2010 - 2013: Black Ops, MW3 and Black Ops 2

In the last three years GDawgg Clan has been rather obsessed with the three CoD releases that followed MW2: Call of Duty: Black Ops, released 11.9.10; Call of Duty: MW3, released 11.8.11 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, released 11.13.12. In October of 2010, while waiting for Black Ops to be released, we played Medal of Honor (the 2010 release). We even had an MoH server running for about 5 weeks.

Also, during these years I maintained contact with the HL2DM and UT3 gaming communities with numerous map releases for both games. I made 14 maps for HL2DM in 2011 and 2012, none in 2010. I created 13 UT3 maps between 2010 and 2012. Our clan also continued running servers for both these games during this time, however, I finally bagged the UT3 server in early 2012 because traffic in this server had slowed to a mere trickle. HL2DM, released in 2004, has proven to be more resilient. People just won't stop playing it and every time I create a new map for this game the players thank me profusely for the "new content". Currently GDawgg Clan has one HL2DM server running, GDawgg.com-Killbox -- 66.150.214.58:27015 I made the map that's running on this server. I named it Killbox2013. It's called that because I ran out of "catchy" killbox names. I refused to include this map in the list of maps I've made simply because it's "just a box" with my stock whitish wall, floor and ceiling textures, a huge GDawgg Clan logo, a boatload of weapons and throwables; and that's it. Players like the simplicity apparently, at the moment, our GDawgg-Killbox server is ranked #46 out of 562 HL2DM servers world-wide. Here's our GDawgg-Killbox PsychoStats page.

I must mention the Dawggs that have joined our clan in the last three years: Crysis, Joseidon, Loblo, THOR, F.N.G., Tank_Jr and FreeRadical. We met Crysis, Joseidon and Loblo while playing CoD4. We met THOR, F.N.G. and Tank while playing HL2DM and FreeRadical is our first and only recruit from CoD: MW3. These guys have meant a lot to GDawgg Clan. They have infused our ranks with their collective zest for the games we play. They're all remarkable gamers and fantastic guys too boot. We're certainly glad to have them on board.

Back to our CoD obsession, as a clan, we played the living snot out of BO, MW3 and BO2. Our clan had three BO dedicated servers running for many months. BO is an ok game. Certainly many people are still playing it. I feel it's been completely overshadowed by MW3 and BO2. While MW2 (released one year before BO) still remains a huge favorite amongst players due to it's awesome maps (Rust, Terminal, Favela) and popular innovations (TAR-21, dual-wield SMG's, etc).

A controversial MW2 innovation was the G-18 dual wield or akimbo. This is probably the second most hated weapon in Call of Duty history after the grenade launcher, aka "noob-toob". The akimbo G-18 is reviled by so many players and their typical whine is, "it takes no skill to kill with it". I say that they're probably just natural whiners, you know the type, a little soft. Probably still wetting the bed. And, I say any weapon that affords you that much fire-power at such a high rate of fire, coming out of two barrels is a good one to have, lmao. The folks at Infinity Ward and Treyarch have stuck to their guns (pun intended) for the most part when it comes to dual wield machine pistols. These handguns remain in their games and they remain over-powered. MW3 has the dual wield FMG9 and BO2 has the dual wield KAP-40. However, the dominance of the KAP-40 is reduced by it's extremely small clip size and the inability to use fast reload (Fast Mag attachment) if dual wield is selected.

Let's see, where was I... we currently have two heavily modded and very popular MW3 dedicated servers running: GDawgg Hi-Jump Mega#1  --  76.114.233.132:27025  and GDawgg TRMNL 999999 XP  --  76.114.233.132:27015.

Unfortunately, no dedicated servers for BO2 have seen the light of day as yet but we're hopeful it'll happen at some point. Treyarch and Activision went to great lengths to make sure that BO2 wouldn't be "altered" in the same way MW2 was. So far (1.18.13) they've been successful in preventing outside entities from creating dedicated servers for BO2. One thing Treyarch and Activision did to accomplish this is to have no .iwd files associated with the game. These critical .iwd files were replaced with .ipak files and their directory location was moved from the traditional "\main" directory to the new "\zone\all" directory. Unlike .iwd files, .ipak files cannot be unpacked or extracted using winzip or winrar. However, an ipak extractor has been created by an enterprising individual and does work. With this in mind, perhaps BO2 dedicated servers aren't too far away.

