Catalyst-Gaming.net
Catalyst Gaming
CG

Half-Life 2 Roleplay (HL2RP) [started early 2011 ~ 2013]
Harbour Roleplay (HRP) [started early 2011 - 2014]
Orange Cosmos Roleplay (OCRP) [started early 2011]
Gmod Racer (GMR) [Before April 2012]
Fortwars [started mid 2012]
Trouble in Terrorist Town (TTT) [started mid 2012]

Catalyst Gaming started in August 2010 run by Roflwaffle/alaskan thunderfuck and supported by RTLK, Raiden, Kronic, vizion and a few others.

The Raiden involved in Catalyst was not the same one involved in Relentless and nebulous.

There were donation rewards in the Harbour RP and OCRP servers, and possibly others. Rofl was honest about spending the donation money on hot wings.

Catalyst Gaming ran Half-Life 2 city and Outland servers, along with Harbour RP which revolved around the usage of boats, Gmod Racer, Fortwars, Trouble in Terrorist Town, and a city roleplay server called Orange Cosmos RP. There may have been some other servers they ran, like Sandbox, and also mentions of Minecraft and Rust servers. An article on their Rust server was posted on the Rust Community Archive:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/rustarchive/discussions/0/4700161359561323175/

You could get PET flags (phys gun, entity spawning, and toolgun usage) without having to pay money or jump through hoops, which likely benefited the roleplay servers as it gave everyone roleplay props to work with.

The quality of roleplay was described as above average (particularly on the outlands server running the ineu pass map), being free from binds and copy pasted emotes. Players were happy with shoot-to-miss and shoot-to-roleplay rules.

OCRP was their biggest hit, with the HL2RP server seeing popularity in 2011-2013. The forum was still up by December 2021, and had 76,593 members, 25,313 topics, and 199,130 posts.

A video uploaded in Feb 2012 showing the server browser shows two of their servers:

• Server: Half Life Two Serious Roleplay | #2 | Catalyst-Gaming.net
  
• Game: [OA-FINAL] HL2 RP
  
• Players: 14/40
  
• Map: rp_city45_catalyst...

And:

• Server: Harbor Roleplay | #5 | Catalyst-Gaming.net
  
• Game: Harbor Roleplay
  
• Players: 20/40
  
• Map: rp_harbor2ocean...

A Steam group comment from March 2012 read: "I want GMR Back."

CG was said to have the usual drama: nepotism, rogue devs, and squabbling within the admin team, although the drama in CG apparently didn't affect the community.

The community would suffer repeated DDoS attacks and went down in 2014. It came back up, but never took off again.

Their Steam group was founded 7th or 8th January 2011, and had a peak of atleast 858 members:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/catalyst-gamingnet

The Catalyst Gaming website, still up as of Jan 2024:
https://catalyst-gaming.net/

Bish notes that Harbor Roleplay moved here, still up as of Jan 2024:
https://forums.harbor-roleplay.net/

Catalyst Gaming scale:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/gca1/discussions/0/3759977946667112956/

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/gca1/discussions/0/1698294337765867799/

HeartBit / HeartBit Roleplay


On his website Blt950 lists an impressive body of experience across several programs and coding languages. On it he writes "I do not live with ice bears or live in an igloo. We - Norwegian people are just like everyone else."

From his igloo in Norway he started the community in 2011, with the ambition of running high-quality roleplay servers in Garry's Mod. He said of naming the community: "Heartbeat was considered, but then we changed the last part to bit, as in bits and bytes, but also as bit of the heart. It made it differ a bit from other community names."

He strived to make HeartBit a friendly community where everyone could feel welcome. Half-Life 2 Roleplay would be the first server, followed by two gamemodes that Blt950 created himself - Black Mesa Roleplay and Protect the President.

HeartBit was mainly funded by donations, and focused on making the donations a gesture of will, rather than a reward which would give players big advantages on the servers.

HeartBit was a small community, described as "close-knit" with friendly members that had good mindsets for dealing with issues. Their most popular servers were BMRP and HL2RP, and they also had servers outside of Garry's Mod such as MC/Tekkit and SA-MP.

