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Today marks the 9th year since we launched Perpheads. It is really quite unbelievable that it has been such a long time and even more surprising that the server is still doing as well as it is.
Before we get into some of the early history of Perpheads I want to quickly mention today's small update:
- Added a commemorative plant that has a small chance of being given to you after harvesting weed (limited to 1 per player) for the next week
- Will not be given out with seed batches or if you harvest before ready
- Substantially increased weed yield for one week
- Added two new gestures, looking at your watch and making a Shush gesture
- Added ability to give players even higher extended prop limit
- Slightly changed the look of the speedometer (in preparation for a future update)
Before we started working on Perpheads, we were playing on a PERP server called VS3. This is where the original owners (Xquality, StephenPuffs, Renato, Tanges, and me) and even @Bolli all met each other. Sadly for us, the server shut down for a reason I do not remember. After some time, no other than @TinySlayer decided to revive VS3 by hosting a PERP server called Simply PERP.
To our dismay, Simply PERP was only around for a few months and since we all really liked playing PERP we decided to give it a shot ourselves. We started off with a really broken base of PERP (still made for Garry's Mod 12, requiring a lot of code changes to work with Garry's Mod 13+).
It took us several months to get the code into a working condition, after which we were able to implement a few cool custom features like the inventory wheel that is still used today.
We also realized very early on that the default Evocity map that was used by SimplyPERP and other PERP servers could use some modifications to make it fit our gamemode better. This is why Xquality decided to make the rp_evocity_v33x_perpheads edit of the map which can be seen in the trailer we made for our server which features a fantastic soundtrack composed by Xquality.
The experience of playing the server was quite different to how it is today. For example, back in 2013 the Steam Workshop was not a thing for Garry's Mod yet.
Instead of being able to download the content very quickly when joining, they had to be downloaded very slowly and one-by-one using the old CS:S way using "fast" download or you had to download the content manually beforehand. We offered the download of the content either as a zip file from our Website, or using SVN.
To alleviate some parts of this issue we made a launcher that would manage downloading the content automatically. Thankfully we were able to abandon the launcher once Workshop was added to Garry's Mod.
After a lot of development we were finally ready to launch on the 5th of July 2013 after 2 weeks of public beta testing. We were thankfully able to attract a lot of previous SimplyPERP and VS3 players immediately when we launched and we started off with quite a few players. However, after roughly a month of running the player count slightly dipped and we thought that people would just lose interest in our server. In fact, I even already initiated cancelling the server that I thankfully stopped and continued running the server (and now 9 years later here we still are!). Another month later we were so successful, that we almost reached the top 10 of Garry's Mod servers at the time.
Old logo:
First website
Second version of the website using VBulletin
Gametracker ranking 2013:
Perpheads - The Fireman video:
2013-2014 firework show:
First website
Second version of the website using VBulletin
Gametracker ranking 2013:
Perpheads - The Fireman video:
After a few months of running we wanted to improve the server further and implement our very own custom map. Evocity was always a really nice map (that many people want to play even now!), but we would rather have our own map that we could shape to be exactly like wanted. This is when we started the initial design of Paralake, a map we still use to this day.
Initial plan for Paralake:
Images from early versions of the map:
Front of city hall including a never released (bad) version of poker:
Firework show made for the release of Paralake V1 (we still use the same terrible program to make these shows!)
Images from early versions of the map:
Front of city hall including a never released (bad) version of poker:
Firework show made for the release of Paralake V1 (we still use the same terrible program to make these shows!)
With paralake we also released a ton of other new content such as our very own custom gun system (previously only CS:S weapons were used), new character models and much more. The jump of content and features from the initial release to when we released Paralake was probably more than any other single update. We managed to put this much time into developing the server simply because we were all just finished with school or just started studying at university and we put a significant chunk of our free time into developing for Perpheads. In fact, developing the map took us around 6 months with several hours spent every day working on it, refining it, testing it, etc.
This is how Perpheads started out and became the server that it is today. Unfortunately, being around for as long as we have been also means that many developers/owners who were once incredibly important parts of our team left or stopped being active, simply due to having to focus on other things in life rather than Garry's Mod. Thank you to everyone who helped us develop the server and make it as polished as it is today.
The same obviously also goes for all of the talented staff that our server has seen and who had to leave due to similar reasons. Unfortunately, there are simply too many to list so just a quick thank you to all of you!
I also want to thank everyone who plays the server. Without the incredibly dedicated player base that we have, we would not be around anymore. Things like PLPD and the website which were (at least initially) primarily developed by community members rather than us Owners/Developers are something that I have not seen in any other Garry's Mod community. It is also unbelievable to me that we still have players from 2013 or 2014 who play our server regularly. Nothing makes me happier than knowing people enjoy playing our server since such a long time.
There are obviously also many other things in our history that are incredibly interesting (such as the tales of Chef Ramsey or our exploits on serveral DarkRP servers). We might tell some of these next year at our 10 year anniversary
If you have some nice memories and images of your early days on Perpheads, please feel free to post them in this thread!
