February News Update - Ham and Jam mod for Half-Life 2

News is a bit late this month, sadly due to the fact that actual news is a bit thin on the ground.

Ham and Jam is not the only mod going through a bit of a slow patch at the moment, in fact it seems to be a bit of an epidemic at the moment. I suppose the most obvious reason is the demographic of people who are actually working on the mods. We’re talking people in their mid-to-late teens or early twenties who do it in their spare time in and around studies and work. As schools and colleges increase the workload and deadlines loom, peoples priorities change and working on a mod gets pushed much further down the list.

We have made some progress, although it’s mostly under the hood with our codebase. Stephen Swires has joined the team to help out with the coding and in the past couple of weeks has done a fair ammount of work. As mentioned in a previous post, we’ve totally revised the way we’re building the HaJ code and it’s proving to pay off. It’s now much more modular and we we can much more easily merge in any code updates Valve release. I’m also happy to say that we actually have a working Linux build which we didn’t have with the previous version.

Gingerlord has been busy adding more tweaks to our Pegasus Bridge map and working on getting a custom skybox texture for it. It looks stunning and really has the feel of a moonlit night. He’s also started fleshing out another map based on a historical mission in a altogether much colder climate…

One problem continues to plauge us at Ham and Jam and thats an accute shortage of people to skin and animate our weapon models. We’re aware that animators are thin on the ground, but considering the ammout of weapons that come out on sites like CDG and the DoD MSA forums, we’re totally baffled as to why no-one seems to want to texture any of our weapons. It’s a real eyesore having to run around with a bright white MP40 and to be honest, with HDR bloom, it’s pretty painful too.

I’ll leave you with a picture of the Pegasus skybox, the current work-in-progress German player model and an example of how acute our weapon texturing problem is…

Written by Jed - Forum URL