Episode 1 - When Mad Max met Gary
by Hoffa
2015 - The Beginning
Back in late 2015 I was working on the NeuroMicro mod for Garry's Mod and as I started to get a bit burned out working on that project I decided to give car physics another attempt.
Mad Max had just been released and I wanted something like that but in multiplayer. My sandbox of choice for prototyping game ideas was Garry's Mod since Lua lets you do anything you can imagine with little effort.
Considering how janky the default Source Engine vehicles were and how unfun they are to drive I decided that I wanted to build a completely new framework for doing all kinds of wheeled vehicles that could be customized and tuned without having to edit random text files from Source.
Rigging vehicles in Source is a pain in the ass and very time consuming compared to the amount of fun actually driving them.
2016 - The Mod
After roughly three months of work we launched https://rustracers.xyz/ most likely the first "Gamemode as a Service" for Gmod. (Note the website hasn't been maintained for 5+ years so the SSL cert is expired at times)
Since the Gamemode for Rust Racers required access to our database Aftokinito ended up building a server orchestration system for deploying Source Dedicated Servers on demand as players queued up to play on the website. An early version of GameLift you could say.
We created a lobby system that allowed players invite their friends and team up before starting a match and using the steam browser protocol we could send players into a match directly from the website.
Tune in for the next episode where we take a look at what 2017 had in store for it.
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// Hoffa @ Nethash Games