As you may (or may not..) have read in previous updates, about six months ago we decided to re-code Ham and Jam from scratch. This was a hard decision for us, we had a semi-working version of the mod but ultimately it was deeply flawed in many places. Partly this was down to it being the first release of the Source SDK which was rather buggy and also it was our first experience of actually coding a mod. If we had decided to keep working with what we had inevitably it would come back and bite us in the arse. So we weighed up the pro’s and con’s and took the step of re-starting the code side of the mod from scratch to allow us a better crack at getting what we wanted doing, done right.

We’ve learnt alot in the year or so of tinkering around and we are proud to announce that we have finally overtaken the point at which we decided to restart. All the features we had in at that point have been recoded and even more have been added and they all work much better than they ever did. Everything is much cleaner, faster, efficient and modular. Adding stuff is a joy now compared to what it used to be.

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This month we’re pleased to announce some significant progress with Ham and Jam after the lull period of the past couple of months!

As we’d mentioned previously, most of our team was tied up with other commitments, mostly exams and finishing up school related projects for the summer term. Now that that’s over, everyone has a lot more freetime and things have started moving again.

Here’s whats going on and Ham and Jam HQ:

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On behalf of the team, apologies for the lack of Ham and Jam news lately. I know a lot of people have been wondering whats been going on especially as the forums have been pretty quiet. We’d planned a small update about three weeks ago but most of us got snowed under with other things.

So what exactly is going on with Ham and Jam?

Well to be brutally honest, not a lot. As we’ve mentioned in previous updates we’ve hit a bump in the road with coding which is making it hard to go forward. Basically, the “core” of our gameplay code (the part which makes Ham and Jam what it is) is stuck in production. We have a design brief for it and planned it all out but we’ve reached the skills limit of our current (novice) coding team and can’t make much progress. We’ve looked around for another couple of coders who can maybe join the team for a month just to push this part through, but so far, no-ones stepped up. For the team this is incredibly frustrating.

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April 1st last year we publically unveiled the mod, perhaps too early in retrospect or perhaps not early enough in others.

Compared to other Source engine mods 1 year of offical dev time is miniscule, others have been in production for 3-4 years, some even from before HL2 was released and still have not released. I think its pretty amazing we have gotten as far as we have with effectivly a core of about 5 people doing the work with others chipping in.

That said we had hoped to be much further along now, we are held back by two things really. Coders and Animators. Essentially the maps for version 1 are pretty much done and we just need the coders to finish our objective system and playtest and fix bugs. We need the animators to animate all our weapon models, which are all modelled and the mjaority unwrapped. We want to get the animated before skinning as we can then optimise and give the skinners the best possible UV to work with.

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