Fretta Gamemode Base

[Dog]

In this article I'll be reviewing the progress on Fretta and answer perhaps unanswered questions. For those who don't read Garry's blog and don't visit the Lua forums on Facepunch a lot, I'll briefly explain what Fretta is and what it does.

Introduction

Garry came up with Fretta earlier this year when he discovered Rambo's Simple Gamemode Base. Fretta means hurry in Italian and that's directly related to its goal. Originally, Garry wanted to include the gamemode base in Garry's Mod, but after looking at the code, they considered it was better to rewrite the gamemode from scratch.

So, what's Fretta's main goals? There's two main goals which both improve the efficiency of gamemodes:

• Making the creation of gamemodes more attractive by making it easier and quicker to do
• Elevate gamemode collections on servers to the same level as swep collections

Getting rid of the idea of dedicating a server to a single gamemode

Instead of dedicating a server to one gamemode, a server admin can add multiple gamemodes to his server and let the users vote themselves which gamemode they want to play. The way it works is very similar to things like votemap in Counter-Strike: Source. The only downside is that existing gamemodes need to be (partly) rewritten to derive from Fretta, otherwise they won't be included in the list.

Here's what the voting looks like:



The smilies move in real time and you can hover over them to see who voted for what. Pretty cool just to see it in action sometime!

Making gamemode development easier

If you've ever made a gamemode yourself (or tried to make one), you probably figured that there should be a lot more hooks/functions included by default. Fretta's aim is to take care of just that. Fretta makes especially things like round-based gamemodes and team/class managing a lot easier. Here's a part of a shared.lua file which describes how the gamemode is set up:

GM.Help = "Shoot the other team!"
GM.TeamBased = true
GM.AllowAutoTeam = true
GM.AllowSpectating = true
GM.SelectClass = false
GM.SecondsBetweenTeamSwitches = 10
GM.GameLength = 10
GM.NoPlayerDamage = false
GM.NoPlayerSelfDamage = false
GM.NoPlayerTeamDamage = true
GM.NoPlayerPlayerDamage = false
GM.NoNonPlayerPlayerDamage = false

You also get this awesome new scoreboard with it for free:



List of gamemodes currently derived from Fretta

• Bombtag
• Build to the top
• Capture the Flag
• Dodgeball
• Fortwars
• Freezetag
• Garry Ware
• Garry's Mod Deathmatch
• Grand Theft Auto
• Hide and Seek
• Knockback
• King of the Hill
• Laser Dance
• Mutant
• Plane Crazy
• Poltergeist
• Sniper Wars
• Suicide Barrels
• Tactical Police Cops
• Zombie Onslaught

At the moment most gamemodes are remakes of non-Fretta versions, but as always, the truly original work follows when everything has been redone.

Progress and other Garry's Mod changes

If you've been following this project for a while, you may have some unanswered questions. I'd like to end with a little interview which hopefully answers a few of your questions!

• What caused you to start working on Fretta?
  Rambo's Simple Gamemode mostly.
  I originally wanted to take his gamemode and put it in GMod
  but after looking at the code, I thought we would be better off doing it from scratch
  so we did.
• What was/is the involvement of Rambo_6?
  Rambo's a contributor to it, along with SteveUK, and a couple of other people are doing gamemodes.
• Will the gamemodes included in the beta make it to the final update?
  Yeah, some will. I'm hoping to throw a ****load of them at the server then run some kind of poll or something, asking people which ones they like the most and what should be included with GMod.
• How long do you think it'll take before Fretta is included with the release version?
  How long is a piece of string. I think it's kind of ready now.. but I've found that it's good to let things stew for a while before setting them in stone (which is what releasing kind of does - as people don't like you changing things under their feet)
• Will you look into adding modules like renderx, gm_chrome and gm_guardian?
  I'm totally open to this kind of stuff. If the authors of any of these things want anything included and they have code I can just throw in GMod, just shoot me an email and we'll talk about it.
• What do you think of the gamemodes currently developed with Fretta as a base?
  So far so good. There seems to be a habit with gamemode developers to just copy and recreate though. Not a whole lot of innovation. But I'm not too worried about that - the innovation usually comes after everything else has been done.
• Is there any other big stuff you want to do after Fretta?
  I can't think of anything. The next big thing will be when EP3 comes out I think. But I don't know anything about that yet.
• What is your opinion on switching to the L4D engine?
  Can't see it happening, ever.</b>
• Do you think you could ever say GMod is finished?
  It'll only be truly finished when it stops selling and no-one is playing.

Wow, this seems awesome!

You can currently test it in two ways. You either pick up the Garry's Mod beta from the SVN or just join the Facepunch test server right away! If you choose the latter however, you might miss some features or get some error messages. For more information, read the thread![...]

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