An early (but late) Christmas present news - Ham and Jam mod for Half-Life 2

Over the following years we built the team up to a solid set of core contributors and other tag alongs who helped where they could and we got so close to a release, except that day was about 3 years ago not today. Everything had been going well and we had weekly or fortnightly tests often with a full server and then things kind of just...stopped. Unlike a lot of mod teams most of us were in our late 20's and 30's and had other things to do instead of sit around all night and make video games. Most of us were at University or tied down with other big life events (babies and marriage being a common theme) and one by one we all got caught up in something that required more time than we had.

Jed had to step down his involvement in the mod for various reasons and I took up a lot more of the responsibilities and then in a bizarre turn of events I went from being a unemployed graduate to being offered a job at a video games company to being made redundant and then re-employed at another game studio all within 3 weeks. It was a tumultuous time and was the beginning of a slippery slope of slowing progress. The rest of the team did their best but with the leadership effectively removed and unable to give the time needed things slowly dropped off and more and more of the team slowly slipped away.

But that's not the end of the story, not yet.

Today we finally release what we had, in the state it was when production effectively stopped therefore you should download this with expectations to match. It is quite rough around the edges, things are not explained (theres no user manual for starters!) and you may run into some large bugs. It is not the release we wanted to give but it shows the direction we were going. Whilst its not quite there, its unfair to keep everyones hard work from being seen in public and hopefully what there is will be happily received, especially for those who never got to see the finished product.

Ham and Jam Direct Download Links
Hamandjam.org (714Mb - UK Host)
Johncrewe.com (714Mb - US Host)

Ham and Jam Torrent Link
Hamandjam.org
Extract the files into your *\Steam\SteamApps\SourceMods folder. You will need access to SourceSDK 2006 to run this, this is a free download through Steam:

1. Open the Steam window.
2. Go to the Library.
3. Change the list to Tools.
4. Find and double-click on the Source SDK item.
5. Read over the dialog box and click Download and Install / Next to continue
6. The Source SDK will then be downloaded to your computer via Steam.

Ham and Jam RC1 Key Features

• 2 teams with 4 playable factions (British, Canadian, Polish and German)
• 16 weapons (2x Rifle, 4x SMG, 3x LMG, 4x Grenades, 3x Melee)
• 3 playable classes per team (Rifleman, Assault, Support)
• 6 levels set between 1940's Norway, 1943 Italy and 1944 France
• 3 game modes (Attack & Defend, Push-Pull and Detonation)
• Prone, deploy anywhere bipods, squad LMG ammo drops and other interesting features.

Where do we go from here? Unfortunately not very far. The remnants core team does not have anything like the time they used to have, quite a few are now employed in the games industry all around the world, and the mod is seriously out of date engine wise. It's a good couple of iterations of the Source Engine back and the sole remaining coder no longer has a version of Visual Studio that can compile our ancient code base so the chances of any 1.1 code fixes are limited. We certainly have a few levels that are work in progress that we'd love to share at some point if we can update Hammer to work with the latest Steam structure and probably the biggest gap to cross is the financial one. We used to be able to get a heavily subsidised SVN server but that company no longer exists and gone are the days where you could exchange advertising for reduced fee's, we simply can't afford £600/year to keep the SVN server going.

People have asked if they can carry on the mod without Jed or I and that's something we aren't willing to approve as its our "baby" and we want to keep things the way we want, we may at some point develop something new with the same base. Feel free to take inspiration from what we've done, its a great core concept and surely WW2 will come back into popularity someday!If you have any questions, queries, bug reports or anything to say then pop into the forum and ask away, someone will be there to give you the answers.

I have updated the team page so everyone has credit where its due so if you see you're not on there and did something then please get in touch, I've trawled through many pages of forum notes and handwritten notes to try and get everyone on there.

Best of luck on the battlefield,

The Ham and Jam Team