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.

Then something amazing happened. Out of nowhere and by pure coincidence the majority of the team found a good portion of time in their busy lives where nothing was going on, even Olah our coder has managed to dig his way out of a hole and help commit a whole bunch of new stuff. So without further a do, let get on with with whats happened this month

The Maps

There’s only really two dedicated mappers on the team, myself and TheSurgeon, and between us we have 4 maps in the works. Pegasus has had a bit of a shuffle around in its design and been made a lot smaller, one of the objectives is wandering around the map at the moment finding the optimal place for itself and the others are pretty set in stone. The advancing/retreating spawns are also being tweaked to allow the Germans to get a decent chance at defending the Command Bunker and the bridge itself before falling back to the Cafe Gondree and beyond.

Radar is also having some gameplay tweaks, notably at the top end by the Radar and whilst the barb wire does its job of being a hinderance, it does it too well! The advancing/retreating spawns are again being tweaked for optimal placement.

Gold has probably come on the most since the last update on it and my god is it an awesome map. It combines open fields, tight hedgerow lined rows and town combat in one nice neat package. Theres so much in this map I could write a seperate post all about it!

Afrika unfortunatly hasnt had much done to it and after a review we’ve decided that it needs some heavy rework, more updates on this when work starts on it.

The HUD

Up until now the HUD has been pretty horrible to be honest, its been left behind but thats not the case anymore. Spine has outclassed himself by designed and implementing stage one of our new HUD design (for a sneak peak look at the new playtest images in the media section!). Its a bit different to most games and sits well with our philosophy of “make it as real as you can, but don’t take the fun away”. You are given the information you need, but in a way that makes it not completely fake nor total realism. The health/stamina/ammo counters are segmented into 5 sections to give you a general overview of your situation.

In a firefight you can at a glance see roughly how well you are doing, but will also have to use your brain to think about stuff tactically. You don’t know exactly how much ammunition you have left, your counter shows 1 bar, that could be 1 bullet or 20 depending on the weapon and its magazine size. Do you reload now and risk being attacked whilst reloading? Do you wait and hope?

Alpha 0.20 Playtest

Since we had so much work done we gathered the team together last Sunday and had a big test of the mod in its current state and all agreed the mod was really coming together. We’ve updated the playtest media page with a selection of the best images from the playtest, as always these are work-in-progress and don’t reflect the final release of the mod. Theres still some borrowed content in there, mainly the axis player models, but its getting less by the day. Here’s a selection of the images:

Donations

This month has seen the most work commited to our SVN server since the mod was concieved, even outweighing the commit of everything to the new SVN. As such we will shortly be needing to upgrade our account with the SVN hosting company and as life goes, this means more money. $180 for a year to be exact, so we’re opening a donation paypal account for people to contribute money to. We’d really appreciate if you can spare a few pounds/dollars/euros and donate. Our main priority for the money is the SVN server as this is central to the whole mod, without it we’re going to be in trouble. We’ve got a list of things we can spend the money on afterwards such as official dev team game servers and hosting but if we’ve find we have a “surplus” of cash afterwards we intend to donate it to veterens charities such as The Poppy Appeal.

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! ;)