Welcome to the ACE Website! After a month of intensive development, we're excited to announce that the official ACE (Armored Combat Extended) website is now in open beta! This article explains why we built this platform and what you can expect from it.
Why a Website? You might be wondering: " Why does a Garry's Mod addon need its own website when Discord, GitHub, and Steam Workshop already exist? "
It's a fair question, and here's our answer: each platform does what it's best at.
- Discord excels at real-time chat and community interaction
- GitHub handles code collaboration and version control
- Steam Workshop distributes the addon itself
- The Website fills the gaps that none of these platforms can address
So what exactly are we doing? 1. Proper Dev Blogs & Updates
Discord messages get buried. Steam Workshop descriptions are limited. A dedicated website gives us space for detailed development blogs, patch notes, and announcements that remain accessible and searchable. And obviously more features
2. Community Funding
Supporting open-source addon development is nearly impossible through Discord alone. This website provides a proper home for our funding initiatives, complete with transparency about where contributions go (will come soon).
3. Server & Creator Visibility
ACE server owners and content creators deserve their own space. Here, they can create descriptions, showcase their work, connect with players, and benefit from SEO coverage that Discord simply cannot provide. Plus different tasty developer tools, such as similar to trello board and more (discord sync in to come). I've always had this vision of uniting the server owners, community contributors in discord, but there were many limitations. Here, it is possible for our contributors to actually put work and hear the feedback from community and get the coverage that they truly deserve.
4. A Proper Wiki
Let's be honest—our documentation needed a better home and obviously an up-to-date information. I solved it by making wiki look like wiki, not some random github file and what's most important - you can actually paste github code and make sure that the code section that you provided is never old. If the code was drastically changing, or it simply is gone, it will warn people who use wiki about this potential issues. We have limited resources and such tools will free a lot of time and motivation.
5. Community Growth
ACE has been in development for over 6 years. While the addon's quality has grown tremendously, community size has remained relatively stable. I believe ACE deserves a bigger spot on the addon shelf, and a professional web presence is part of making that happen. SEO coverage, proper dev blogs, proper communication between community and developers - this is what I see the website like.
An important part of the survey that we conducted recently was funding and donations. After 6 years of working on ACE I realized that developers are also human (lol yes), and they can have real life problems and issues. By asking developers, contributors and you through the survey, we knew, that something has to be done with ACE, with its activity and potential popularity that it deserves. There is a trusting community, that is willing to stay with ACE no matter it takes and I, after some absence, thought that it would be unfair to betray the community, that we all grew up with, that was patiently waiting for new updates, for new events and ofcourse sneak peaks. Donation will open us a way to pay developers or literally hire them, so they can dedicate their time on the addon that they truly love to work on. And my personal duty, as I feel it, is to make that happen and I hope that you will help ACE in its new beginnings.
Now let's talk about fun stuff - Website Features Here's what you'll find on the ACE website: 📰 Blog & News Stay updated with development progress, major updates, and community announcements. No more scrolling through months of Discord history!
📚 Wiki Comprehensive documentation for ACE, from beginner guides to advanced technical references. Searchable, organized, and always accessible. Feel free to contribute too!
🎮 Servers Discover ACE servers, see live player counts, and find communities from any country to join. Server owners can claim and customize their listings.
📁 Stuff Street Share and download ACE creations—dupes, chips, and more. Rate builds, leave feedback, and discover what the community has built. More organization, easier discoverability.
🎬 Videos Community video hub featuring tutorials, showcases, and epic moments. We'll handle the search engine optimization that the videos get pulled properly on the web when searching, while providing users latest and greatest tutorials by internal score system. Now we build our own identity, if we like what we have, then we must be proud of it and share it with others. Submit your own content and get featured!
💬 Forum Discuss ACE topics, ask questions, report bugs, and share ideas. A dedicated space for longer-form discussions that don't fit Discord's chat format. While we had something similar in discord, they always become lost, users / developers forget to mark many issues as solved or not solved, which creates a large mess. We'll handle it by automation and better sorting.
🛠️ Development Board A secret (to a normal user) page. Trello like organizer with github sync in, proper tracking and sync with forum issues or even contributors pages. Use your contributor pages as your personal website!
👤 User Profiles Your identity. Track your contributions and achievements, showcase your builds, and connect with other community members.
🔧 ACE Projects Addons to ACE. Perfect place and time to contribute to ACE - custom gun packs, custom engines and more.
Other features: Articles page
Useful articles, recommendations, community stories, tell about your accomplishments, engineering challenges and so on. This will allow us to bring more attention to the website by having more useful information which will bring more attention to our website
Funding (support) page
One of the most important pieces for sustainable future. It consists of regular donations and funding. Main difference is funding is guaranteed to go to the budget of a model, hosting or whatever it is up on the funding. You get to decide what you want to see more and we'll bring in licensed high quality assets to our game. We can also finally boost the motivation of developers, contributors and so on, potentially hiring some of the developers or contributors or finding someone on outsorce and sponsoring events and so on. The transparency is the next step, it's still WIP, no decision has been made about proper way of making it, but it will be there. And yes, I made sure to automate the donation process, we recommend KoFi for seamless donations and proper sync in with website (we update the information ,grant the role), but we also made sure that a major part of our community (which is CIS), can also apprecaite the work that we're putting in, that's why I added boosty platform!
Messages
Developers can finally dedicate their personal discord (if they want) to their personal affairs instead of just constant spam of "fix this and that". Now it's done on the website. While we cannot compete with social media (and we do not intent to), basic functionality is important to get done, more customizability and notifcations settings will come in future.
Security reports
You can now report safety issues through the form that developers will be notified about, you will have your own chat. Please use it when necessary, do not use it for regular bug reports.
Github / Discord sync-in
We can solve the problem of multi platform usage by using proper syncing. Issues / suggestions will exist in the same space and user may use whatever they want to, if they want to use github they use github, if they want to use website or discord we let them use whatever is the most convinient for them to use. We value feedback, not the platform that you use. Currently sync works with github only, discord is coming soon!
And more...
Anything that could be improved will be improved, we're not limited by platform anymore, expect more features, UI and UX improvements to come along the way!
The Vision
For many players, ACE isn't just an addon—it's the addon they play Garry's Mod with. For others, it's a community where they literally grew up, made friends, and created lasting memories across servers like AWM and countless others.
This website is about continuing that legacy. It's about not giving up on ACE and working to build something that matches the potential this addon has always had. Better and faster.
I truly believe that:
There is no other addon with this vision and potential that ACE has
Open Beta
The website is currently in open beta , which means:
- ✅ Core features are functional
- ✅ You can create an account and explore
- ⚠️ Some bugs may exist—please report them!
- 🚧 New features are being added regularly
We're actively looking for feedback. Found a bug? Have a suggestion? Let us know through the forum under website issues category or Discord.
What's Next?
This is just the beginning. We have plans for:
- Website filling with existing content
- Discord bot functionality
- Stability
- Security overview (important to get it done, because website was generated with AI technologies :D, please wait for more news about it )
- And much more...
Join Us Whether you've been part of the ACE community for years or you're just discovering it, welcome home. Create an account, explore the features, and help us build something great together.
The future of ACE starts here. Build with us,
Build Beyond Limits
— KemGus & The ACE Team