 Good evening. Have you ever heard of NexBot? If you've been in the Garry's Mod community for any meaningful amount of time, then chances are you probably have. These things have been making quite a splash online recently, and they're starting to become a bit of a divisive issue. And there's also quite a lot of confusion surrounding what NexBot even means. When most people hear the phrase, they probably think of some weird, silly image chasing them around a Gmod map. But first and foremost, NexBot is the name of an AI navigation system. So, to better understand the Gmod NexBot phenomenon and the discourse around it, why don't we go on a quick crash course together? As has probably already been beaten into your head repeatedly by now, Gmod is powered by the Source Engine, which was created for the game Half-Life 2. The Source Engine is an upgraded version of the Gold Source Engine created for the original Half-Life, which itself is built from the foundation of the Quake Engine. This is affectionately referred to as the Leaning Tower of Ducktape. The original game Quake uses what's called a Waypoint System that instructs enemy NPCs where they can and can't go. When Valve began working on the original Half-Life, they opted to upgrade the old Waypoint System from Quake into what they call a Node System. At a first glance, Waypoints and Nodes seem very similar. Much like Waypoints, Nodes are placed manually throughout a level to instruct NPCs of what paths to use during combat. However, Nodes are a lot less strict than Waypoints and allow for more dynamic and interesting NPC movement. If you find any of that confusing, don't worry. Because all you really need to know is that for its time, Half-Life 1's Node System was considered very impressive and the game received universal praise for its advanced AI. After Half-Life took off as a huge hit, Valve began development on a sequel and seek to revolutionize FPS AI once more. Valve took this Node-based system from Half-Life 1 and expanded on it further, making it more dynamic and opening up support for NPCs who jump or even fly. Half-Life 2's AI was praised for its complexity much like the original games was. But as Valve began to broaden their horizon and working on multiplayer games, they ran into a problem. See, while these Nodes systems work great for a linear single-player experience, very few people would mistake a bot cycling through a set of pre-determined Nodes for another player character. So when Valve and Turtle Rock decided that they wanted to feature single-player bots in Counter-Strike Source, they realized that using Node Graphs was infeasible. So they set out to develop a new system for these bots. This led to the creation of the new multiplayer bot system with the very creative name of CS Bot, or as it was advertised on the game's box art, the Counter-Strike Bot. The Counter-Strike Bot can jump and crouch, it can traverse ladders, and in general, it can navigate multiplayer arenas in real time. It can also talk. The CS Bot system was so effective that Valve began tweaking and implementing it in other games under a new, more broad name, NexBots. Today, NexBots are used in Team Fortress 2 for training mode, MVM, Halloween event maps, and pretty much anything else you can think of that needs NPCs. They're used in Left 4 Dead to create convincing rabid zombies who chase you around corners on giant maps, and they're even in Dota 2, somewhere, supposedly. Basically, all of Valve's multiplayer games with bot support now make use of the NexBot AI system. So, how do NexBots work? Basically, instead of some poor developer being forced to rigorously place nodes throughout a level by hand, a file called a Navmesh is generated automatically using a console command called NavGenerate. Afterwards, it's possible to make some manual tweaks to make AI perform even better, but it's not necessary. With minimal required human input, these meshes allow NexBots to dynamically traverse the map in a way similar to how real players might. The Navmesh system also comes with some other interesting commands too. The YouTuber UncleDane wants to use data from the game's Navmeshes to determine the biggest TF2 map in terms of player walkable space. To put it simply, since this system was created, NexBot has become an inalienable part of the modern communities for pretty much all Valve and Valve adjacent games. But before we get into how NexBots have warmed their way into GMOD and meme culture, you've got to know that this video is brought to you by Surfshark VPN. Surfshark is a world-renowned VPN service that you've probably already heard of. 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On top of that, Surfshark offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you've got nothing to lose, and its 24-7 customer support can help you troubleshoot any problems you might run into. It's also very affordable, especially if you use promo code Richter to get 83% off your purchase and receive 3 extra months for free. So go to surfshark.deals-richter today to pick up an elite VPN service to protect yourself online. Anyway, let's get back to the topic at hand. Garry's Mod's implementation of next bots is actually kind of interesting. See, GMod borrows a lot of code from Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, which is one of the only multiplayer source engine games that doesn't have any next bot support. So, to my understanding, the navmesh system had to be implemented into GMod manually, and all of Half-Life 2's Node Oriented AI had to be adapted as well. GMod actually even includes an example next bot NPC. It takes on the appearance of Judith Mossman from Half-Life 2 and repeats If the map you're on doesn't have a navmesh, then once spawned, Mossman will just stand up and sit down over and over again. These kinds of scripted next bot GMod NPCs have been used for spooky stuff for a very long time. Veteran players will probably remember the friendly companion cube, an early creepy GMod custom NPC which would only move when the player wasn't looking and then kill them with a knife suddenly. However, some might not have expected that the newest wave of GMod horror would spawn from Sonic the Hedgehog. Have you ever seen this image? It's a meme called Sanic and it used to be really popular in the early to mid 2010s. In 2013, someone made a primitive NPC of Sanic that would navigate any GMod map in real time to chase you and kill you. Of course, using the next bot system. It also played the green hill zone theme at deafening volume, which was the best