Spring has sprung
As you’ll no doubt of noticed we’ve had a bit of a spring clean of our website and are now sporting a new design care of Spine our art lead. The original site design was something we put together quickly when we first launched Ham and Jam but after a year it was really starting to look a bit shabby. We’ve tidied a lot of things up too so hopefully using the site will be a bit easier and for us, keeping it up-to-date will be a pleasure rather than a chore.
We need your support!
This month we’d like to draw your attention to the nifty “donate” button lurking over there in the sidebar. As we briefly mentioned in the last news update we’re trying to raise money to help cover some of the expenses that Ham and Jam has incurred.
Up until now our expenses have either been covered by sponsors or from members of the development team digging into their own pockets. Luckily it’s only been small amounts so far which has meant sacrificing beer money on the odd occasion. However, we’re having to dig into our pockets more often than is financially viable and the kindness of our sponsors only goes so far.
One area that is critical is to maintain and pay for the teams SVN server which has been the central pivot to our development process. Our current SVN server was provided free for a year by a sponsor but very soon that deal will end and we will have to cover the cost of the server ourselves.
This is where we need your help. We need to raise £200 by the end of June to secure our SVN services for another 12 months. Without it development on Ham and Jam could grind to a complete halt!
At the moment we have a fairly basic SVN set-up but with £200 we will be able to expand our source repository and allow more of our development team access to it. It will also enable us give access to beta testers so that they always have access to the latest updates - something we sorely need for our upcoming regular playtests.
We don’t expect to raise the entire £200 from donations alone and the dev team will add what we can to the fun as we’re able. So if you’ve got a few pounds, euros or dollars sat in a paypal account doing nothing, we could really put it to good use!
If you’d like to donate but don’t have a the ability to use Paypal, let us know and we’ll discuss other ways you can get your donation to us.
Development work this month
Well now we’ve got on our knees, cap in hand, here’s the latest developments on the game itself.
First up we were very lucky to get some help from Matt “Mugsy” Boone of Valve (you may know him as the lead coder on Day of Defeat) who looked into our source code and helped find some bugs and offered some advice and suggestions on where to make improvements. Several people noticed he was playing Ham and Jam on Steam and wanted to know how long he’d been on the team! Needless to say his help was very much appreciated and helped us out a lot.
We’ve elimnated the irritating “aim-lag” bug which drove so many people nuts during the last playtest. The problem came from the client and server sides getting out of sync and the server deciding you had fired your weapon some time after you actually did. This set up a wierd sort of “timewarp” where the server would make you go back to where you were when you fired the weapon earlier - effectively making you hop back and forth. To say it was irritating would be an understatement but thankfully it appears to of been solved now!
More of a enhancement than a bug fix, we’ve removed our slightly jerky recoil system and implemented a smoother version inspired by the recoil from Day of Defeat. It still makes shooting accurately a challenge but the motion isn’t as jerky as before and is much more pleasing to the eye.
We’ve also made headway implementing a deployment system for some weapons which will hopefully soon allow us to fold down the bipod on MGs for more accurate shooting. As an aside to this, we’ve been experimenting with movement when prone to reproduce something more realistic and remove the awful “spin on the spot” movement from just about every multiplayer Source game.
A few other small bugs have been dealt with - bunnyhopping has been removed, melee weapons are no longer incredibly loud and we’ve got rid of the amusing bug where a bullet hit would punch you across half way across the map!
Hopefully we’ll be having another team playtest soon to confirm these annoying bugs are gone and we’ll get some useful feedback on how the new changes improve on gameplay.
Maps and models
While most of the work this month has been on coding we have had a new mapper and modeller join the team on “probation”. At the risk of jinxing ourselves we won’t say who or what their working on but we can say it’s looking very promising so far.
Media updates
As part of the re-design we’ve fixed up our media section a little. We’re currently in the process of updating the map screenshots so it’ll be worth keeping an eye on for the latest pictures.
Final matters
Hopefully this summer we’ll begin much more serious and regular playtesting which will mean added more beta testers to the team. As we’ve mentioned before we’ll recruit the testers ourselves so don’t ask! However some long-time supporters of the mod will doubtless be offered a role on the team as reward for their loyalty.
