched 3 episodes and had enough. Police Academy Bought to watch with the kids. Way more blowjobs than I…
About 6 years ago, just before Alex was born we decided that our house wasn t big enough. So after looking at a few houses I decided that none of them were really big enough for us and it s be better to buy a cheapish one and renovate it. So we bought one that was equidistant to our parents houses (I would have preferred to move in the middle of the countryside with no neighbours for miles but…
Let me preface this by saying that the house is awesome. I ve got a special ability to find things that are wrong. I m not a big moaner but I was very aware that we had a limited time to pick up on stuff and get them fixed. Also keep in mind that this is only the stuff I m aware of. Here s a list of fuckups. BEFORE MOVING IN Cracked mirror while installing light fitting. The electrician did this 3…
A couple of times we ve been watching a movie in my cinema and the sound has cut out. The first time this happened was during a pivotal scene in The Martian, when the sound was really loud. We kept watching because we thought it was an artistic decision in the movie, to just drop it to completely silent to ramp up the tension. I set a PC up to play games in there a few weeks back. I noticed a…
They hurt when I stand up after sitting down for a while or when I get out of bed. After a minute they stretched out and are like normal feet. I only realised recently how fucked they are, before that I thought it was something that affected everyone. I think they ve slowly got worse over the last few years and now they re to the point where the doorbell goes and I m struggling to get to the door…
Developer QOL When I added Lua to Garry’s Mod my intention wasn’t primarily to make things moddable. I wanted to make things easier for myself. By wrapping a few functions and coding in Lua I could iterate a million times faster. I didn’t have to close, compile and re-open every time, while also hiding all the bullshit and hard stuff. Unity was about that when we first started with it. They hid…
It s weird seeing people struggle with being home all the time. Climbing the walls, bored out of their head, willing to risk the lives of their loved ones just to be in the presence of other humans. This is my dream existence. I don t have to go anywhere, I don t have to see anyone, delivery guys leave stuff on the doorstep and walk away. Cancellations Every few days something pops up in my…
So I haven’t finished HLA yet. According to Steam I’ve played it for 6 hours so far, so here’s what I think. Fan Boy Despite making Garry’s Mod and knowing pretty much everything about Half-Life 2, I wouldn’t consider myself a Half-Life universe fanboy. I enjoyed the story less as it went on. There are things that interest me, mostly the human side, the displaced and downtrodden people. The…
We re having a problem with our Rust HDRP branch where it imports forever. We had log files on our build server that were 30gb. The problem comes when you want to find out why they re so massive. You can search for an app to install to do it, but surely Windows should be able to do this itself? It s 2020. Log Folder Your editor log folder is probably in…
Alex is 6 years old. His birth (which I documented here ) feels way longer ago than 6 years. He s old enough now that he has his own special interests. He loves video games. Any time he comes in my office to tell me something, he stops mid-sentence and gawps with his mouth open at my monitor before asking me what I m doing. Recently he s got into Minecraft. Hugely into it. To the point where we re…
I love the idea of Blazor . Getting rid of Javascript and using C# for everything, what s not to love. Well after trying it for a couple of projects, here s everything that is wrong right now. 1. Google Google doesn t index Blazor sites. It doesn t load the webassembly. It only parses what s on the page before the webassembly loads. You could liken this to sites running VueJs but you shouldn t…
In a previous post I talked about Control4 and mentioned that you can jailbreak it. This lets you do things like add/delete/rename rooms and add/delete/rename devices. Things you d probably expect to be able to do anyway. That process was kind of hard and there was a lot of misinformation when you searched, which made it even harder. So I took a few hours to find out how it all worked, then a few…
We have a pretty neat system for Benchmarking Rust. Every commit triggers an automated build The build is uploaded to Steam Our benchmark PCs constantly update from Steam ..and run a bunch of benchmark tests This means that for most changesets in our source control we have a benchmark that ran. The big idea being that we can track performance between changesets automatically. Results View I made a…
Control4 came out with a new modern looking remote.. Compared Compared to the older one it s much lighter and smaller. It feels nice to hold, lot more modern. I didn t really realise how massive the old one was until I got this one. I remember feeling that way the first time I got it like what is this big black 80s brick. But I d got used to it. Setup You don t need a dealer to install it for you.…