Garry's Mod Dupe Downloader

Wanna' skip all the boring stuff and get straight to downloading some dupes? Awesome. Just grab the latest build of the program here. ;)

The story

Once upon a time, a beautiful game known as "Garry's Mod" existed that allowed you to do pretty much anything your stupid mind desired.

This game was well known for just how many awesome mods existed for it, and as such it's developer (a guy named "Garry") decided it'd be best to make downloading these mods as easy and efficient as possible.

The introduction of the Toybox

So, he created the "Toybox"; a special place accessable at any time within the game where mod creators could upload their masterpieces, and us regular folk could download them simply by searching for what we wanted, and clicking "download."

Now, there were many different types of mods for GMod, and a massive amount of which were known as "duplicates" (or "dupes" for short). These "duplicates" were simply copies of objects spawned in a Garry's Mod world, and as such, could be absolutely ANYTHING.

This, coupled with the fact that duplicates were exceptionally easy to create (just plop some stuff in your world how you want it, copy it all, and upload your copy!), meant that the majority of the toybox quickly started filling up with dupes. And it was awesome.

The destruction of the Toybox

However, as time progressed, Valve introduced a new concept to Steam known simply as the "Steam Workshop" that allowed mod creators to host their custom game content. And, of course, Valve figured one of the first games that should switch over to using the Steam workshop would be our good old friend, Garry's Mod, since the entire point of the game was largely based around modding.

This, unfortunately, meant the death of the Toybox.

Now, all hope was not lost. In fact, many awesome new things were brought to the table with the massive switch to the workshop! But, unfortunately, just as many (if not more) awesome things about the toybox were lost. One of these awesome features was proper in-game integration with dupes.

The dupe problem

See, all Garry's Mod content is stored on the workshop, where they can be searched, subscribed to, favorited, liked/disliked, commented on, etc. This includes dupes, which makes up a stunningly large portion of the workshop's content.

However, dupes, unlike other workshop content, CAN NOT BE SUBSCRIBED TO, as doing so simply causes GMod to see the dupe, realize it's not a regular addon, unsubscribe you from it, and delete it. All within half a second (or less depending on your hard drive speed!).

So, if you can't subscribe to dupes, how the heck do you get them? Simple! Unlike all other types of GMod mods (excluding saves), there's actually a dupe tab in the spawn-menu where you can properly spawn dupes. Oh, joy! That's not inconsistent at ALL! :D

But it gets better, trust me. Get this: YOU CAN'T SEARCH FOR DUPES IN THE DUPE MENU.

Lemme' just repeat that: YOU CAN'T SEARCH FOR DUPES IN THE DUPE MENU!!!

So, basically, you find a dupe on the workshop you really like, and unless it's one of the most recent ones, it's pretty much impossible to get it since that would require you wading through the millions of dupes in the dupes menu trying to find the specific one that you want.

The solution! :D

ENTER: http://steamworkshopdownloader.com; a beautiful website that allows you to download workshop content simply by pasting the content's workshop URL and clicking "download." ...But that's not all that's beautiful about it. If you go to http://steamworkshopdownloader.com/api/workshop/ &# 60;ENTER 9-DIGIT-WORKSHOP-ID-HERE&# 62;, you get a JSON document containing the file's size and URL as well as it's title and thumbnail's URL.

Knowing this, I tried downloading a dupe through the site and, after some research (by that I mean this page: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=500521598), found that the downloaded files are actually 7-Zip archives that contain the actual dupe files loaded by GMod.

So, I combined all this together and made... THE GARRY'S MOD DUPE DOWNLOADER!!!!! Basically, it's a program that allows you to simply paste the workshop URL/id of a GMod Dupe and click "Download Dupe" to automatically download and install said dupe into GMod, where it can be easily spawned, at any time, by going to the dupes tab, clicking "My Dupes," and spawning the newly-downloaded one.

What's even better is that it can actually be used while GMod is open, and was tested and found to successfully work while playing on a local GMod server! That's right. While playing on a GMod sandbox server, you can simply open the workshop, find a dupe you like, paste it's URL into the program, alt-tab back to GMod, and spawn the dupe in the world.