BO2, the game, is quite well done, with two exceptions: no developer's console and the aforementioned lack of dedicated servers. Apart from those two HUGE items being excluded, the game is awesome to play.

It should be noted that prior to the game's release, Treyarch assured the PC gaming community that we would have traditional dedicated servers in BO2. They lied to us. They flat lied and I'm still pissed about that.

On a more positive note, I reached "Prestige Master" on December 19, 2012. 36 days after the game was released. I enjoyed the game for the most part. Cheaters spoiled it for me on a few occasions but I didn't get bogged down complaining about cheaters, I just reported them and moved on.

MW3 was probably the most progressive of the three CoD titles released since 2010 in that it's dedicated servers are easily altered. Black Ops was ground-breaking with the dive feature and weapon personalization (carried over to BO2). The face-paint was rather novel too. I have a screen shot of my player character, in NukeTown, holding dual HS10 shotguns, wearing "joker" face-paint. I personally have logged more than 2000 in-game playing hours in these three CoD games.

Finally, as much as it pains me to give kudos to Treyarch, some of the features they included in BO2 are noteworthy:

• Select fire - enables players to select automatic, semi-automatic or burst depending on the weapon
• Weapon Prestige and Diamond Camo - players can prestige their weapons twice which unlocks personalization, the diamond camo is attained after getting gold camo for every weapon in a given category (SMG, Shotgun, Assault Rifle, etc)
• Shock Charge - tactical throwable that shocks and freezes players
• Tactical Mask - this perk allows players to be immune to concussion grenades and shock charges
• Flak Jacket - this perk allows players to be immune to most explosives (frag grenades, bouncing betties, claymores)
• Engineer - this perk allows players to see all enemy equipment glow red through walls, this perk also delays enemy explosives that were triggered by players, you can also booby trap care packages or re-roll the care packages
• Wild Cards - features used to modifiy a players load-out structure
• Perk Greed - this wild card allows players to double up in any or all three perk slots
• Primary Gunfighter, Secondary Gunfighter - these two wild cards allow players to add an attachment to the default attachment allotment for primary and secondary weapons
• Awesome maps: Hijacked, Carrier and Slums are my favorites, Cargo is ok, Plaza and Meltdown should've been left out of the game altogether in my humble opinion

I'm sure I'm leaving something out. If so, I'll add those things later.

In my next post I'll talk about my 2012 map-making binge (made maps for the first time for Soldier of Fortune II, Quake 3 Arena, Quake 2 and Quake 4) and GDawgg Clan's return to Half-Life, the game that started it all for us...

GDawgg Clan:

Celebrating 10 years of great gaming today!!!

Our clan was formed on October 21, 2002.

 

November 2009: CoD Modern Warfare 2

An FPS pc game with no dedicated servers and no developer's console? Unheard of! Insane! Gaming blasphemy! Unthinkable! And yes, it actually happened. To one of the best games to come along in years. MW2 was the trial balloon floated by Activision and Infinity Ward (IW) in 2009. I'm sure they made a mint off this game. I doubt, however, that they'll ever make those mistakes again.

IW's decision to release MW2 with no dedicated servers and with no console was the event that informed pc gamers world-wide that we are of secondary importance to game developers like Infinity Ward. They let us know exactly where we stand. Their primary concern and primary target market is the hundreds of millions of console gamers (Play Station, X-Box, etc) world-wide. Why? Because there's so many of them and that kind of "return on investment" demands that they be catered to. Does that also mean that they completely piss off the entire FPS pc gaming community in the process? It wasn't necessary, but that's what IW did.

IWNet. That's the name of the match-making system IW introduced to replace dedicated servers. It is, may I say, a total piece of crap. I wonder if I should repeat that. IWNet = utter garbage.

The pc gaming community did not take this lying down. We organized and signed petitions. Many players boycotted the game. But I knew it would only be a short period of time before the creativity in the midst of the pc gaming community would rise up and make a statement. I told my clan-mates that it would happen and I didn't need a crystal ball to come to that conclusion. What choice did we have? IW left us no choice but to alter MW2 in every way conceivable. I'm quite proud to say, that's exactly what we did. Those with programming skills in the FPS pc gaming community got to work on MW2 and we showed IW what the game was supposed to look like. We showed IW how MW2 was supposed to be played. Trust me, they will never forget.

