Airborne, interviews and the dev process.
Time goes by quickly and I hadn’t realised it’s been three months since we last posted an update. Sorry about that.
I know we talked about a release delay of “weeks” but as usual I grossly under-estimated the lack of free time myself and the team would have this summer. Anyway, with this update I’m glad to say I can bring you some news of positive progress so lets start off with the good stuff!
Commonwealth Airborne Forces player models.
I mentioned in our last update that one of the things that we really needed to get done was the Commonwealth Airborne Forces models. This was a key requirement of our Pegasus Bridge map and something that was very close to my heart.
I’m pleased to say the base modelling and texturing are done and we’re already started the process of getting them in-game. Three of the team – myself, Soren and Lasse – worked on the model and it was certainly a labour of love for me.
Soren was responsible for the 3D model and high-definition sculpt for the normal map, I created the texture for the distinctive Denison smock and Lasse created the rest of the texture for the model, helmet and Bergen rucksack.
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It took a lot of work, especially to capture the distinctive look of the smock and we went all out to get it right. I’m really pleased with the results. The screen shots are taken from the Source model viewer so you can exactly how it will look in game. Sadly the detail in the normal maps is hard to make out in a still image so I’ve included a render to give you some idea of the detail.
A couple of interviews
I got interviewed by two gaming sites about Ham and Jam, the history, development, how it plays and our plans. I tried to be as thorough and honest as I could be. Hopefully you’ll find them interesting.
I’m always happy to talk about Ham and Jam so if anyone else wants and interview feel free to get in touch.
The development process – why stuff takes ages
A discussion came up in the forums after our last post about why its taking us so long to get stuff finished in which I responded with some details on just what is involved in making something like a single player model. I think this was quite enlightening for some people as they hadn’t quite understood what is involved. Certainly if you’d ever done anything for the original Half-Life games the complexity in character modelling for Source is a huge leap.
Please take a read if you’re curious – it might explain a few things and just the amount of work we have to try to cram into our limited development time.
Recent playtest
We held a team play test a few weeks ago which was great fun and good to get a proper fight going. We went through all the maps which are candidates for the first release and apart from a few small tweaks they are all pretty much done. Certainly maps like Pegasus are going to be brutally hard and you really are going to have to work hard as a team to be successful as the British side.
In summary…
So that’s it for this month. Sorry again for the lack of updates. We’ll try to be better in future!
