[BB], 2025 in review

Published: 2026-01-01

Author: Teddi

2026 has landed, and with it comes the time to look back at the previous year and reflect on what happened in the world of [BB]. And honestly, it wasn’t quite as packed as 2024.

After really pushing in some huge updates during 2024 across the board for [BB], 2025 I think has been a time to try and work on other things and identify what could happen next. Indeed, one could consider 2025 very much a refinement year with polishing and improving various features that were introduced in 2024.

I’d like to just take a quick moment to shout out to those who reported a number of suggestions and bugs via our GitHub issues page. Your feedback is invaluable in helping us improve [BB] and although we may not action every suggestion, or do so in the most timely manner we do read everything and take it all into consideration.

The state of Garry’s Mod in 2025

I’m going to pivot for a moment and actually talk about Garry’s Mod itself in 2025. It’s been an interesting year for the game, receiving quite a few significant updates so late in to the life of the game. CS:S content being added by default was a huge one, alongside with the internal web browser being bumped up to a much more recent version of Chromium via CEF and even custom shader support!

It’s an interesting one, because it potentially opens up the game in so many different and new ways - but I’m not sure that anyone in the wider GMod community really knows what to do with it yet, or if we (at [BB]) have any proverbial gas left in the tank to really capitalise on it. GMod is such a unique game to develop and play with but in various respects the majority of the playerbase tends to stick to DarkRP style gamemodes and content, meaning that you can build things and the players rarely come. That’s not the fault of the players and is part of an entirely separate gripe I have to do with the GMod server browser; however it does mean that innovation can stifled somewhat beyond educational purposes.

Basically I’m not entirely sure how this will shape and develop the future of [BB] quite yet in terms of how we pivot, what we may or may not end up doing within the game, or if we’ll look beyond GMod.

Potential deprecation of the Forums & maybe an updated Wiki

In 2024 we made a larger push to move away from the forums as a primary means of communication and support for [BB], and `zin 2025 we’ve seen that trend continue. The forums are still there, and will remain so for the immediate future, but I think it’s fair to say that for a long, long time they’ve not been the main hub for discussion around [BB]. We’ve received a few requests over the last few years for pruning of old community data which is fine, coupled with the Online Safety Act 2023 in the UK it feels like an ever increasing liability to keep old user data around that isn’t actively being used. I’ve been considering an anonymisation of the data first for users that haven’t logged in for a long time (which is the majority of users), and then potentially a full deprecation of the forums in 2026. This is still very much up in the air, but I wanted to at least flag it here so that users are aware that it may happen. The forums for the meantime are also set to no longer be public, meaning they also cannot be indexed by search engines. As a result a large amount of data has been unindexed from search engines already.

Additionally, while we use the Wiki as a way to serve information helpful to players, there’s likely a better way we can do that in such a way that doesn’t require constant manual upkeep. Again, whether or not that happens in 2026 is yet to be seen, but it’s something we’re considering.

General Gamemode News

BBase

Continues to be maintained. There’s actually some features in there waiting to go out (such as a proper notification system), it’s just a case of finding the time to get it all set up and fully released. Since a couple of GMod updates ago we’ve noticed an increase in server crash rates which I’ve pinned down to our sockets module. I’ve been investigating this, but due to the age and lack of documentation of the module it’s proving difficult to fully resolve. The fact it also hits Deathrun far harder than any other gamemode is really interesting too.

I also tried to remove a few memory leaks from the chatbox earlier this year to mixed results. We did remove the rainbow lag issue (oops) but I’ve been unable to get the newer chat tag parsing system quite as efficient as I’d like. It’s on the list of things to revisit in 2026.

In a really neat new feature that was added (from my perspective at least), I finally sorted auto-awarding custom model content for those that develop content for [BB]. This was something I’d actually started back in 2024 but ended up side-tracked by other things. Now, if you develop an item for [BB] (regardless of whether or not it ends up in the store) you as the creator automatically received it, alongside any commendations.

And finally, a big one that has seen a rather positive reception is that the [BB] API now supports a field letting you know when changelevel for a server is. Sometimes the simplest things can make the biggest difference!

Surf

As mentioned in the 2024 review, Surf was considered feature complete and for the most part continues to be deemed as such. There were some updates to fix and improve various bits and pieces, but nothing major. I have been working to improve saveloc now and again, yet it continues to elude me for some reason, my very own white whale. 2026 year of the better saveloc?

Deathrun

Continues to exist. Mostly dead. Outside of receiving no updates beyond some attempts at crash fixes, it’s primarily been the testbed for testing the socket crashes. Why it’s the worst affected gamemode / server is still an absolute mystery to me. Surf is only lightly affected at best and then Climb never seems to be affected at all. It’s bizarre. Maybe in 2026 I’ll write a sockets module from scratch for educational purposes and see what happens.

Go Fish

I started working on Go Fish some more in 2025 and pushed through a few updates, but never quite got to where i wanted to be in terms of new content. Go Fish is actually the most fun of any [BB] project to work on, but it’s also the one that requires the most time investment to get right, especially as I’m touching parts of the source engine (and even GMod API) that aren’t necessarily the most mature, or are intended to be used in the way I’m using them. Some players saw the example of the Grigori boss I came up with and reception was generally positive - though it was super interesting from my point of view to see how it worked locally vs on the server.

Will Go Fish see more updates in 2026? Possibly, but it really depends on how much time that can be spent on it.

Closing Words

2025 was stable and generally resilient, which is a good thing. Boring times are good times in development as it means you can focus on polishing and improving things rather than rushing to add new features all the time. The community behavior as a whole seems to have continued the positive trend from 2024 in to 2025, which is great to see.

I’m not sure what 2026 will bring for [BB], but whatever it is I’m sure it’ll be interesting!