Friday 11 April 2008

Pause, take a deep breath, carry on...

It's been a long, long haul between releases this time, but the finishing post is on sight. Assuming Dick Swayze doesn't find any more last-minute nasties, 1.0.4 should be good to go early next week.

This has been one of our biggest sprints to date. Just to summarise, this release includes:
  • New timeline UI
  • New gesturiser UI, including gesture previewer
  • Better faces
  • Improved ambient shadowing
  • Name tags in director's view
  • Miscellaneous performance & memory improvements
  • Various new features to support the upcoming Sci-Fi pack
  • New start sequence
  • Change to way you load movies
  • New launcher and update mechanism
  • New mouse bindings for set navigation
  • Improved walk pathing and step animations, and less sliding around
  • Better rendering, especially for close-ups
  • New female faces and hair
  • Guns now have muzzle flashes
  • New mouse cursors to show what you can do with a prop or other object
  • Pack names shown in tag browser for props
  • Fixes to cutting room
  • Improvements to the way props are held
  • ... and a host of miscellaneous tweaks, fixes, and improvements!
So, we're going to award ourselves a weekend off, enjoy the sunshine if there is any, and then start work on the next release...

3 comments:

Ricky Lee Grove said...

Congratulations. That some helluva list of improvements. I'm looking forward to testing it all out. Thanks for the hard work and enjoy your weekend!

Spong3y said...

Comments with each fix:

New timeline - It was a bit difficult to click events exactly overlapping each other, so this was worth the fix.

New gesture UI - unlike the timeline, the old gesture UI does not overlap events. It just places new ones below the recent one.

Better faces - looking forward for these.

Improved ambient shadowing - hope it makes low quality renders look good.

Name tags - it could make organizing characters much much easier, especially in crowd scenes.

Performance and Memory improvs - yes, definetely the one I'm looking forward for.

New start sequence - I don't quite understand, but is the "start sequence" the main menu? Just asking.

Improved walk path and steps - also one of the stuff I'm looking forward for, very similar to pathing in Antics.

Better rendering - more stability means more quality, I should say.

Muzzle flashes - you guys definetely saved me from buying some expensive 3rd Party FX tool. Thanks!

All the others I did not specify - they're all awesome, I can't wait for this update!

Matt Kelland said...

... and the word from Dave P and the boys over in QA, as Monday draws to a close, is... "it's mostly OK, just got a few more things to check." Code seems to be OK, art seems to be OK, it's mainly down to issues with the installer and the release note,s and all those last-minute gotchas.

Looking good for a release very, very soon.