Silly physics sandbox Garry's Mod is getting some big upgrades

Garry's Mod is a game about screwing around, playing with physics and possibly creating your own fun game and it's about to get some big upgrades.

Actually getting games and extra content to play in Garry's Mod is about to get quite a bit easier, with an update releasing on January 21 which moves it onto a more modern Steam API. For the Steam Workshop this means addons won't have a size limit (so you can download everything in a single pack) and they can show their real uncompressed size. Facepunch also said that new or updated addons will take less space on your drives thanks to all this too.

Once that's out, they will be moving onto another big release on January 24 which brings in the long awaiting 64bit builds and Chromium for the browser engine they use in-game.

You can actually try out both updates right now on Steam, by opting into one of these Beta versions:

Pre-Release - This is the first update
Dev - This is a bleeding edge version of the game, expect it to contain more bugs than usual
x86-64 - This is a preview of the upcoming 64bit builds and the new in-game browser engine

I've tested out the 64bit build with Chromium and it seems to work quite well, the only issue I encountered is the Steam Overlay appears to be disabled which is a known issue. See the full announcement here and changelog here for the first upcoming update.

Have a favourite pack you play with Garry's Mod? Do let us know in the comments. What would be good for someone new to it to play?

Hat tip to Mr Doomguy.