Thanks to all you guys voting for us we have made it into the Top 100 Unreleased Mods 2009 over at ModDB.

We didn’t expect to make it this far (we never have before!) and we’d love to see how far we can go, so please vote again for us. You can vote for as many mods as you like too, so you don’t just have to vote for us, have a browse around the other candidates.

Development has been pretty slow over Christmas as you’d expect but the pace is picking up again now so expect a larger update next month. What we do have this month though is some images of the “nearly final” MG34 texture. I say “nearly final” as we’ve got a few problems to solve with it in terms of ingame performance. The holes in the barrel shroud are supposed to be see through (as in the render) but ingame this looks a bit dodgy and creates some visual oddities when you see through them, into something else transparent. The problem arises as we can’t decide which is less of a performance hit, a alpha texture requiring extra work on the renderer or to have the holes modelled and add the extra work there. Either way it’s 99% done and looks like this:

We’ve also been given the near complete “theme” for Ham and Jam, produced by Brian Gair. This is the music you will hear in the menu screens and for general media releases from now on.

Have a listen!

Last but not least another video by one of our testers “Porc-Epic”, this time showing off some gameplay from HaJ Pegasus.

More next month!

For those of you celebrating it, Merry Christmas from the Ham and Jam team.

It’s the time of the year where mod development naturally slows, team members are currently slogging it home to their parents to be fattened up with mince pies and mulled wine all over the world. This week also holds our last internal beta test of 2009. Feels weird that this year we’ve done over 100 tests and in the back of your mind you think “Have we actually gotten anywhere?”. The answer is yes! The downside of regular tests is you never really see the mod evolve if you’re active in it, however when you flip your version of the mod back a month or two via SVN, the difference is amazing.

As we plough headlong in 2010 what can we/you look forward to? A public release in some shape or form for certain. When? Who knows, but rest assured when you read a date on the site that we’ve been ready for a good while before and have been solidly testing the mod to hopefully have a smooth release *touch wood*

Back to this year though, things have been progressing quite nicely. Spine has finished all the overview maps (we’re showing two in this update, the largest and smallest) for all the levels due to be released in v1.0 and is back on texture making duties, cranking out signs and posters like a Norwegian sweatshop. Weapon textures are being finalised (you can see bits of the WIP MG34 in the images) and prop models are being churned out by Cpt. Ukulele at a rate of knots. He finished off the Horsa glider models for Pegasus in a matter of days, something that had eluded 3 other modellers for months.

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