There's a lack of information about how the experience of the HeartBit HL2RP server compared to other communities that ran it, but there's no doubt that the lore and quality of roleplay were treated seriously.

Black Mesa Roleplay was made in Clockwork, but changed over to Nutscript for its last two releases. In the gamemode you played as a scientist in the Black Mesa research lab in the desert of New Mexico.

Protect the President saw players split into 3 classes - the president, secret service agents, and terrorists. If PtP was run, it must have been sometime before this article was written (July 2018).

With limited event freedom, low interest in BMRP, and a low playercount overall, HeartBit struggled to stay afloat. It ended a few times, and at some point ended for good in late 2014. According to player interviews Blt950 sent leftover donation funds to charity, which is backed up by information from the Blt950 website:

"HeartBit Roleplay has got it's waves of acitivites and been shut down and restarted so many times that it's hard to keep a track on the amount and times, though here's a somewhat accurate timeline of it when we hosted BMRP.

• [BMRP] 21st April 2017 - 21st May 2017
  
• [BMRP] September 2015 - December 2015 *
  
• [HL2RP] 28th February 2015 - April 2015 *
  
• [BMRP] 11th July 2014 - 25th September 2014
  
• [BMRP] August 2013 - 19th January 2014
  
• [HL2RP] 22nd June 2013 - August 2013
  
• [HL2RP] 14th January 2012 - 22nd July 2012
  
• [HL2RP] Somewhere in 2011

* Server launched under "UniPlay" community, but still made by the same HeartBit people and quality.

The community is now permanently shut down due to lack of interest and players mainly. At the shutdown HeartBit donated rest of it's money to Charity Water which was $300!"

Blackquill was a member and would move on to join LemonPunch and later become one of the head staff at nebulous.cloud. Blt950 too was involved in LemonPunch, having been a developer for them in mid-2013.

Blt950 would co-found UniPlay in early 2015 which ran a DarkRP server, and would become similar to HeartBit in eventually running Protect the President, HL2RP, and BMRP. They also ran Rust and Minecraft servers. The Rust server is noted on the Rust Community Archive:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/rustarchive/discussions/0/4700161359561034046/

HeartBit would return for reunion events in 2017, and later reform as HeartBit Group in 2018. Blt950 said of Heartbit in July 2018 "The culture of trying to make quality gamemodes and gaming experiences continues till today."

The new website reads: "HeartBit Group is a network and catalyst of previous, current and upcoming projects." They intend to support the creation of original gameplay projects within the HeartBit network, putting emphasis on realism in terms of gameplay experience, and if there's anything that serious roleplay gamemodes offered in Garry's Mod - it was potential immersion through realism.

The HeartBit Steam group was founded on 4th July 2014 and still had 119 members when checked in 2018, down to 94 by 30th Jan 2023, and disappeared by 3rd Jan 2024:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/HeartBitRoleplay

The Steam group for the successor - HeartBit Group, which was founded 26th May 2018 and had 56 members by 30th Jan 2023, and 57 by 3rd Jan 2024:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/HeartBitGroup

The website for HeartBit Group, still running as of Jan 2023:
http://heartbit.group

The Blt950 website:
https://blt950.com/

Main index
- Community index

A version of this thread was shared to:

nebulous.cloud https://nebulous.cloud/threads/the-history-of-ww3rp.29577/

Monolith Servers https://monolithservers.com/forums/threads/the-history-of-ww3rp.9960/

ShockCore (Forum seems to have been hacked)

Main index
- Gamemode index
-- WW3RP links

These were made for fun, and were popular on the LemonPunch forum. One member wanted to make a playable card game for them.

1: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1438758199
2: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1438758548
3: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1438758752
4: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1438758898
5: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1438759062
6: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1438759211
7: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1438759372
8: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1438759564
9: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1438759773
10: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1438759927

Pulsor Gaming
[PG]

Half-Life 2 Roleplay (HL2RP) [2011]
Intergalactic Warfare Roleplay (IWRP) [2012 - 2013]
Star Wars Roleplay (SWRP) [2012]

With the BnT community slowly coming to an end (BnT had run World War 3 Roleplay and Clonewars Roleplay servers) some of the members moved to Pulsor Gaming. The community was founded in July 2011 or earlier and would bring new life to the WW3RP experience they'd transform and now call IWRP. The head staff seemed to be Eclipse, Banana, and TRUCKER.