How was this accomplished? Mostly by young talented pc gamers from around the world who banded together and created sites, forums and then began to work together to accomplish the mission of "fixing" MW2. I'm sure more "working groups" sprung up than I'm aware of, but the two communities that have made the most progress in making MW2 playable are alterIWNet (aIW) and Four Delta One (4D1). Kudos to these guys who got the job done. Awesome work!!!

At some point during the week ending on Saturday October 16, 2010 aIW released dedicated server software for MW2. GDawgg Clan had servers running on aIW's network. It was a great achievement by them. It was also a whole truckload of fun being able to play MW2 with dedicated servers and 18 players (IWNet only allowed 8 players per match). Unfortunately, aIW was forced to cease it's operations. We were not surprised by this. Shortly thereafter, 4D1 sprung up. I don't have a timeline for 4D1's releases but I do know that some of the creative minds from aIW are a driving force behind 4D1. This community is operating a fully functional MW2 network, complete with ranked dedicated servers. Friggin awesome! The members of GDawgg Clan as well as thousands of pc gamers from all over the world applaud the work done by 4D1.

MW2 is such a kick-ass game with such great maps (Rust, Terminal, Favela), weapon innovations (MP5K, TAR-21, tactical knife, first appearance of dual-wield weapons in the CoD franchise) and perk innovations (marathon, commando, sit rep, etc). I'm sure I left out about 30 other things. Thankfully, it has been made "playable" by the collective creativity of the FPS pc gaming community.

Note: No map editor, compile tools or mod tools were ever "officially" released for MW2. However, many mods have been created for this game. I made nine mods for MW2.

2009: CoD4 & UT3

CoD4 proved to be a hard act to follow. CoD4 has a number of features that many recent games have seemingly been unable to replicate. I have to think this failure to reproduce some of the things that made CoD4 so successful is purposeful. Here are four things that many recent game releases don't have that CoD4 has:

• Ranked dedicated servers
• Developer's console
• Map editor and compile tools
• The ability to play the game without being logged onto Steam

First, let me say that these are four things I consider to be of critical importance in a first-person-shooter pc game. Plainly put, CoD4 is just different from and better than the CoD titles that followed in so many ways. This game has the capability to run dedicated servers with up to 64 player slots. Things like this make gaming fun and in case you haven't picked up on this by now, the fun is what got me into pc gaming in 1992. Fun is what has kept me doing this for the last 20 years. Our clan had a 48 player CoD4 TDM server, running mp_crossfire which reached the rank of #2 in the world among all CoD4 servers, according to GameTracker.com (see top image). That server was a blast to play in. Just as a frame of reference, three of the four CoD titles that followed CoD4 all allow no more than 18 players in their dedicated servers.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to make 16 maps for CoD4. Killbox maps, one with multiple jump-pads, a pushwall map, a terrain map and more. Perhaps my most popular CoD4 map is mp_chaos. It consists of a large flat concrete area with shipping containers placed in what seems to be a random arrangement. This map has been downloaded over 750 times since April of 2009 and people are still downloading this map today. My favorite of all the maps I made for this game is mp_moose_snot. The name comes from a certain texture I used on some of the buildings in the map that appear to have an ugly greenish color near the seams of the whitish-grey metal. Looks like snot to me. Hence, the name. Another map I made, mp_killbox2, was a lot of fun as well. So much so, that four days later I decided to remake it for HL2DM and it ran on one of our HL2DM servers for more than a year. Wildly popular. Trust me, there are more maps, too many to mention. Suffice to say, the Dawggs of GDawgg Clan played the living crap out of these maps back in 2009. Man, did we have a blast! Swiz also made a map for this game on May 8, 2009, mp_bunker. Great map which includes some pushwalls and many other cool features. Swiz's excellent attention to detail is very apparent in this map. And, this was the first map he'd made for any game. Magnificent job Bro! We had tons of fun playing it.

