It’s an uncommon question we get but one I think that’s worth answering (mostly so I can point people here). What do you do all day? Why haven’t you done <x> yet?

The general short existential answer is: we try to exist. [BB] isn’t ran as a profitable enterprise so we don’t really have a motive from an income point of view to work on things and we do have lives (unfortunately) that exist outside of [BB]. Instead we generally try to work on things that interest us, or things that we think generally will interest a large subset of players.

In more depth however, our setup over the years has drastically changed and what seems like an almost seamless experience for players is actually a lot of systems at work behind the scenes. Over a decade ago the majority of servers in Garry’s Mod were just a single srcds instance running a gamemode. For the vast majority of communities that exist today that’s still likely to be the case but for [BB] we’ve got an incredible amount of subsystems at play. Sometimes you see us talking about these, like we might mention the “API” or something about FastDL, but as a player those are all just baked in right?

It turns out, we run a whole bunch of systems

And the below image is just a sample of them. Almost none of them actually even run on the gameservers themselves, even if they do talk back and forwards!

All of the above systems in some way shape or form, play or have played pivotal moments within [BB]’s lifespan and if they’re still in any sort of active use, usually receive some form of maintenance; be that a bug fix, a library update, a feature request, or just a general update to keep them in line with the rest of the systems.

Something that Admins often see but the average player doesn’t, is in Discord we have a channel which fires a message every time a commit is made to any of our repositories. I feel bad for our admins as it can get a bit noisy 🥲, though it does allow Admins to provide feedback if something catches their eye and they want to talk about it.

Essentially the point that I’m trying to make is that even if things aren’t being changed in a very obvious or way that is noticable to a player, it doesn’t mean that things aren’t happening in the background somewhere. It may just mean that our focus or attention is on something which does help the community and playerbase - just not in a way that is immediately tangible.

Okay, but why can’t you give me a date for <x>? Why don’t you just work on it when I suggest these things?

Generally speaking, there’s usually a list of concerns in the pipeline of things that are being worked on. Sometimes certain features and ideas are planned out months in advance. Sometimes they’re time-limited and we need to pounce on them so we’re always shuffling and trying to re-prioritise where it makes sense. Some of you have great ideas or points, though often we circle back to them a few days or even weeks later when they become relevant or there’s room on the radar. I appreciate it can have the appearance of we forgot it and we’ve suddenly come back to it like a bad smell, but it’s usually just a case of timing and dealing with events as they come up.

On a related note, I always recommend people suggest ideas either on our forums or on the ideas / issues GitHub repository. Sometimes it can take a while for things to be actioned (or we may reject them) but it’s honestly the best place visibility-wise for us to see your gameplay suggestions / issues. It also allows us to tie them to internal tracking so we can manage them better.

Hopefully that gives people an idea just how many cogs are turning at [BB] to give you a smooth experience. We’re not always the fastest, but we hope that whatever we do, we do it well.