Eclipse was set on wanting to see IWRP come to life, and Col. Avalanche (checkm8) was interested in Half-Life 2 Roleplay. The community ended up running servers for both gamemodes. TRUCKER did the little coding that was needed. Felgroove, Bobnine, Banana, and Col. Avalanche helped run things on the servers.

Eclipse, TRUCKER, and Col. Avalanche funded the servers, further supported by donations. There were donation rewards such as character skins. TRUCKER was taking care of the forum and website, and had even been running a server from his laptop. He ended up losing his internet connection for 2 weeks due to DDOS attacks.

Initially the community ran their HL2RP server. It would be joined by IWRP which used the map rp_salvation_2 and was essentially WW3RP set 300 years in the future.

TRUCKER said of IWRP:
"We used to play a lot of WW3RP until we thought maybe we can do a better job and wanted to come up with something similar - just a different setting with more of what we wanted to see. I don't think we were really going for a lore connection between WW3RP and IWRP, we just wanted to tell a Sci-Fi story, but have the same type of militaristic roleplay that WW3RP offered."

The IWRP gamemode saw the Globalist faction as an empire with advanced technology, such as having a spaceship to roleplay in which hovered over the ground and could send small ships to the surface. They'd clash with rebels that occupied planets and despite lacking in technology would still attempt to fend off the Globalists. A practical challenge was getting the Globalist players down to the surface without them being killed by the awkward physics as the ships moved.

Much of the roleplay happened on the ships and was calm in tone. Events were similar to the BnT WW3RP server in being conducted on a shoot-to-miss basis, with PVE battles being shoot-to-kill affairs. The rebels were known as the Forlorn Republic and had their own base. With a lack of animators and modelers; a lot of the content was recycled from other Sci-Fi content packs.

The server would go through stages, evolving as changes were made and new ideas were implemented. WW3RP would continue for many years, and while the LemonPunch server was well known, the Pulsor Gaming server seems to have been forgotten, possibly due to the cultural shift the scene underwent over time. WW3RP would become a heavily deathmatch-oriented experience by 2015 onwards.

Eclipse was involved in starting a Star Wars Roleplay server, probably helped by the fact that many of the ex-BnT members had Clone Wars Roleplay experience.

TRUCKER said of the community in general:
"It was a really fun period. I think we did a lot of exciting stuff and had a group of like minded people to roleplay with."

The content had flaws, and TRUCKER couldn't always be reached due to European/American timezone issues. He was in Europe, while many of the community members were in America. He wanted write off work on the gamemodes, and the community was split between the two main servers (HL2RP and IWRP). The community seems to have winded down sometime around August 2013.

Felgroove continued work on WW3RP and was probably joined by Powley and AlexD in eventually helping out with the LemonPunch WW3RP server that started in late 2014. Felgroove would later work on the AfterFlash WW3RP server which was tried in mid 2016, while nebulous started their own WW3RP server in mid 2016 and ran for 2 years.

The Pulsor Gaming Steam group founded 1st July 2011 had 28 members in 2018, down to 26 in Jan 2023 and Jan 2024:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/PulsorGaming

The Pulsor Gaming website and forum seem to have shut down.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/gca1/discussions/0/1698294337765867799/

These 44 characters appeared in the nebulous Half-Life 2 Roleplay server in 2016, and were saved as part of a series.

