Story
Early days
Back in the early 2010s, I began playing BHOP on Garry's Mod. The first server I joined was Peltiers. This gamemode became my regular. My first run took 45 minutes on normal, playing Bhop_monster_jam. I didn't do well at the bhop. Eventually, I improved after watching tutorials and winging it. I didn't strive for records, and autostrafe became my default style. Peltier had this on his server. I started using bhopping to listen to audiobooks and podcasts, as I noticed I absorbed more from this medium of learning while I bhopped. My bhopping improved as a result.
London
Eventually I moved to London for studies. I don't recall which server I was on then. Still, the loading screen had a song from a degenerate early-2000s prank featuring adventurous members of the boomer generation sharing hygiene tasks. This made my university flatmates think I was constantly watching that video several times a day. When I explained, they realised it wasn't my frequently visited website. At the time, I did most of my university learning through BHOP, which helped me learn a lot. It went well, but ill health caused me to drop out and return to my home town.
Home town
While I was back in my hometown, Peltier's server was no longer active, so I began playing on other servers. Now, if you don't know, Peltier is a pretty chill, relaxed server owner. So going from that environment to your typical bhop environment was unpleasant, to say the least. Although I did experience a bit of what the bhop community is like in London, I never really experienced it properly until my return to my hometown. I experienced the full toxic brute of the community, and I was not a fan.
The Station
In 2018, I moved to work at the station. Peltier was back up around then, and bhop became my regular game mode. I made a joke to another player about a map, comparing a local area to the map. It turned out this person, who I will call JE for privacy's sake, was from this area. We became friends and played regularly. A few years later, someone I will call BW came along. They knew more about backend systems than I did. My knowledge of this subject was a bit lacking. I learnt a lot from BW and gained enough skills to host my own backend system. Since JE and I lived next to each other, we met up and became good friends. We created a DarkRP server together, which wasn't successful. The DarkRP server brand was "Helious Gaming", a name I took from the game DEUS EX.
BHOP server
As I developed my skills in making and hosting GMod servers, I wanted to make my own bhop server. This was mainly due to toxic behaviour in the bhop community. I have no idea why you lot are so mean to each other. I wanted a specific game mode and couldn't find it anywhere. I knew it was public, but the server owners of several different servers refused to give me the source. Gravious 8.42 came my way; I installed Pterodactyl on a VPS and fired it up. The database was completely empty, but I found a fix. I first ran this server myself on bhop_monster_jam on September 6, 2023 at 1709 hrs UTC.
At first sv.db was the database, but the same people who refused to give me the gamemode source strongly advised me against it. I was naturally sceptical. I tried several times and failed because I lacked the knowledge. I eventually worked out how to do it, and migrated all the data to a MySQL server. At this point, the server had around 1500 usable maps and another 500 non-zoned maps. I wrote a script to find the non-zoned maps, then zoned the rest. This took a long time. After around two years of glorious friendship, JE and I parted ways. As I took full ownership of the server, I decided to rename it. It became "The House Of Poe"
The House of Poe
The goal was to make the server unique, since several servers ran this game mode and lacked originality. I redesigned the system's entire theme and added additional scoreboard functions. I did all of this under the House of Poe name because I was running it independently. I also created a few new styles. At the time, czarchasm.club had expired, so I bought it to preserve gmod bhop history.
September 2026
Recently, a few things where, including a visual RTV system that required me to screenshot over 3000 maps. This was an automated process. The server crashed several times during this process because the custom addon loaded into a non-screenshot map, took a screenshot, and then loaded into the next one. Each instance increased RAM usage by 10 MB, eventually causing a crash. I gave all my screenshots to sourceindex.net so the bhop community, mainly CS2, could use them one way or another.
I got the segment system from the bhoptimer addon, created by shavitush for CS2. I ported it into the TAS system for the gamemode. Additionally, I used zones-cstrike by srcwr to apply the CS2 standard zones to all my maps; I used this addon to add more maps, since I could auto-zone several more maps. I ported the map data to the gamemode I run now and imported it into the database.
Special thanks
- To the owner of fastdl.me, for hosting all the map files I needed.
- To JE/ELYX for those many nights of bhopping.
- To Finny, Little Lou, Heavy TF2, Jack/ELYX and TCK1337 for testing, especially Finny, who would often jump on at short notice for me to test something.
- To Gravious for making this epic gamemode.
- To the owner, FXgaming, for giving me the autostrafe code and helping me out in the early days.
- And to the others whom I have failed to mention!
Credits
- Server owner: Poe
- Gamemode: Gravious
- Modification of Gamemode: Poe
- TAS Segment system: Shavitush
- Maps: https://fastdl.me/
- Map images: Poe & Lightningblade
- Ideas for improvement: Various
- Triggers menu: Improved by Poe, originally made by CLazStudio
- Web czarchasm.club: Czarchasm, domain acquired by Poe
- Bhop Anticheat system: CLazStudio
- Discord Integration system: Trixter, modified by Poe
- Testers: Finny, Little Lou, Poe, Heavy TF2, JE/ELYX, Tck1337
- Style Selector: Poe
Long term projection
I plan to always run this server. This server will die when gmod dies...
