This topic was written to give a little insight into the past present and future of the MeshCloth tool, lets dive right in!

If it wasn't clear yet (like when you didn't read the description) i am the original maker of the MeshCloth tool, in this section i will give a little insight in how this tool came to be, and came to its 'end' (before CrazyBubba uploaded this old beta to the workshop)

It all started in 2007, when smartphones where still for nerds & china was just launching their first satellite, there was a company called PhysX (had been around a few years by then) that made a special kind of graphics card only meant for processing Physics, they also had a game, called CellFactor: Revolution to show off the capabilities of their hardware.

I played their game, liked it, but was like "Do we really need special hardware for this?", and then decided to try recreate it.

At that time i was already quite capable of writing Lua addons for Gmod, having made a bunch of (mostly unreleased) addons (you may remember another i released; sui_scoreboard) i figured id try create cloth in Gmod, i quickly realized the best approach would be to "fake it", have some sort of objects that are attached together and then draw mesh between the position of those objects, and so, MeshCloth was born.

Sadly, while the community was full of phrase (and i was quite giddy about pulling it off, even if it was/is a far cry from actual cloth physics) Garry was not, he was literally pissed off at me for making the MeshCloth tool, telling me mesh was never designed to be used dynamically, and he wasn't at all happy about people reporting performance issues and bugs for Gmod, due to my tool abusing mesh and crashing their Gmod. We never really got out of this squabble (i tried to jump-start a dynamic type of mesh but to no avail) and eventually Garry made some changes to how mesh worked, which made the MeshCloth lag 10x more (on top of being quite laggy already) so at that point i just sorta stepped back from Gmod, apparently the maker didn't want me releasing addons to show the versatility of Gmod/Source, fine.

In the years after i did jump into Gmod servers occasionally, just to mess with Wiremod and have a e-boner about seeing my scoreboard everywhere, but since somewhere as early as 2008 i haven't actually made any new addons.

Now here's the kicker, i haven't been paying much attention to Garry, but i've been told that he stepped away from Gmod to work on Rust, and there's now a team of devs working on Gmod that actually listen to the (dev-) community, and my best guess at this point is that they either rolled back the "anti-dynamic" changes Garry once made to mesh or improved mesh to be less laggy whatever happened, the cloth its performing much better now then it ever did all those years ago. I should point out that new & faster computers etc play a role, but (in my own tests) even on old machines it performs better then it used too, so there has to be more going on besides updated hardware.

A few days ago CrazyBubba added me on steam, when i accepted his invite he asked me if i was the MeshCloth dev, if i was ok with him re-uploading it, and if he should add me as contributor, simply put the answer was yes to all his questions.

However, mere minutes after he added me as contributor (and i accepted) i was getting literally dozens of friend invites from people wanting to ask me about the MeshCloth, suggest features, or report bugs.

So then i just figured "why not", and i have since started a rebuild, it should be noted that this version that's on the workshop right now is actually a beta (v1.5) that was never meant for public release, and at some point i actually had a much more capable version (v2.5)
I've been searching for that version but besides a handful of screenshots it seems to have gotten lost in the void of time and broken harddrives. So i've been chatting with CrazyBubba about where we both move from here on out, what he does with this version, and what i do in my version. Which leads us too the last category.

Ok so the plan as it is now (nothing set in stone yet) is this:
This addon will soon become MeshCloth Classic, it will get minor bug-fixes (where possible) and updates to include more materials, and perhaps some other fun things CrazyBubba can come up with to improve this version, but not much more besides that.

I will actually release a separate addon, probably called something like MeshCloth Pro, at first it will pretty much be a recreation of this, but build from scratch (to overcome some of the more nasty bugs that cant really be resolved otherwise) but obviously i will try recreate all options i once had in said v2.5, and then think of new ones.

For the first few versions of "MeshCloth Pro", i will still stick to how the cloth works now (which simply translates too stuff roped together with mesh squares drawn between) but for future versions i will look into doing something better, "actual cloth physics" (that doesn't need a load of stuff roped together) and/or making my own "dynamic mesh", more info on this at a (much) later stage.



That's all for now! i will probably have a first version of the new one towards the end (dutch time) of the upcoming weekend, but whenever it arrives, we will mention that in the description of this tool, so hang in there, in the mean time, feel free to ask questions about the past present or future in this topic!