O.K. I admit the last news post was a joke, but it was true! I was in the middle of writing the up-date when I was invited down the pub and I thought it might give me some inspiration. :D Well at least you can’t say we’ve got our priorities wrong.

So lets got on with it…

Weapon System

I finalised the weapon code for rifles and machine guns over Xmas which now means they function as per our original design plan. Most of the effort was put into making the code as simple and portable as possible and from that we have two “foundation” weapon classes that all our other weapons are based on. This means we can add new rifle and machine gun weapons into our framework very rapidly with the bulk of the work being the modelling and animating.

The ammuntion system has been added to the bolt-action rifles so like their MG and SMG counterparts, ammuntion is managed in a magazine/clip system rather than the “bucket-o-bullets” I’ve talked about in previous posts. The Enfield was a particularly tricky weapon because of the fact it has a magazine that can be reloaded when half full and a single clip counts for only half of it’s capacity. It was quite tricky to get it working within the framework but it’s done now and appears to be functioning well. Testing will iron out any final bugs though.

User Interface

We had a fairly long discussion a month or so back about how our in game HUD should look and Spine prepped a few concept pieces for us to try. We’ve now started finalising the code needed to implement his designs and it’s very simple, functional and very customisable. I’m sure there will be revisions to the HUD design as time goes on but this way a non-coder can play with the design without tying up a programmer.

Maps

We recently found some new intel on Pegasus Bridge which forced us to re-evaluate all the data we collected before and we’ve found some additional details we’d missed. John has done some re-modelling on the map and the bunker is now about as accurate as we can make it. Theres also some rather interesting new routes available at the back of the Gondrée Café…

Afrika has had a few minor tweaks and last I heard one team member lost their mapping virginity and is working on a very “cool” map indeed.

We’d still welcome any mappers that might want to contribute something but be aware we do have high standards for our “stock” maps.

The “Orange Box” Engine

We got asked a lot if we’d switch to the new EP2/Portal engine when the SDK was released so that we’d have all the new stuff. Well the SDK code is out in beta but at this moment time we’re not planning to move to it. While there are some technical improvements, a lot of the new changes are purely visual and we can’t justify the time involved in porting everything when we don’t even have a final version of the game on the previous engine. Right now our focus is getting the game to some sort of releaseable state on the EP1 engine. When the time is right, the SDK is out of beta and we consider it bug-free enough to work with, then we’ll maybe consider switching.

Contributors and Beta Testers

We’ve had one of our periodical role-calls and it’s become very apparent that the “core” team of HaJ developers is basically about five people. Over the past year we’ve had a lot of people offer us help but sadly it’s often not worked out too well. We have no problem anyone who wants to contribute say one piece, completing it then oving on - it’s the “hangers on” that have, to some degree, really held us back.

With that in mind we’re considering being a lot tougher on what sort of work “casual” contributors will do and work more integral parts of the mod will only be offered to those who can demostrate prior experience, work of a high standard and guarantee some sort of commitment to finish whatever task their on. It’s sad that we may have to remove some people from the active team due to non-participation but it’s necessary to keep things moving slowly.

On another note, I’d mentioned previously that we may be looking to recruit beta testers and this could happen fairly soon. I personally feel we’re getting to the stage where serious regular playtesting will be worthwhile and for that we’ll need some dedicated testers who can help us nail bugs and any gameplay issues.

Again, don’t contact us - we’ll contact you. We’ll probably recruit from the ranks of our forum members as anyone who’s stuck with us this long deserves some sort of reward! ;)

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