Citizens:
Abbudin "Sikh" Thamir
Abigail 'Quilly' Marshall
Andrea Miller
C.D. James Miller
Chelsea Kall
Clyde 'Blanc' Storm
Dr. Claire Pryderi
Dr. Ekber Demir PsyD.
Eoin O'Neill
Frank 'Tosser' Regall
Helen 'Pidge' van Rensburg
Himitaru Nyanka
Hiroki 'Hinaka' Tanaka
Jackson 'Father Jack' Henare
Lazar Grigorievich
Mahmood Jelany
Mario Mason
Mike Harvis
Owen Rain
Ray Hollins
Richard 'Ricky' Petrovk
Ryan Herzog
Taqukaq 'Lilly' Begay
Tom Line
Tony Johnson
Vince 'Greg' McGregory
'Kelloggs'
'Owl'

Government:
Melissa Makintosh
Rep. Konrad Hurtz

Conscripts:
SSgt. Sandra Killian
Sgt. George Lazinski
LCpl. Jaesa Uhira

Civil Protection:
HERO-2 (Sectus)
HERO-4 (Dallahan)
KING-4 (General Mario)
KING-6 (Isuckatgaming)
ROLLER-6 (Corrage)
UNION-1 (Tommyquill)
UNION-2 (Lemon CntCake)
VICE-2 (TheRobsterDJ)
XRAY-1 (cookiro)

Creatures:
Gruh'Shuu
'Exanimalis'

OutsiderGaming
OG


MikkoK and Jonne Bravo had played the LemonPunch Half-Life 2 Roleplay server and teamed up to make their own version in a community they made called OutsiderGaming. The OutsiderGaming Steam community group was founded on 19 October 2013. The exact launch of the HL2RP server appears to have been the next day, 20th October 2013, with 45 player slots, and at some point it ran the map City8_v2.

Rictalspace noted "Outsider Gaming was a splinter of Relentless Gaming." Relentless Gaming was a community that ran a Half-Life 2 Roleplay server from as far back as 2009.

MikkoK paid for the server out of his own pocket, with some support from donations that offered rewards such as prop spawning and physgun/toolgun usage on the HL2RP server.

The community was aimed to have a less authoritarian staff culture than other communities, and they planned to launch a MetroRP server they were developing. The HL2RP server was attracting more players than other communities for awhile. The community had atleast 57 members.

The OutsiderGaming website and forum had shut down by 2018:
http://www.outsidergaming.net/index.php

Repeated DDoS attacks resulted in their server host dropping them, so after around 2 months of server uptime they ceased operations. The community itself closed 6th March 2014, which ended their plan of starting a MetroRP server.

The OutsiderGaming Steam community group:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/OhGeeCommunity

