C'mon, everybody!

We've gone on and on about the performance improvements in Moviestorm 1.1.7 for the last few months, and we've quoted all sorts of numbers to show you how clever we are. What you really want to know, though, is what this means in terms of the movies you can make and how easy it is to use Moviestorm. So, in my usual destructive manner, I decided to push Moviestorm to its limits and see what it could do. It was a simple test plan. Put as many characters as possible on the set, all different (in order to maximise the number of textures being used), animate them all at once, and see how big a crowd I could create before Moviestorm exploded. For reference, in the previous version, I had difficulty with more than ten characters, and twenty was out of the question.

Try this, then...

And, just for extra sweetness, that movie loads from the desktop into the Director's View in about 35 seconds.

To be fair, some disclaimers. It wasn't all fun'n'games. I did have to save frequently with this number of characters on set. Once I had over 50 characters in there, it ran out of memory after about 10-15 minutes of work, especially if it involved scrubbing around in Director's View, changing the duration of animations, or dragging things on the timeline. After 60, it did get quite painful, and was certainly more work than fun - though maybe that was just because I'd been repeatedly adding a character, choreographing them, and rendering the result for more hours than I could count. I also did resort to the trick of switching shaders off while I worked, and then back on again for rendering. I could probably have put a few more on, but by this point, I decided I'd reached Moviestorm's practical limitations.

However, dealing with ten or twenty characters at a time now seems trivial. I don't have to worry about whether putting an extra character or two in the background will cause Moviestorm to choke on its breakfast. I can do a small crowd if I need to - maybe not an entire stadium, but certainly a pub crowd.

It also came as quite a revelation to see just how many costumes we have now. There are over 60 unique outfits on the screen, and that wasn't all of them. Many of them are customisable, which means there are even more possibilities than you can see on screen. And that's just the guys!

It'll certainly be interesting to see what possibilities 1.1.7 opens up for you - we're looking forward to seeing your next crop of movies!