Worst October Ever!
Wow, this October has been a bit of a bummer for us here at Ham and Jam.
I suppose the most obvious problem was our website getting hacked and defaced. It wasn’t our site directly that was attacked but the host we were on. Once they’d gained access to that they then systematically went through all the sites on the host defacing them and replacing their index pages.
We did manage to get the HaJ site back up fairly quickly but the host themselves chose to take all the sites off-line and re-install the server software. During this time we figured it was time to bring forward our plans to move to a new host so we’ve been frantically trying to move things from one server to another and migrate everything. The current look of the site site is temporary and we’ll tidy things up shortly now that everything on the new server.
As you’ll be aware from our last update we were seconded to help out with a commercial project which chewed up a lot of our time this month. We still can’t disclose what it was we were doing, but I can tell you I’m really proud of the HaJ team members who did work on it. Considering what we had to do and the insane timescale we had to do it I feel we did an amazing job with the resources we had.
Unfortunately that project and the fact that a large number of our team returned to their various colleges and universities meant that not a great deal got done on Ham and Jam this month. Certainly I was completely tied up with the other project and trying to get our site and forums back on-line. John is back at university but suffering from the great British tradition of waiting forever for his ISP to transfer his account to his new student house so it left without access to the Internet!
Pierog has been trying to get us moved over to the new Source codebase so we can take advantage of the lastest stuff such as HDR, Phong, etc. This wasn’t as easy a task as we thought and is taking a considerable ammount of time, not to mention he’s trying to fit it in around getting an education!
So all in all, this month has been a bit of a wash-out for us. With some things still not settled we’re going to take a time-out to let everyone get their real-life stuff sorted and then re-group in November and make a serious attack at taking the game forward.
