Source 2013 mod patches dilemma. blog - malortie

Context

In 2013, Valve introduced a new community content
delievery system, which allowed for an easier way for
content creators to deliver and receive criticism from the
community. This introduced a new section called Workshop
on many game pages, from which players can subscribe
and download addons, models, etc...

Among those games were Valve's proprietary games such
as Half-Life 2, CSS (Counter Strike Source),
Left 4 Dead, and of course TF2 (Team fortress 2).

When Source based games received the update, the mounting
mechanism was changed for those games. Since many mods
require custom content from various base games such as
HL2 episodic games, many stopped functioning
correctly, to the point of being unlaunchable.

Along the years, the community tried to fix source mods
at it's best and many people came up with simple solutions
such as modifying the 'gameinfo.txt' and replace it with
the one from the Source 2013 edition. This solution is
not ideal, specially for mods with custom compiled code.

This is when I started (late 2015) to release patches
to emulate original mods, using compiled code I
recompiled from Source 2013's code base. My solution
was to port the Source engine mods to the 2013
edition. After an entire year, I presume that this
has been benefical to many players, (44000+ downloads)

In pre-2016, I wrote another blog, which can be read here.

From this point, we continue here.

Dilemma

It has been around a year since I announced anything
so I believe it would be the time to inform people
who have been watching my blogs for future Source mod
patches.

First of all, studies are going well and advancing.
There is not much left to do. Therefore, I am
expecting to find work soon, this is as of my
current real life situation, as explained in my
previous blog 'Important announcement'.

Secondly, as for modding using the Source engine, I cannot
say the same - About a month ago, Microsoft removed the 2013
community version of Visual Studio, the tool that was used
to compile the (.DLL) modules to make patches work with
the singleplayer Source SDK Base 2013 version. Newer versions
of Visual Studio such as 2015 or 2017 (RC) do not support building
this SDK. In other words, fixing mods using the traditional
method is, unfortunately, no longer a mean in the problem.

Thirdly, the only way I see possible for remaining mods and or
mods still in need of a fix, would be to port them over
Facepunch's Garry's Mod. Garry's mod is a sandbox game based on
a modified version of Source. It's use of the LUA programming
language (which I know) could potentially represent a way
to fix mods, as it allows custom entities to be implemented,
which could be used to emulate entities present in custom
Source mods game code.

I understand the disappointment for many, including myself.
This possibly puts moral down for many people, and I wish
things would have turned differently.

Lately, I have been asking myself, if an attempt to port
the majority of the mods to Garry's mod would be worth the
amount of work, considering the decreasing amount of players
in the Source modding community. In addition to this, even
if I manage to port those, Garry's mod will probably end
up losing support from Facepunch, which would have me remaking
these ports countless times. Dilemma.

Sincerely,
malortie.