Swiz also turned me onto UT3 in June of 2009. Geezo peezo! What did he go and do that for!? UT3 has so many dimensions, so many variables, it was a dream get involved with this game from both a playing and a mapping standpoint. Infinity Ward, the developer of the CoD series, placed obstacles and restrictions in the path of anyone seeking to create custom content (maps, mods, skins, etc) for their games. UT3, developed by Epic Games, is exactly the opposite. The doors to making all sorts of goodies for this game are so wide open, it's simply a pleasure to have such a game and the map editor for this game loaded on my pc's. I had played other UT games prior to UT3 and was never really impressed with them. This game was different in that the player models seem to be larger than in the past and, more importantly, I wasn't mapping when I had played the previous UT titles. With mapping as means to release some of my creativity, I went nuts with UT3. Totally. I made 40 maps for this game, 11 of them in the first 42 days that I had the game and 27 in the first 5 months. I feel that I made some of my best maps in UT3. The tools the game offered to work with and the map editing interface simply made mapping so much fun and so effortless that all I needed to do was have map ideas and the process of exporting those ideas into actual gaming venues was completely unencumbered. My first UT3 map, dm-gdawgg1, I really like a lot. Also, dm-killbox_b and dm-nutso-b are two others that I enjoy. However, I must mention the mutators. UT3 mutators are modifications to UT3 that any server admin can employ. There are several that come with the game but they're so easy to make that there must be thousands of custom mutators made by the gamers themselves. Here's three I really enjoyed:

• Zark: makes the sniper rifle fire like a sub-machine gun - deadly beyond belief
• Big Head: makes a player's head grow as his kill to death ratio grows - hilarious
• Juggernaut: player grows huge after so many kills and then more huge after more kills

 As I said, there's thousands of them, crazy stuff!
 
Swiz made two maps for UT3: dm-hangar and dm-jump_v1.2. Both are totally awesome maps with lots of space, lots of teleporters and lots of jump pads. I repeat, awesome maps. Great work Swizzle!

Our clan members played CoD4 and UT3 simultaneously in 2009 leading up to the release of CoD MW2 (Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2) in November of that year. This one would prove to be a great game but one mired in controversy.

More to come...

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...

The Dust Settled, What Do We Do Now?

Surviving our disappointment wasn't easy. More than half of our clan was gone. 90% of our remaining clan-members refused to play HL2DM. GDawgg Clan was in shambles. I was fortunate to have some stalwart clan-members who didn't give up on me. Who didn't give up on us. We were barely more than two years in existence in November of 2004. I asked myself, "what do we do now?" Finding answers to that question wasn't easy either.

Initially, the key to our survival was in playing other games. We were forced to go back to Half-Life, just to maintain some balance. We also played AG, DOD, CS and CS:S (Adrenaline Gamer, Day of Defeat, Counter Strike, Counter Strike:Source). The problem was none of these games could really sustain us given where we were mentally at that time. The build-up to HL2's release had been so huge and it took so long (the original release date was pushed back 6 months to November 2004). Yeah, you guessed it, the air had been let out of the balloon and we were completely deflated. It's a wonder that we got through that. We tried and tried to make Half-Life be for us what it once had been. We played it. We still had two very popular and well-trafficked Half-Life Killbox servers. It just wasn't the same anymore, no matter how much we played it. Being in this state of not having a game to play that we could be collectively enthused about made all of us seek other outlets. To be honest I can't remember what the other guys did. But for me, I had two HL2DM servers to run. Or, not to run. I could've easily just dropped them but for some reason, I didn't. I knew I had to get someone to make a Killbox for HL2DM and perhaps then my clan-mates would regain some interest and come try it out, even with all the flaws that HL2DM had. That was my mission. Find a map-maker.

How does one find a map-maker? Well, what I did was to search the HL2DM server menu for custom maps. Occasionally I would stumble into one of these custom maps and the mapper would be there alone, testing it. Sometimes I'd get kicked straight-away. Sometimes the mapper would leave and sometimes the server would just crash as soon as I arrived. One day, following my search routine, I wound up in a custom map with a guy named Black Hat Rob. He didn't feel the need to kick me out or crash the server or leave. He stayed and we chatted. I told him what I needed and that I'd pay him for it. We agreed on $35. A few days later (12.08.04) he produced dm_killbox_gdawgg and I began running this map on both of our GDawgg HL2DM Killbox servers. Then on 12.18.04, Rob created dm_killbox_gdwg, implementing some changes I'd requested. Unfortunately, the majority of my clan-mates were just not interested in HL2DM. Having a killbox for the game didn't change things. And, I completely understood. HL2DM was such a huge disappointment for all of us. The only difference for me was I had to take us somewhere. I didn't know where. I just knew we couldn't stay in this funk forever. We had to move forward and it was my job to get us there.

