It's Christmas - let's party!

OK, Santa baby, time to shake it!

A few shots from the 2009 Christmas Party at the Moviestorm Mansion.

The wicked ladies

A few weeks ago, we gave you a bunch of Halloween monsters created by the Marvellous Mister Ollis. Quite rightly, a number of you observed that they were all male. This is because we are all - apart from Lisa, of course - well brought-up English gentlemen who would never, ever think of a lady as monstrous, evil, or anything less than entirely beautiful, wonderful, and charming. Even when they're dead.

However, we recognise that for dramatic purposes, it may sometimes be necessary to depict ladies in an unflattering light. So Chris went home and locked himself in the cupboard under the stairs for a month with nothing but old Hammer movies and absinthe, and here's what he came up with: a vampiress, a zombie, a witch, and Mrs Frankenstein.

These are renders of the original 3DS Max models, not the actual Moviestorm heads we'll be shipping, but you get the idea. They're all morphable, just like the guys. And they'll be available soon.

Payment systems - update

When we rolled out the new marketplace last week, we had a couple of problems with the payment systems.

1. We can't take American Express. This is due to some issue between PayPal and Amex. To be honest, we don't entirely understand it, and suspect it's as much a corporate issue as a technical one. We use PayPal Pro to handle the actual money transfer, and until they sort it out, we're completely in their hands. The latest prognosis is that we won't be able to accept Amex until 2010.
2. We can't take PayPal at the moment. We're still working on it with PayPal and our billing provider, we think we have a working system, and we'll know in the next day or so whether it's all fixed now. If it is, we'll get it out to you right away. If not, it's back to plan B. Or is it Plan C by now? (And yes, we do see the irony in using PayPal Pro and not being able to accept PayPal...)

We'll keep you updated - thanks for your patience.

What would we do without Jeff?

In previous posts, we've alluded to Jeff's design skills. Turns out, he's even more talented than that.

Over on the Photostorm page, under Scene, you'll see he gets a credit for music as well.

He's not just a guy in a suit, you know!

Last-minute launch hiccups

Well, we've just done our biggest, most complicated launch yet, and we're bloody pleased that it nearly all went to plan.

However, there are, of course, a few outstanding problems that we'll address as soon as we can. F'rinstance...

1. We can't accept PayPal just at the moment. Credit cards work fine, but PayPal's not going through. We're sorting this out with them, and we expect to have it up and running in a few days.
2. We're having issues with taking American Express cards. Again, we're taking it up with them, and that should be fixed soon.
3. If you've got unpurchased items in your shopping basket from a previous trip, you'll need to clear those out manually, otherwise it'll try to sell you those as well as a subscription.
4. A few people are having problems logging in with Moviestorm 1.2, and we can't quite figure out why. If this happens to you, change your password and you should be able to log in.
5. There's no message of the day on Moviestorm 1.2. It works fine on the development service, but it doesn't work when we make it live. It seems to be something to do with Amazon s3, and if we were a little more awake, we'd probably be able to figure out what. That should be sorted tomorrow. If it was there, it would look like this, but bigger. And you could click on it and get yourself a sub.
   
   
6. There are some visual inconsistencies in the site. We've moved stuff to new servers, implemented new CSS, and changed the back end systems, and guess what? We missed a few bits. We'll find 'em and fix 'em as we go.

There's more, of course, and we'll get to it all in due course. And doubtless, you'll find a whole bunch of other things we missed and tell us about them in the website forum and the feedback forum.

Anyway, thanks for your patience. We're off to put our feet up and perhaps sip a small glass of sherry. Just the one. Between us. We reckon we earned it. Especially Yolise, who shouldered the burden of the Web site work.

Oh - and to our American friends - happy Thanksgiving!

Quiet before the storm

It's all been a bit quiet on the blog for a while. The office, on the other hand, has been a hive of activity, as we gear up for a big release Any Time Now. This will include Moviestorm 1.2 and major changes to the marketplace, so it's slightly more complicated than usual.

We also officially changed the company name from Short Fuze Limited to Moviestorm Limited this week, so we're in the process of going through the Web site and everything else with a fine tooth comb and updating everything to reflect the new name.

Normal blogging will be resumed shortly.

Our codebase is bigger than yours

Conor just committed subversion revision number 20,000 to the Moviestorm codebase. That's a lot of code.