[HAJ News - August 2007] Action Stations!

[Jed]

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:

Support from CVSDude

Ham and Jam is pleased to annouced a sponsorship deal with CVSDude who have kindly agreed to provide free version control hosting for the next 12 months.

We use SVN extensively and it makes collaboration much easier within the team. Everything is kept in one place, tracked and shared with everyone during updates. We also use it for the actual game content and binaries which means everyone always has access to the latest version as it’s being developed.

Version control is a big part of the development of Ham and Jam and the potential loss of our existing SVN provider was a big headache. CVSDude stepping in has helped relieve one headache and certainly made moving forward easier.

New team members

We’re please to annouce that Olah and Baer have come aboard to help us with some of the coding and E.T. has offered his help to complete our missing v_model animations. We’re really glad to have them and things have really moved forward in the past couple of weeks with the extra help.

Objective system code close to completion

We’ve mentioned this in previous updates and are glad to say that with the help of Olah, our objective system is starting to take shape. The objective system is what drives much of the gameplay behind Ham and Jam and lets us build up missions and objectives in our maps. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to start plugging it into our maps for testing.

Wiki and Steam Community pages

Collaboration was a bit problematic using just our forums so in an effort to keep everything in one place and make it a bit more collaborative, we’ve set-up a internal developers Wiki. Sorry folks, it’s not public but hopefully by the time we start pushing out public beta versions we’ll be able to make some sections available. Mostly it’ll be info on the game and for people who want to map or model for it.

I’ve also set-up a new Steam Community group for Ham and Jam which hopefully we can use for playtests and better organisation. Again, it’s currently a private group but when we go public we’ll allow people to join it.

Odds and Ends

Our new codebase is getting close to matching our original internal alpha build in terms of content except this version is much improved in terms of code quality and functionality. If you’re not a SDK coder this won’t mean much, but we’ve been careful to seperate our own stuff from the Valve codebase to make merges easier and to use proper OOP programming techniques as much as possible. The hacky “how does this work?” code is slowly disappearing.

Final words…

We appreciate how patient everyone has been with us so far and we know you’re itching to see more than a bunch of map screenshots. We hope to very soon start playtesting internally and luck permitting, we’ll maybe get some actually gameplay screenshots out and maybe a video.

We can’t at this point give you any percentages on how complete the game is or what’s left or any estimates of a release. All we can say is that development is back in full swing and this past month we’ve made a hell of a lot of progress.

[fess]

Great to hear things are back on track and good progress is being made!

[Arturo]

Like fess said good to hear and keep it up!

[zone trooper]

Bloody awesome, and is that the E.T. from the Insurgency mod?

[Slackiller]

Nice to hear.

Way to go Baer

[Hugo.B]

It's great to hear of progress!
Just wondering, will the release of HL3 Ep2 see any major code changes to Source? Could it cause any problems?
Hoping all goes well.


H.B.

[Jed]

Mike Durand @ Valve said that the SDK update will follow quite quickly after EP2/TF2/Portal and after a chat with Matt Boone he said some stuff like proper team and class handling and proning will probably be included.

I was tempted to hold of doing any major work on hour team/prone code until that release but seeing as their saying October and the SDK update could turn up any time between then and Jan 2008, we have to press ahead and just go with what we've got.

[Chief-Phillips]

Glad to hear everything is going well guys, and remember, PHL is behind you

[War Pig]

Hurrah!

I think I'll get back to gaming soon!

[Blackout]

Wow my account has been validated atlast lol. you need to take that validation thing off, I think you would get more forum members.

Anyway just wanted to say ive been watching this mod, And thought it had died like the rest.

KEEP IT UP YOU LOT, I HAVE FAITH IN THIS MOD

Cant wait.