The miracle of birth: where Moviestorm characters come from

Sometimes we wonder about Chris. There he sits at his desk, surrounded by pictures of Bjork, Ne-Yo, Rihanna, and Lily Allen, listening to My Chemical Romance, Green Day, and Bat for Lashes, while browsing Etsy, Hot Topic, Yukka and Vintage Vixen. He tells us it's research.

Then he sits in the coffee room, doodling and mumbling to himself, with that strange look in his eyes that all artists get. You know, the one that says, "I'm being creative, don't talk to me, just bring me doughnuts and drinks heavily laden with caffeine."

After a while, stuff like this gets mysteriously plastered on the walls of the office, usually half-way up the stairs. or left lying on people's desks in plain brown envelopes.

And a while later, new Moviestorm characters appear.

(More screenshots soon, but here's one of those guys in action.)

Halloween Morphing Heads

A few of the heads in Chris's Halloween Morphing heads pack are proving a little elusive. Here's how to get to the Cutter, Piggy, Frank, Mouldy and Vampyre characters.

1. Select the Halloween '09 Monster Morph head - you'll need a male character.
2. Click the arrow next to the morph slider, and choose your monster.
3. You can now morph between the basic human face and the monster face, so you can make him as monstrous as you like!

1.1.7.1 released

Apologies for the slightly delayed notice: 1.1.7.1 did indeed ship on Friday.

Release notes can be found here.

Modders, please read this if you're having a problem starting the Modders' Workshop.

Best laid plans... 1.1.7.1 hiccup

The office net connection has been down for the last three hours, just as we were in the final stages of making the 1.1.7.1 release.

British Telecom are looking into the problem now, but we can't do the release until the net's back, and it's completely out of our hands. It may well be a problem at the exchange, in which case they probably won't fix it until 2am when there's less phone traffic. As a result, there's a good chance the release will be delayed until tomorrow. We'll keep you informed: if the worst comes to the worst, we'll take our kit and the QA team to Dave's house tomorrow, set up a temporary office there, and do everything from his spare room.

It'll be like the old days, back when there were just three of us... except with more of us.

1.1.7.1 set for launch

We're currently putting the 1.1.7.1 patch through its final tests, and it's all looking good. Barring fire, tempest, flood, or Eagle-Eye Holloway spotting something horrific, we'll upload it to our servers tonight when we leave the office, and you'll be able to get it tomorrow after we've verified that it uploaded properly.

Eagle-Eye Holloway is watching YOU!

Moviestorm 1.1.7.1

• SNOW LEOPARD (MacOSX 10.6) USERS are strongly recommended to reinstall Moviestorm in order to benefit from significant performance improvements. Please note also that the NVIDIA Cg Toolkit has a different installation process under Snow Leopard.
• Please note that some modders' content will need to be republished before being used in Moviestorm.

Resolved issues

• Old movies with character "Place Here" commands outside of the floor mesh now load and playback correctly.
• Facial expressions now work correctly.
• Placing doors on the set will no longer be disabled if content packs are missing from the user's library.
• Character library stays on screen after closing the shortcut key help panel.
• The Weather special effect now works in the Camerawork & Cutting Room Views without distorting the camera view.
• Deleting a "Place Here" command now updates subsequent waypoints correctly.
• Walking on rugs works again.
• Updated preview thumbnails for various costume and heads.
• Finally added Tari Akpodiete to the credits (sorry Tari!)

Another of those changes that's so small you probably didn't notice it: the Moviestorm icon on your Windows task bar is the MS logo, not the camera.So when you glance down, look for the little orange blob amongst your open apps, not the little black blob. Why? Because it shows up better, and is more in line with the current user interface.

(Mind you, I'm still getting used to the little blue square for Photoshop Cs4 instead of the feather I'm used to from earlier versions!)

Moviestorm mods

During the 1.1.7 upgrade, we found that quite a few user-created mods (and, by extension, movies that use those mods) stopped working. In some cases, Moviestorm wouldn't even start with those mods enabled. That was a little unexpected, but in retrospect, perfectly understandable. As part of the 1.1.7 development work, we changed a number of things about the way our assets are constructed, so they now run faster, look better, etc, and we republished almost all of our content packs to work in the new way. Our experience so far is that if you republish the mods you've made, they mostly start working again.

Obviously we want mods to work, and we don't want to break your movies. The best Moviestorm movies couldn't have been made without mods: Cloud Angels, Chanel Untold, Death in Venice, and many more. That's why we gave you the modder's workshop in the first place, and why we're working on opening up a modder's marketplace.

However, we need to be very clear about one thing.

The bottom line is that we don't provide support for mods. As we've said before, the modder's workshop is still very much a beta tool, and you're using it at your own risk. If you install mods made by someone else, that's at your own risk too. If that comes across as harsh, that's the exact same risk we take: you're using the very same tools we are: the only difference is we get several weeks of testing against a new release before it goes out, which gives us time to find and fix problems in the background, while you guys only get to test the new code when it's already shipped.

If all you're doing is changing a few textures, or importing simple static models from Sketchup, you shouldn't normally have any problems at all. However, as soon as you start doing more complex things, and particularly if you're hacking into the code or the mscope file, you're right on the edge of the modding capabilities, and there's always the risk that the underlying code will change between versions and break your mod. What it comes down to is that if you're running with mods, you've got a Moviestorm installation that isn't what we supplied, and very probably isn't something we can test against. We certainly can't test private mods we don't have access to.

We'll do what we can to help you, but here's what you need to do to help us.

• When you upgrade Moviestorm, switch off all your mods first. Try loading it up without any mods on. That way, at least you'll know whether Moviestorm works at all.
  
  
• Once you know Moviestorm is working as supplied, re-enable your mods. If Moviestorm stops working, or your movie doesn't load, then it's almost certainly a problem with one or more of your mods. Switch them off one by one (or switch them all off and switch them on one by one) until you can find out which mod is causing the problem. We do know that some people have experienced problems simply by having a lot of mods installed, so it's worth disabling any mods you're not actually using, and see if that makes any difference. We've also had reports of some mods being incompatible with each other, so there's something else to check out.
  
  
• If you're a modder, republish your mod and try again. (If you're using someone else's mod, go back to them and find out if there's a new version available.) We'd strongly recommend that when you publish a mod and put it on a 3rd party site, indicate which version of Moviestorm it was made with - that way if you're using a mod made for 1.1.6 and you're running 1.1.7, you know that's a possible source of the problem.
  
  
• When you report a bug to us, let us know which mods you're using. If you know the problem is related to a specific mod, send us the actual mod file (or tell us where we can get it). If you can tell us who made it, and where and when you got it, so much the better.

Armed with that information, we can probably tell whether the problem you're experiencing actually means "Moviestorm doesn't work at all on my machine," or "this mod completely breaks Moviestorm" or simply "this mod doesn't work any more". That's a big, big difference from our point of view, and it helps our QA team enormously. It tells us exactly what you guys are doing, and will also help us make a better, more reliable, and more robust modder's workshop in the future.

We can't and won't guarantee you that we'll fix your specific mod or make Moviestorm work with it. We'll help if we can, but if there's nothing we can do, then our final position will be to recommend that you disable the offending mod and work around it.

What would be enormously useful, for us and for you, would be to compile a list of mods on the wiki and note against each which version of MS it was made for, and any known issues. Any volunteers?