In #developer-talk, Nak explained his navigation system to Zemen. It runs a double A* search from start to goal and from goal to start, meeting in the middle ("a trick GPS use"). The search tracks polygon entry points, and the system reads the map's AIN info_nodes. NPCs such as the 200 antlions in his video run a "dumb" AI while waiting for a path, so they seem to react immediately.

In #developer-talk, Asphaltian posted the v0.2.0 release of VPhysics-Box3D. Earlier, on 16 Oct, BlueShank had argued that Box3D deviates too much from vphysics to be a drop-in replacement.

In #developer-talk, Retcon shared a komstation article about his mod, a Garry's Mod-style sandbox for the PSP.

In #next-update, Redox reported that voice still randomly breaks on the 64-bit dev branch (build 10205 from 16 Oct). A fullupdate doesn't fix it, and snd_restart fixes it only temporarily.

In #next-update, Evgeny Akabenko asked Rubat to publish on GitHub the source of GMod's own, non-Valve shaders: g_bloom, g_blurx, g_blury, g_bokehblur, g_colormodify, g_downsample, g_morph, g_premultiplied, g_refract, g_screenspace, g_sharpen, g_sky, g_sobel, g_sunbeams and g_texturize. not.ejay noted they could already be decompiled half decently with vcs-decompiler, but saw no reason not to publish them.

In #next-update, a straight white male criticized the warning shown every time a player fails to spawn a prop, entity or weapon (from a commit on 28.08), arguing that the failed spawn is indication enough and that servers run prop placement scripts. Albino said it pops up even with tips turned off. Later the same day, a straight white male added that the code calls the popup with GAMEMODE:AddNotify with no checks.

In #next-update, Cynthia listed functions missing from the menu state on dev: Angle, CreateMaterial, GetLoadPanel, HTTP, http, LerpAngle, LerpVector, OrderVectors, UpdateLoadPanel and Vector. Rubat confirmed it and said the change wasn't silent: the changelog states "Remove some unused libs from menu state". He added that the wiki shouldn't list menu state functions at all, since the menu state isn't meant for modding. On GitHub, kila58's issue "CreateMaterial missing from menu state" was closed as not planned.

In #developer-talk, Callum showed GMod's main menu fully recreated with VGUI. He said VGUI will always be a little slower but it's fine for a main menu: about 300 FPS on the DarkRP server list versus 500 with HTML. Akiko noted that one upside of the HTML menu is it immediately shows when the HTML backend is broken.

In #developer-talk, mage.tearz noticed that updated content addons no longer ship .sw.vtx files because gmad blacklists them, and the server console shows missing .vtx errors. Redox explained that .sw.vtx isn't used by GMod, which is why it's blacklisted. Astralcircle asked for .dx80.vtx to be blacklisted too; WinterPhoenix replied the counter-argument will be RTX Remix.

In #lua-help, full metal sergeant 228 asked whether there's a better way to do controllable textures, since he heard the default matproxy library is very slow, and noted LVS creates a material per entity. Artemking4 suggested instancing a material per usage from a base material and changing only what's needed. Asked by TankNut how slow matproxy must be for that to be the alternative, he said creating materials is "dirt cheap" because they are just containers for shader inputs.

In #developer-talk, Nak showed his LuaOS running DOOM at decent resolution with sound. A JIT-friendly self-patching block cache took it from 0.9M to 8M instructions per second; later a GTA beta loaded.

In #lua-help, 0d9b reported that util.JSONToTable turns strings that look like vectors into vectors even when called with ignoreConversions set to true. He asked whether this is intended, calling a JSON parser that mangles the output without an option to keep the original values "a bit useless for... parsing json". Artemking4 said he prefers MessagePack.

In #developer-talk, TankNut described problems with his physics-driven mech: movement is unpredicted, so multiplayer feels slow, and hook order breaks things because the mech moves in PhysicsUpdate after its turrets update in PlayerPostThink/Think. He added that the biggest problem in recreating player movement is that Lua has no equivalent of entity->PhysicsImpact, though ApplyForceOffset might be enough. He later said it may matter less, since it seems to be only for touch-related things.

In #next-update, Vitroze reported that PANEL:OnMousePressed now always calling MouseCapture breaks VGUI addons such as GmodAdminSuite. Rubat called it an issue with the mod but asked for a repro. Commit bb557c fixed the regression and Vitroze thanked him.

In #developer-talk, Nak released a NikNaks version with BSP physics parsing (not on the Workshop yet). Later he said BSP parsing is up to ~2x faster, BitBuffer 2–3x and mesh generation 3–5x.

In #next-update, Earu asked why fading static props stop writing depth while they fade out. Artemking4 and Evgeny Akabenko explained that fading props are moved to the translucent pass, and translucent objects don't write depth. In the evening discussion, Rubat asked why transparent props would write depth at all, and said alpha testing is irrelevant for fadeouts. Earu said he would remove his issue. Evgeny Akabenko and Earu then discussed dithered fades combined with TAA.

In #next-update, TheSoulClock said the new x86-64 branch crashes his low-end laptop every time he joins a big server; Rubat said crash logs would be needed to do anything about it. Nykez said a Mac user of his started crashing on load, and WinterPhoenix suspected (not yet verified) a render.Capture crash on x86-64 Linux.

In #developer-talk, Astralcircle's game ran out of memory around poster 10 while making a huge map overview. Rubat pointed out that poster can leave the tiles uncombined via its second argument. Astralcircle then made a 20k screenshot of gm_construct.

In #developer-talk, Harry said he multithreaded SV_ComputeClientPacks, increasing performance by over 50% and running a solid 64 tick with 128 players. He is looking into going past 128 players; he expects the entity limit to be the main problem, since it can't be raised without client changes.