As the co-lead of Ham and Jam, and given that Gingerlord has been lumped with writing most of the monthly updates, he gets a break this month and I give you my own round-up of where we are at the end of the year.

Well first of all, I’d like to thank everyone who’s stuck with us and given us their support over the past year. We appreciate things haven’t been going quite as quickly as we would like and there’s been a number of reasons for this. However we’ve kept on, keeping on and things are really starting to look solid.

Map updates and playtest

The team got together a few weeks ago and decided to have an informal playtest on our two maps, haj_radar and haj_pegasus, which was probably the most populated tests we’ve had. It was also the first proper playtest we’ve had since Gingerlord expanded Pegasus all the way up to the Bénouville road junction. The map now has a number of objectives - secure the command bunker, capture the bridge, liberate the Gondrée Cafe and then push up towards the Bénouville junction.

The Germans put up a spirited initial defense of the Bridge, but were soon pushed back to the western side where one heck of a firefight took place. With mounting casualties the British liberated the Gondrée Cafe, pushing the enemy back towards Bénouville. What followed was an intense battle for the road with men crawling on their stomachs just to gain back a few feet of territory. Through gardens and overwalls both sides thought tooth and nail to hold on and although the casualties were huge, eventually one side broke. Who won? That would be telling….. ;o)

New art assets

HaJ is certainly starting to have it’s own “look” now that we have a large library of art assets to draw upon. Unfortunately we’re still struggling to replace all the borrowed content so that we can be 100% legal before we release a public version. The biggest hurdle is currently the weapon view models which need to be animated and skinned. Texture artists aren’t a problem, but animators are and we need those first so we can remove un-needed faces from the model and optimise the texture maps. This is so the texture artists have the best possible base to work from.

Updated Source engine

We’ve also taken a big step this month - we’ve swapped codebase. We’re now running the newest version of the Source engine which gives us acces to HDR, Phong and a bunch of other improvements over the previous version. However, moving to this engine isn’t as easy as you might think. It requires moving all the code we’ve written into the new codebase and obviously this takes time. That said, myself, b0b, Pierog and Gingerlord have formulated a plan and are currently moving everything over as we speak.

Oh and we’ve also got out Linux build environment set-up so hopefully we’ll have a Linux server available in parallel with the Win32 version!

Commonwealth model preview

Last of all, we promised you a second media update this month but in true HaJ tradition, I screwed up. I was supposed to take a bunch of screenshots during the last playtest but got so caught up in playing the game I completely forgot. :o(

However, I decided that it’s about time I unveild the new Commonwealth player model I’ve been working on for the past couple of months as the old Goldsrc converted models just weren’t cutting it any longer.

The base model was made by myself and the normal maps were made by the talented Alun Hollyman who is also doing the textures. Alun creates the normal maps by taking our base model into ZBrush and physically modelling all the creases and details resulting in a much more realistic result than just converting greyscale bump-maps.

I have to reiterate that the following pictures are WORK IN PROGRESS, let me repeat that, WORK IN PROGRESS. I’m sure someone will pick them apart though even though they are WORK IN PROGRESS.

As a final bonus, I’ve created a rendered a Quicktime 360° rotation preview of the player model so you can get a closer look.

The model uses my “modular” approach to making the player models, in that certain elements are quickly interchangeable to create new characters. First of all, we won’t have a clone army like Day of Defeat. Each side will have a number of heads/faces. Likewise, different roles will carry different equipment.

This chap represents the “base” Commonwealth infantry man and will be adjusted depending on the country and climate in which he’s fighting. Canadians will have the greenish tinted battledress and in North African maps you can expect short-sleeves and sunburnt legs.

Well that’s all for now.

A Happy Xmas too everyone from all of us at Ham and Jam! :o)

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