We did have one clan-member who embraced HL2DM. His name was TOI YA BAS, from Scotland.
TOI, as I used to call him, played HL2DM early and often, every day. He wasn't in a funk like the rest of us. This was refreshing for me because he loved our new HL2DM Killbox maps. Our killbox maps became popular and our servers were chock-full of regular players in a short period of time.

A few months went by. Another development that helped us get beyond our HL2DM disappointment was the creation of a Half-Life map by one of our clan-mates. Her name was stupid. Yes, that was her player name and she was anything but stupid. She was very creative. stupid was from Switzerland and she was a cutie too. To date, she is the only female member GDawgg Clan has ever had. stupid made a Half-Life map for us. It was called M-Cross. It gave us something new and different to play. I really liked the map. Played it a lot. It gave me an idea: have it made for HL2DM.

It was now June, 2005. I met a guy named Bullet Magnet. He's from Scotland like TOI. I have no recollection of how or where we met. It had to be in one of our GDawgg HL2DM Killbox servers but I'm not sure. Just do not remember. Okay, so now you're wondering why is it so important to remember when and where I met Bullet? Easy. He changed everything. He changed everything. How? He is a mapper extraordinaire. A "Master Map-Maker". He and I became fast friends. Bullet created a number of maps for GDawgg Clan. Eleven in total. He would eventually make an HL2DM version of stupid's map, M-Cross. Here's one of Bullet's most profound creations: DM_Killbox_GDWG_BB1 http://gdawgg.com/195.html. But, how did he change everything? Perhaps you'd like to know? He taught me how to use Hammer World Editor. This is the tool used to make maps for Half-Life and HL2DM. The entire pc gaming landscape shifted for me once I had the knowledge of how to make my own maps. It was like discovering an entirely new universe that had been dwelling right inside my own head just waiting to be revealed.

It happened like this: I was looking through the HL2DM server menu one day and I saw a map named "tehbox" in the server list. The name intrigued me. I joined the server. There was no one there. The map was so cool to me. By the looks of things it was quite apparent that tehbox was unfinished. What I had discovered was a work in progress. It was a huge wooden platform with very few weapons and a smallish cinder-block building in the center with an operable crane on top. There were also shipping containers on the huge wooden platform. I looked and looked for some clue as to who the original map-maker was for tehbox. Attribution is very important to me. It was critical to find out who made this incomplete, yet very cool map. Unfortunately, I never found out who the original mapper was. I asked Bullet to make some changes to this map for me. It became quite the collaboration between the two of us. He must've made five or six versions of this map for me. The best version, dm_killbox_tehbox_3a was very popular on our GDawgg servers. Then one day I say to Bullet,"can you make a map for me with a long corridor and a bunch of doors leading to various different rooms?" The idea for this map spawned from the film, Matrix Reloaded. In the movie, there was a scene where Morpheus and Trinity have to get the Key-Maker out of a building with a long corridor and hundreds of doors. That's where I got the idea. I figured that Bullet and I had collaborated so well on Tehbox_3A that this doors idea ought to be just as good, if not better. We got started. It was a good start. But then something happened on Bullet's end. I think it was either family or career-related. Or, maybe he simply got tired of making maps for me. That's quite possible. Whatever it was made him almost inaccessible via the web all of a sudden. I couldn't get in contact with him when I was having brainstorms about the doors map. I had to write stuff down and/or remember stuff and some of my ideas got lost in the process. So, after a few days of no contact with Bullet, I finally caught up with him and said, "hey man, maybe you can show me how to use Hammer..." It only took an instant for him to show me where to download Hammer from and where to find an online Hammer tutorial. Within an hour I created a test map by following instructions from the tutorial. Nothing in my pc gaming world would ever be the same again.

To be continued...