Read me before JBModding

[Snakez]

A lot of people like to compare JBMod to Gmod. If that's what you're expecting, prepare to be let down.

JBMod was the first code-based mod for Half-Life 2. Ever.
The initial Steam release is almost the exact same as the last version to ever be released.
So you're playing a game that's about 18 years old and hasn't been updated at all.

It was created on the now-defunct HL2World, a community that gained fame before the official release of Half-Life 2 as one of the only places on the internet that didn't ban you for discussing the stolen/leaked game.
This caused the site to become a central hub for modding, with community members creating maps, models, etc before the game was even officially released.

JBMod brought back the physgun from the Half-Life 2 leak. If you weren't a gamer in 2003 and 2004 you might not know that physics based games didn't really exist at the time. Half-Life 2 was the first game to have physics as part of its main gameplay and was responsible for changing how games are created today.

Its main purpose is just to screw around with physics. It was a highly community driven mod, not having much functionality by itself unless you're savvy with console commands.
Community maps that add spawners and things to play with are the entire basis of the mod.

JBMod is being released on Steam to immortalize the mod since the original version isn't playable anymore. It's not here to compete with anything else.

[Snakez]

Why now?

This marks the 10 year anniversary of the last YouTube video I put out back in October 2012.
It also marks approximately 10 years since JBMod was unjustly removed from Greenlight[www.jbmod.com]. That was in August 2012. It lasted a whopping 90 minutes before getting removed. I'm still waiting on an actual explanation by the way so to Valve: you might want to check your support ticket backlog.
10 years is a nice round number so it seemed like a better time than ever.

Really though it came down a few things:

First - Nostalgia. If you weren't into gaming back then you'll probably never understand the appeal of it, but Half-Life 2 was one of the first games ever to have a major focus on physics. The graphics were state of the art. The idea of just screwing around with physics, building ramps to drive on or making crazy contraptions with physics is just something you couldn't really get anywhere else at the time.
The JBMod dev team often compared it to the Tribes 2 construct mod or the Half-Life 1 entmod but with physics. For what it's worth Tribes 2 construct came out a few years earlier in 2001-2002 and still has a much better welding system than JBMod ever will. It's what we wished we could be.
The original JBMod doesn't work anymore since it was just a couple of files that you copied to your Half-Life 2 folder. Steam didn't even support launching mods back then. You had to use shortcuts or the command line to play.
By shipping a game with a self-contained engine, it will be immortalized forever so we can all play it 20 years from now and remember how terrible it was.

Second - There's still a surprising amount of interest for JBMod. The website and YouTube channel still get pretty steady traffic for something that came out 18 years ago.
By giving people something they can play without having to find an ancient version of Half-Life 2 maybe they'll have fun like we did or maybe they'll think it sucks. Who knows, at least it'll be out there.

OMG is this going to have ______?

Probably not.
This shouldn't be a surprise since it was mentioned on the store page but the initial release is literally the same thing we had in 2004.
At some point in the past two decades I added cubemaps to the default map but that's about it.
It's still the old JBMod. It's still single player only by default. You still spawn things and freeze them using the console. Multiplayer still has an untextured player model with weapons for ♥♥♥♥♥. Welding is still terrible and will make you ragequit.

99% of you will hate it. Maybe the 1% that likes messing around with console commands might have fun.

What about features announced for JBMod 0.6 or JBMod 3.0?

JBMod 3.0 isn't actually coming to the Playstation Store, sorry to disappoint.
Anything that was announced for JBMod 0.6 probably exists somewhere. But we had 4 or 5 coders and no central repository. We just shared links to files hosted on our personal websites. I definitely don't have a copy of everything anymore, I don't know if anyone else does.
I'll be merging in my old code and put it up on a beta branch soon(tm). Things like Mono scripting will be pulled out for now since there are 20 years of security best practices to catch up on and Workshop is scary.
If more than one person still has this installed a week from now maybe we'll look at adding new features.