The last 10% is the hardest 10%…
Sorry for the super long wait between news updates, it’s just been real hectic over here at Ham and Jam. Lots of changes with the team members lives has left precious little time to spend working on the mod, but fear not as we’re still pumping out work even if this update shows little of it unfortunately.
It’s true what they say, the final 10% of any project is the hardest 10% and we’ve certainly hit that here at Ham and Jam. There is no doubt we are in the final phase of production before releasing our first public version, it’s just taking an age to get it sorted!
Two things are certain:
1) The bulk of the work on the mod is done, what’s left is minor…but a lot of minor stuff makes a major stepping stone.
2) We have come too far to let anything stop us now.
Work on the mod toils on through the long Summer nights here at Ham and Jam and slowly but surely we’re getting there. Every day more and more bugs are quashed and more and more features are added. The stuff left to do is trivial compared to the rest, yet without it the mod feels incomplete and unreleasable.
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To help us through these long nights we really do need some extra team members, without them everything takes ten times as long as it should. If you’re one of the below then please get in contact:
- Weapon Texture artists
- Animators (3D Max Prefered)
- Other Texture artists (HUD and Environment)
- Coders (Prior mod experience a large bonus)
- Modellers (Vehicle modellers with unwrapping experience preferred)
No joke, if we had one of each of the above, giving us 4 hours work a week we wouldn’t be sat here talking what if’s, we’d be slugging it out ingame! The one thing thats holding us back is the lack of weapon textures. If we had a reliable guy doing them we’d hazard a guess that within 2 months we’d all be playing.
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Without your help this last 10 percent could drag on much longer than needs be. We’ve had many people promise us work but many fail to deliver. At time’s we think we’re cursed! We will bring on Person X to do job X and Y, and within a day/week/month their hard-drive dies/they break their arms/lose their job/move house/vanish without reason.
It’s a shame and without the above incidents (all are allegedly true..) we would be almost certainly released and be sharing the mod with you. The only plus sides to this slow down in development is certain area’s have managed to get really polished, such as the maps destined for release day and even the ones for the next update after that. Code wise SteveUK has also managed to jump on the time waiting for the visuals to be done and crank hard on getting us on the Orange Box engine. Whilst we may not release on it (EP1 is the current plan) the interval between engine updates should be substantially shorter.
Lastly I leave you with a short video, shot sometime ago and has been floating on YouTube for sneaky people to find. It documents one life of a player on Pegasus from spawn to death. There’s bugs and errors in it naturally, but hopefully it shows you an insight into the level and I promise the next video won’t be in the dark!
