It's been quite a bit of time since our last news post, so not only do you get a development roundup, but some other related news spliced in as well!





Metamod:Source stable branch (1.10)



Not much exciting is going on with development of the stable branch of MM:S. However, like SM about 1.5 years ago, MM:S is now officially on a rolling release cycle as of two days ago.



There will be no more "final" releases of MM:S. As with SM, people looking to update their servers after a breaking game update would often grab the latest release rather than a snapshot build, not realizing that they might need something a bit more fresh. In addition to now avoiding that confusion with MM:S, we've also revamped its builds download page, adding similar revision information and source links to what you see on the SM builds download page, and adding support for HTTPS to all downloads.





SourceMod stable branch (1.8)



Similar to the stable branch of MM:S, there's nothing too exciting going on with this. We're continuing to provide many, many game compatibility updates as needed, including updated gamedata files. Additionally, multiple bugfixes have made their way in since this was tagged as the new stable branch a bit over a year ago.



On the note of bug fixes, after weighing the pros and cons, we've decided to switch to GitHub Issues moving forward for future bug reports and feature requests for SourceMod. While this requires users to have a GitHub account to report an issue, many didn't know that the previous bug tracker existed, let alone that they could log in with their forum credentials. (It also unintuitively took forum email address, rather than username). There are numerous stagnant issues there, many that are no longer relevant or that have just been requiring more information for years. This will give us a fresh start. The old tracker is still available, but set to no longer accept new SM bug reports. As before, it will not be for general support or help. The forums are better suited for that.





Metamod:Source development branch (1.11)



Some highlights:

Added support for compiling on newer toolchains, such as Visual Studio 2015 and 2017 on Windows.



Removed the old v1.4 plugin API.



Added v1.6 API support for "ep1" games (The Ship and Source SDK 2006 mods).



Re-added support for Dota 2. (This includes initial support for Source2 and x64 dedicated servers!).



On the note of Source2, there has been some stir lately due to rumors that CS:GO will be ported to it in the future. That obviously solicited many questions from people, wondering if SourceMod would continue to work with it.



While we don't foresee CS:GO moving to it anytime soon, having MM:S work on the newer engine was the first step and had been in the works for over a year. There are now four Source2 releases, but Dota 2 is the only multiplayer one, and is more lobby-based than relying on dedicated servers. That's part of the reason that it's a bit too early to say what SourceMod's fate will be on Source2. On the server side, the differences are somewhere between jumping from an older Source variant to a newer one, and the jump from GoldSrc to Source. And similarly to when Source debuted, there is no SDK; we're flying blind.



We've not settled on anything yet, but one of the following three approaches is likely.

Add Source2 support to SourceMod. Some whole sets of API just won't work on Source2 or may act a bit differently. Some new Source2-exclusive ones would be added. Our code would become (more of) a mess, but scripts that don't rely on engine functionality would continue to work as-is. Many scripts would still need to be updated.



Create one or more new MM:S plugins that just extend the VScript scripting API that already exists in the engine, exposing an admin API and whatever other functionality is missing. No existing scripts would work, but the base of the scripting API is a first-class citizen and would have a much smaller chance of breaking with a game update, as Valve would be maintaining the bulk of it.



Create "Source2Mod", porting SourceMod to Source2, dropping support for Source(1) in that copy. Clean up APIs and make Source2 a first-class citizen. The majority of scripts would break, but the familiar SourcePawn language and non-engine APIs would stay the same.





We're not necessarily asking for input yet, just sharing some ideas we're tossing around. They involve differing amounts of work required, and we still have plenty of reverse-engineering left to do to figure out the full extent of what we can do.





SourceMod development branch (1.9)



Some highlights:

Added support for Counter-Strike: Classic Offensive and Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop.



Added the ability to trigger an entity output directly.



Added the ability to get and set entity output variables.



Added a native and extended the Database methodmap to allow safe, escaped SQL query value string formatting.



Added support for having multiple public and multiple private chat triggers, (such as having both ! and / as private, with no public triggers).



Changed the "ep1" builds (used by The Ship and Source SDK 2006 mods) to use the newer MM:S v1.6 plugin API (requiring MM:S v1.11 or later).



Added support for compiling on newer toolchains, such as Visual Studio 2015 and 2017 on Windows.





And unrelated to any of that...



Some users have recently expressed interest in having an AM or SM Discord, Slack, or other chat provider set up. While we have no plans to split the community across multiple chat services, I'd like to remind everyone that there is still an active community for SourceMod on IRC (irc.gamesurge.net). The #sourcemod channel exists for anything related to SourceMod - installation help, plugin development questions, and more. There is also an #am-announce channel for those that want to follow development live. All git pushes, issue and pull request openings/closings, and most game updates get announced there as they occur.



For those that don't have an IRC client installed, there are also multiple web chat clients available.