way to gauge how far away from it you were. Anyway, if you were there for GMod 13's heyday then you probably remembered that this Sanic NPC became an early viral phenomenon that even spawned a few spinoff mods. These spinoffs became known as Sanic next bots, in reference to the AI system that powered them. And in 2016, an app called Sanic SNPC Creator came onto the scene that effectively automated the process of creating Sanic next bot add-ons. It copied the same code from the original Sanic add-on, then allowed the user to plug their own image and sound into it and it would even automate the process of uploading the add-on to the workshop. Okay, so making clones of the Sanic next bots was already very easy, but now the barrier of entry had become lower than ever before. Even back then, people began to complain about these Sanic clones flooding the workshop and being low effort. But eventually, the Sanic SNPC Creator app stopped working for some reason, which I think is what caused the craze to die down a little bit. But then, in the late 2010s and early 2020s, an enormous wave of popularity hit GMod in the horror sphere. See, just on the tail of the internet's obsession with analog horror, GMod's connection to the liminal space horror genre and the meteoric rise of GMod ARGs brought the game to a level of popularity it hadn't seen in quite some time. Not as a goofy game to mess around with the TF2 Heavy in, however, but as something far more sinister. People began to make quote-unquote haunted GMod maps where dark figures would watch the player from a distance. YouTubers like the Librarian and Vinesauce Vinny would both explore weird liminal space GMod maps to audiences of hundreds of thousands, and well, Sanic clones came back. And they came back stronger than ever. Since the Sanic SNPC Creator had stopped working, a new app called GM Publisher popped up in its place, which, just like the Sanic Creator, made creating funny PNGs that chase you around the map trivial, and with tons of little children's eyes being drawn to the game because it's so Nextbot's allowed GMod to collide with the meme sphere on a scale I'm not sure it ever had before. On platforms like YouTube and TikTok, people began raking in tens of millions of views by recording themselves running around on GMod maps, usually liminal space ones, trying not to get caught by spooky or silly images. And by this point, the entire Sanic clone designation had been totally lost, I guess since Nextbot was shorter and a lot catchier. And make no mistake, this genre of Nextbot chase videos is pretty much an inescapably popular part of GMod discourse. There have been waves of people who bought and started playing GMod just to get in on the Nextbot trend. And of course, there have been a lot of people trying to capitalize off of it as well. For example, there are now in-game servers that run game modes where the only objective is to parkour through the maps to get away from Nextbots for as long as possible. And third parties have even started making Nextbot chase knockoffs as mobile games, and even on Roblox. Which is funny to me because that's not even a Nextbot at that point, man. The GMod workshop has become flooded with so many copy-paste Nextbot add-ons that at some point, the Steam Workshop moderation team apparently felt it necessary to adjust their spam filters to remove links to the GM publisher app. So it seems like even Valve themselves have begun to get overwhelmed with these things. And I can see why. The fact that Nextbots are so disposable and easy to publish has made it kind of hard to find higher effort NPC add-ons on the GMod workshop. And there's a growing audience of people online who are very upset about how the game's content landscape has changed as a result of it. To the vast majority of GMod players, I show Speed, Freddy Fazbear, and Saul Goodman chasing me around GM Liminal Space. That's Nextbot. Get this Counter-Strike history lesson out of here. To clarify, I don't think people are upset strictly because not everyone who plays GMod understands the intricacies of an AI system. Or anything like that. I think it's just a pushback against GMod becoming popular with little kids who don't really have any connection to the game. A lot of these add-ons are literally just like Nextbot of a picture of my friend I took in class or something. To a lot of people, I think it almost feels like a death rattle for the game's identity. Did GMod really survive 15 years as a staple in Source Engine culture just to dilute into an Obunga Backrooms game? There is definitely a pushback against that frame of argument, though. I mean, it's not like the game is actually becoming any harder to play with friends. At the end of the day, you can choose what add-ons you do or don't want to play with. Some people even make the case that complaining about the Nextbot phenomenon is akin to gatekeeping, and I can't say they're entirely wrong. But whether you love or hate Nextbots, one thing's for sure. The fact that they're not only still in use, but have become a viral sensation and heated topic of conversation 20 years after their inception is remarkable. It doesn't look like they're going anywhere either. Personally, I fully understand why people feel upset about the workshop being flooded and GMod's identity being reduced to effortless TikTok memes. But if you think this is the peak of online entertainment, who am I to judge you for it? I mean, it's not like you're actually hurting one and hey, you are helping keep the game alive. Hey, I just did a video defending Five Nights at Freddy's Effect on GMod on the grounds that it got more people into 3D modeling and mapping for the Source Engine, so I'd like to think I do understand the long-term positive effect and annoying in-the-moment swarm of little children can have on a game space. At the same time, though, this trend sucks. I'm sorry, I know it's not like for me, but it really does, it just sucks, I'm sorry. As a tip, if you want to search for add-ons on the workshop and easily exclude Nextbots from your result, you can press the minus icon next to NPC to exclude NPCs from the search. This excludes all NPCs, though, not just Nextbots, which is unfortunate. Honestly, maybe they should just add a Nextbot tag to the workshop or something. That's all I have for now, though. Thanks for watching! If you enjoyed the video or are a fan of GMod and General Source Engine content, subscribe for more and join my Discord. Things get silly in there. 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