2006 - 2008

2006 - 2008. These years helped to define the GDawgg Clan of today. I went on various map-making binges during this time. I authored maps for HL2DM, Half-Life, F.E.A.R. and Crysis Wars in these two years. More importatly, our clan picked up five key members from the ranks of HL2DM players who played on our servers: ratbag_mf, Greekfreak , Metalimage, Idle_Threat and Stinky Hangdown. Awesome names! Gotta love those names. These guys came on-board during these transition years and helped move our clan forward. All five of these awesome gamers are still members of GDawgg Clan today. Not only are they all awesome gamers but they are great people as well.

The old guard Half-Life dawggs and the new guard HL2DM dawggs have blended very well over the years. Our clan continues to be a group of guys who care about each other as one would care about his own brothers. We are brothers. We've all grown closer as the years have passed.

CoD4

I don't know why I purchased Call of Duty 4 in March of 2008. Can't quite remember what prompted me to buy it. Perhaps I had an inkling that the game might be good. I had previously bought Call of Duty in 2003. This was the original title of the Call of Duty series. I didn't like it much. I think I played the game twice. Much to the contrary, CoD4 turned out to be the game our clan had been looking for since 2004. It brought us all together in one game, on one platform that we all could enjoy. GDawgg Clan turned a corner with this game. We still have three CoD4 servers running today and the game remains extremely popular with pc gamers.

I made the decision early on not to patch our CoD4 servers because there were just way too many patched CoD4 servers. Many gamers were buying the game through Steam and thus playing the game through Steam. The problem here is that in 2008 there over 20,000 CoD4 servers running on Steam and somewhere between 10,000 to 15,000 CoD4 players on Steam. The result was thousands of empty servers. I had no desire join those ranks. By not patching our servers we remained in a vastly smaller pool of servers. As a result our CoD4 servers became a hit with players almost immediately. Our CoD4 San Jose Mix server pretty much stays packed day and night while running just one map 24/7: MP_Crossfire. http://www.gametracker.com/server_info/8.6.9.127:28960/

The maps released with CoD4 include some real winners: mp_crossfire, mp_pipeline, mp_countdown, mp_backlot, mp_bog, mp_overgrown, mp_farm and mp_cargoship to name a few. The guys at Infinity Ward (CoD4's developer) who created these maps really have much to be proud of. They made a whole rack of awesome maps for this game. There's one CoD4 map I haven't mentioned yet because, in my humble opinion, it may be one of the best maps ever made for any game: mp_shipment. Many players poo-poo this map as being too small. I do agree that it's tiny. Like postage stamp tiny but that's what sets shipment apart from all other maps. For a few years I was running a CoD4 shipment server with a 40 slot player-limit. To call it complete and utter mayhem would be a gross understatement. This server had between 20 and 35 players in it day and night for a couple of years. Yes, spawn-killing was rampant. The challenge was who could do it the best and come away with the win. I set the scorelimit at 2000 and the timelimit at 60 minutes. The madness created while playing this server defies any objective description. I loved every minute of it. Though I must say, MaiM was better at it than me. No doubt mp_shipment is an "acquired taste", however, it's popularity speaks for itself. Shipment has been remade for other games. Crysis Wars and Crysis 2 to name two. On August 12, 2011, I created cw2_shipment5 for Crysis 2. Though the non-playable surrounding area of my map is different from the original mp_shipment, I made sure the playable area is almost exactly the same as the original. You can download cw2_shipment5 here: http://gdawgg.com/c2maps.html. Here is a video of this map: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq1uk0PHNUU.


GDawgg Clan's latest CoD4 Shipment server can be found here: GDawgg Shipment 24/7 - 208.167.251.61:28930

Late in 2008 I discovered CoD4Radiant, the map editor for this game. CoD4 would be that last game in the Call of Duty franchise to be released by Infinity Ward with it's own map editor and compile tools. A fact that the FPS pc gaming community is greatly displeased with...

Moving Forward

My journey down the path of mapping with Hammer World Editor was just beginning. My first map was the doors map, dm_doors_5. It was a crude map but it was playable. I was proud of it and, of course, I put pushwalls in it. <smile> No one knew in August of 2005 that I would make as many maps as I have over the years, I certainly didn't intend it to go this way. However, the maps gave me and our clan an identity that has linked us to HL2DM. How ironic, given that HL2DM is the game that blew our clan apart just 10 months earlier. How ironic, given that many of my clan-mates from our Half-Life beginnings despised HL2DM and completely refused to play it. Yet, this game would put GDawgg Clan on the map, so-to-speak, in spite of our near 100% collective disdain for the game.

My maps and our HL2DM servers helped to make GDawgg Clan identifiable to many players as time passed. But going back to August of 2005, we were still in survival mode, looking for a good FPS pc game to change the direction of the clan. We tried getting into Quake 4 but it was a bust. We had servers for this game and one of our former clan-members, Keeper, even made a killbox for it. However, Quake 4 suffered from the overwhelming popularity of Quake 3 Arena. Q4 just didn't and couldn't measure up. It was a complete bust. Then we found F.E.A.R.-DM.

It was spring of 2006 when WRATH talked me into buying this game. By that time I had made 20 HL2DM maps and 17 Half-Life maps. Yes, it was a binge, 37 maps in 8 months. Mapping had opened a door to my creativity. I even made a killbox for F.E.A.R.-DM -- map #38: http://gdawgg.com/900.html.

F.E.A.R. was great. WRATH, Swiz and I played it a ton. That was all we had. It was a whole truckload of fun too. This game gave us an avenue away from Half-Life and HL2DM. It was precisely what we needed. Both WRATH and Swiz used to kick my butt regularly in F.E.A.R. but i didn't care because we were back to enjoying gaming again like it had been with Half-Life.

I was grateful that we were finally moving forward. WRATH and Swiz were too. We played F.E.A.R. until we simply got tired of the game.

Next, we began adding new members from HL2DM...