Main index
- Community index
-- OutsiderGaming index

Back in the late 90's and early 2000's I used to spend a lot of time on GameSpy Arcade and MSN Gaming Zone. Internet gaming was considered as a bit of a nerdy thing, and I didn't save any mementos to remember what my experience looked like in the scene. Literally all I've got left from back then is a few old game discs, a newsletter from a LAN centre I won a tournament at, and the background texture of a Geocities clan website I used to run. Geocities, GameSpy, and X-Fire would close, but thankfully Steam was fully released in 2003 and is still going strong which really helps save content, but its features like the screenshot function were only implemented in 2011. Even Googlevids and YouTube didn't appear until 2005 which would be useful platforms to save and share gaming content(although Google would buy YouTube, close Googlevids, then delete YouTube channels without stating why(as they did to mine at one point.)) The biggest problem with archiving content has been the failure of hard discs, so being able to save content on YouTube has been a benefit, even if it isn't completely safe there...I'd love to be able to watch a montage of screenshots or videos from those days. Eventually I started capturing content over the years, especially from Garry's Mod when I got involved in 2009. Time would slowly move on, and everything gradually changed. It might not have felt like it at the time, but when I joined LemonPunch in 2014 I knew people would look back and miss those days just as I missed the years gone before. I had a motivation to make a montage video of the WW3RP server then, not just for sake of doing it at the time, but because I felt that it would age well in future. Sure enough it seemed to be a popular idea and it turned into a series, and even if I didn't enjoy the gameplay as much after 2014, I knew there were people that said the later years were their favourite, and having a montage video each year helps give context and meaning to ones from previous years.It's been great to see how the experience changed over time year by year. I'd always wished that someone would make montages like that for other servers too, and when I had enough experience to sort the whole thing out then it got easier and easier each time and I realised that it wasn't hard to just do it myself. It was difficult at first, but by following a few steps; it breaks the project down to parts you can easily manage. The first was to ask the community for content, then wait for contributions, then save the content, then try to order the content from oldest to newest, then find a soundtrack to fit the best content into it. The soundtrack offers you the length of the project, so if you have a lot of content then you can pick music that's several minutes long, but if you don't have much content then you can pick a song that's only a couple of minutes long.You always want to have more content than you need for the song so that you can cut the worst content out to fit it, rather than have too little and stretch content out. So you pick the screenshots and clips that tell the best stories and are visually appealing. Having lots of characters in the middle of interacting in some serious roleplay situation that has good lighting will look better in the montage than having a random screenshot that doesn't really convey what the experience was like. All of the montages I've made could easily have been twice as long as they are, but I think the term "less is more" really applies when you want to show the highlights of a server. Telling a story and having the content flow are the important things, and if you've got the content flowing from oldest to newest then you're telling the story of the timeline for that server. An alternative method would be to tell the story of the players experience, like for HL2RP it would be arriving at the city, interacting with citizens, interacting with Civil Protection officers, then showing some resistance roleplay, and then towards the end you'd show a climactic battle scene if you have content of combine forces engaged with rebels.There were weapons involved in the servers, but I often shied away from showing too much deathmatching because I wanted to celebrate the roleplay aspect of the servers, avoiding them appearing like frag videos. The majority of FPS servers are about deathmatching, and as much as I enjoy playing them casually or getting the satisfaction of playing competitively in teams, I felt that roleplay(if the players involved are being fair and care about mutual interaction) can be more engaging and immersive as an experience than just deathmatching. I was lucky in having the trust of Computer22 when he gave me the tools I needed to pretty much run things as I wanted on a serious roleplay server in Gmod, and the genre has kept my interest since then. I've spent a lot of time in other gaming genres like SimRacing and RTS games, and each of them share common issues like anti-social players being disruptive which can easily erode the value in leagues and clans. There are obviously a lot of potential difficulties in the serious roleplay scene too, and I admit that I don't play much these days, but I think it's worth celebrating and remembering the highlights of the best gaming experience around.What inspired my motivation?Archive historyMain index- Community index-- Communities without servers--- Gmod Community Archive index

What do you enjoy about the experience?
Living another life than our in another universe is just something ... EXCEPTIONNAL, I don't have anything to say other than this.

What does the experience here have that other HL2RP servers lacked?
A real immersion, and a fucking great code that developpers did, I really enjoy this server because of this.

Has the experience changed here over time?
Not really, I always played the same way and had the same feeling.

Have there been any challenges?
I don't really know what challenges this server could have, excepting minges.

What would you like to see added in future?
Maybe more things for the civilians, but I don't really know what, i'm not an expert

What do you enjoy about the experience?
I mainly liked the diversity of the players. Not everyone was super experienced and a lot of people were completely new to the gamemode, so they always did things that weren't considered conventional

I never enjoyed being an actual rebel and being a citizen was always the best part since the people you met were always flamboyant and different, and they always had different goals which made it entertaining

What does the experience here have that other HL2RP servers lacked?
An actual playerbase

Has the experience changed here over time?
I would say so. From the few times I've gotten on the server over the past months it just seems really bland to me now. I always liked how there were only a few super geared rebels and when guns weren't so common. Now it seems like almost half of the server is a walking army that sits in an area of the map that's completely secluded

My favorite experiences were when masses of citizens grouped up in condemned zones and caused commotion, with some of those groups actually becoming somewhat prominent. Now all you find are your average oppressed citizen, average super geared rebel, and average loyalist. Nothing ever new really happens.

Have there been any challenges?
The only people I see anymore are people who've been playing the gamemode for years. There's never any new players that I see and everyone's off in their own circlejerk

What would you like to see added in future?
I'd give a suggestion, but I know it's not going to be added. There's always these massive threads detailing these crazy new changes to the BMD system, or how to improve rebel RP, or how to improve this or that but nothing ever happens or changes.

TLDR
Nothing new ever happens and nothing ever changes. We see these massive suggestion threads and talk of a new weapon base, but those threads always just become irrelevant and no one pays any more attention to them. Literally go and look in the accepted/denied suggestions forum and you'll see what I'm talking about