As I’m not doing so much development work on Source tools at the moment, I should post a bit more about my work and the development going on behind Ham and Jam.

Theres a lot of cool little things we’ve added, some a little hacky, some little code wonders. A lot of these you’ll have to wait until we release to see, but others we’ve started sharing as their just too cool not to show off now.

One rather amusing idea we had was “First Person Ragdolls”. In most FPS games when the player dies you tend to kick into a third person view and HL2 is no exception. We joked about how violent some of the player deaths were (especially from explosions or falling off things) and how they would look if you continued to see them from the first person perspective – watch the death through the eyes of the ragdoll itself.

Of course, being me, it was too much of challenge not to try and it turned out to be incredibly easy. In fact the first hacked version was less that eight lines of code!

Being the nice chaps we are, we decided to share the code with the HL2 modding community and posted up in an article on the Valve SDK Wiki.

It’s going to be a while before Ham and Jam is release (we’re getting there!) but if you want to see what the effect looks like you can check out some test videos we made below.

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