Garry's Mod custom spectate player

I have been making my own scoreboard, and needed a custom spectate function for it, so I made this:

util.AddNetworkString( "spectatePlayer" )
  local playerLocal
  local isSpectating = false

 net.Receive("spectatePlayer", function(length, client)
    if isSpectating then return end
        isSpectating = true
        playerLocal = client
        print(client:Nick() .. "Started spectating: " .. net.ReadEntity():Nick())
        client:Spectate(5)
        client:SpectateEntity(net.ReadEntity())

 end)

 hook.Add("Tick", "keydown", function()
        if not isSpectating then return end
                if (playerLocal:KeyDown(IN_FORWARD)) then
                        isSpectating = false
                        playerLocal:UnSpectate()
                        print(playerLocal:Nick().."Finished Spectating")
                end
        end)

Is there anything I could improve on? Am I over-complicating anything?

There's a few things to comment on:

I'm not a Gmod developer, so I'm not familiar with the spectating abilities built in, but, I'd assume that if any exist, they're probably better to use than re-inventing the wheel.

There's only two states: not spectating, and spectating. What happens if I want to simply switch between players? Do I have to stop spectating, and then select a new player to spectate?

Why can I not just press lmb and go to the next?

util.AddNetworkString( "spectatePlayer" )

You've got extraneous whitespace in your brackets.

print(client:Nick() .. "Started spectating: " .. net.ReadEntity():Nick())
print(playerLocal:Nick().."Finished Spectating")

String concatenation joins the strings, as they are. Meaning, it would read like:


QuillStarted spectating: James Heald.

QuillFinished Spectating

Add some whitespace in there.

print(client:Nick() .. " Started spectating: " .. net.ReadEntity():Nick())
print(playerLocal:Nick().." Finished Spectating")

Oh, and you should be keeping the cases (upper and lower) consistent in your messages:

"Started spectating: "
         ^
"Finished Spectating"
          ^

StackExchange Code Review Q#40563, answer score: 3