guthen/vkxtoolsentityspawner

Garry's Mod's Tool to place entities and entity spawners in the world.

VKXTools ─ Entity Spawner

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This addon is available on the Workshop here

📃 Description

This is a tool made for Garry's Mod in order to spawn random choosen entities in a specific shape with or without a spawner.

It allows you to spawn a lot of entities, see the following list of compatibles categories :

• Weapons
• Scripted Entities
• NPCs
• Vehicles
• simfphys vehicles

⚪ Shapes

Shapes are used to spawn entities in a certain geometrical form, they only impact on position, angle and number of entities.

Shapes	Description
None	Spawn at a single point
Circle	Spawn in a standar circular shape with editable radius and entities number
Square	Spawn in a rectangular shape with editable wide, tall and offset between each entities
Random	Spawn in a circular shape with a random radius on each entity giving a random impression; the number, maximum radius, x and y ratios are editable as well; this shape might be usefull in apocalypse/zombie-like servers

🤖 Spawners

Spawners are used to spawn random choosen entities at a fixed delay and a fixed maximum of entities. They can be permanently saved on the map or just temporary. They are usefull to spawn groups of NPCs (like zombies) or to spawn vehicles or weapons periodically for an apocalypse server for example.

Green spawners are non-permanent spawners and red spawners are permanent (saved and loaded on server restart) ones.

ConVars

• vkx_entspawner_network_superadmin_only <0 or 1>: server; default to 1; Should the spawners be networked to superadmin only or be available for other players?
• vkx_entspawner_network_run <0 or 1>: server; default to 0; Should the spawners run-time be networked to allowed users? This option syncs the new spawner properties to clients. Users are defined by vkx_entspawner_network_superadmin_only convar

❗ Known Issues

No issues

💡 Contributions

If you are a developper and you want to help, I'm opened to contributions as long as you respect my code style.

You can also suggest features and report bugs in the issues page.

vkxtoolsentityspawner's Issues

Feature Request: Spawner text

It would allow server owners to minimize the use of addons such as 3D2D, DTextscreens, LED, etc.

It would also help to find out how far away the user is from the spawn area with dynamic text.

Unable to spawn Gredwitch's Emplacement's entities

Reported by: Sesto

File : lua\autorun\vkx_entspawner.lua
Function : vkx_entspawner.can_spawn_safely (~line 191)

When you attempt to spawn a Gredwitch's Emplacement's entity with the tool, it returns a notification error because an entity (probably a child entity created by the GE's entity) obstruct the new entity to spawn.

We should investigate on how to solve this, maybe by looking for the children with Entity:GetChildren or looking for the source code of the GE's entities to understand why it does that.

Add a way to set the Spawn Chance of each entity in the 'Selected Entities' automatically to a fixed number

Suggested by TheSilentAngryCat

Could be:

• a button populating a Derma_Query
• a button w/ a numslider
• a DermaMenu option

LFS Compatibility

It should be possible to assign LFS teams per vehicle to prevent friendly fire from AI.

Configuration Presets don't save loaded entities

File : lua\weapons\gmod_tool\stools\vkx_entspawner.lua
Function : TOOL.BuildCPanel (~line 306)

The Default Presets VGUI only save convars but that's an issue for saving entities configuration, as they are handle in the table vkx_entspawner.ents_chance and not in a convar. We might have to make a custom VGUI or edit the default one.

Add a "Select All" option in the Available Entities list

Suggested by TheSilentAngryCat

Choosing which Weapons should NPCs spawn with

Suggested by Aogen:

We may do a global system which could allow us to fix #5 too

Spawners are inconsistent

Even though the delay is set to 1 second and I am inside the radius for that long, the entities don't spawn. I am trying to do this with Simfphys vehicles.

Spawn Helper Option: place entities on `info_node`s

Suggested by: epicplayer40

The goal of this option is to help spawned NPCs's pathfinding by spawning them in navigable areas.

This could be achieved by either snapping preview entities on foreign info_nodes or by passing this option in the spawner structure and to change its spawn position at "run time" (in function vkx_entspawner.run_spawner).

I prefer the first option as it shows to the user what does that option do

Add support for spawning of ZBASE NPCs

Suggested on the Steam Workshop by 2den2:

Links to ZBASE and its addon collection.

Instant respawn issue

Hi, I use this mod a lot for my modes and I was wondering about something strange, I don't know if it's a glitch or not but I'll explain it as well as I can.

Basically, I think the timer for spawning will go off even when you're not in range or there's already an entity that was spawned.

For instance, if you had a zombie spawner, and a zombie has been spawned for 15 seconds (AKA the spawn time):

If you kill that zombie, another one will instantly spawn. If you kill that one, it will take 13 seconds if it had existed for 2.

Is this a glitch or is it intentional?

(COMMENTATOR FORM STEAM)