Valentine's Day pack available in app

Ben finally recovered enough to make it into work and build the patch for the Valentine's Day pack, so you can now get it directly from the Moviestorm launcher as well as from the Web site.

Just hit Get More Content when you start it up, then you can rent or buy it (or try it free for 7 days).

Valentine's Day mayhem, continued

On Friday, we told you we were releasing the Valentine's Day pack in two stages.

"Unfortunately Ben, who's the mastermind for the patches, was taken ill and had to go home early before he could complete the patch creation process. Rather than have someone else take over part-way through, and risk screwing up what he'd already done, we opted to put the tested standalone version in the marketplace today, and let Ben complete the patching on Monday when he's recovered."

Of course, we assumed that Ben would be back on Monday. He's still unwell, so we're having to delay the release of the patch a little longer. In the meantime, you can still get the pack from the Marketplace.

Valentine's Day mayhem

We released the Valentine's pack today. Normally we don't release on Fridays, but since Valentine's Day is only ten days away, we figured we shouldn't wait till Monday.

You'll notice from the announcement on Moviestorm News that you can only get it from the Marketplace until Monday. if you fire up Moviestorm and hit Get More Content, it won't appear. This is because of the way we package the addons. We have to make two versions of each addon pack. One's a standalone version that goes into the marketplace so you can download the pack from the Web site. This was ready yesterday as planned.

Then we make a second version of the pack which is a patch update, so you can get this directly from Moviestorm without going to the Web site to purchase it. Unlike code updates, these get flagged as optional updates, so you only get them once you've got a license to the pack. The patch then has to get tested separately to make sure it shows up in the Moviestorm launcher and installs properly. We didn't manage to get to this bit yesterday, and were planning to do it today.

Unfortunately Ben, who's the mastermind for the patches, was taken ill and had to go home early before he could complete the patch creation process. Rather than have someone else take over part-way through, and risk screwing up what he'd already done, we opted to put the tested standalone version in the marketplace today, and let Ben complete the patching on Monday when he's recovered.

Sorry for the inconvenience & any confusion - however, this way at least you can get the pack now instead of waiting.

Faeries

Ben found himself alone in the office yesterday. We'll let him take the story from here...

"Only one in the office on a Friday, so went to country instead. Found a video in a broken video recorder abandoned in a country garden. Has some strange footage. Warning: apparently female faeries have yet to discover clothing."

Deflecting lasers

Ben's been playing around with some of the new swordfighting animations and some lasers (with hide). Add in some of the Earcom scifi sounds, and this is what you can do.

Thumbnails

Another little snippet from the commit log:

• Revision 24087 Committed by dave: - Changed the angle for the body part's thumbnails
• Revision 24088 Committed by ben_sanders: - Resaved the parasol thumbnail
• Revision 24081 Committed by ben_sanders: - Updated thumbnail on the beachfront set, and added boulevard set

This is the kind of thing that you don't normally think too hard about when you're starting out building something like Moviestorm. You know how your character & mod shop and prop choosers are going to work: you have a bunch of different things to choose from,, and little pictures of them which you click on to select them. Not exactly rocket science.

Then you come to implement it, and it all looks a bit meh. In some cases, you can't actually find the thing you want. Turns out that the angle from which you view a 3D item is far more important than you might think. If you don't get a good thumbnail image, what you see is confusing and messy: in extreme cases, it's like one of those quizzes, where you have to identify a common household object from an unusual angle.

In our original version of the prop chooser some time ago, we had an automated thumbnail tool which took a snapshot of each item from a standard angle and distance with a standard lighting, and then cropped it to fit. When we re-did it, we replaced many of the automated thumbnails with hand-made ones. This involved employing an intern for a month or so doing nothing else, as it's a time-consuming and tedious job. However, the results were worth it.

Body parts are generally a lot easier to standardise, so we're sticking with automated thumbnails for the new mod shop and character shop designs. However, we're still experimenting with what the best angle is. It makes more difference than you realise.

More tantalizing hints

You can glean a lot about what's going on from the feed of the updates committed to the main Moviestorm codebase: here's just a few entries from today:

• Revision 23995 Committed by amos_willbond: - Updated icons for morph regions (character shop).
• Revision 23996 Committed by amos_willbond: - Further changes to morph area icons (character shop)
• Revision 24001 Committed by chris_ollis: - Extra face textures for morph male
• Revision 24012 Committed by ben_sanders: - Mouth height separated, and full morphs added
• Revision 24013 Committed by ben_sanders: - Added blood and blemishes to the skin detail
• Revision 24014 Committed by ben_sanders: - Beards added
• Revision 24015 Committed by ben_sanders: - Copied beard thumbs from core

The new character workshop is definitely taking shape!

The worst Moviestorm crash we've ever seen

We want Moviestorm to be easy to use. We try not to dazzle you with an enormously complicated interface, with hundreds of buttons and menus. In some cases, this means that you can't get the level of precision you need for a certain task. We're always trying to find ways to let you do that, without transforming the Moviestorm interface into the control panel for a supersonic jet.

One of things that can sometimes prove difficult is precise positioning of objects in the Set Workshop View. Thankfully, we've got some new functionality currently in development which will help.



This gizmo is called the, er ... well, it's actually called The Gizmo right now, because we haven't come up with a more sensible name for it. It allows you to "nudge" an object by very small amounts, until you get it exactly where you want it. As well as allowing linear movement, the Gizmo (somehow I think that name is here to stay) also allows you to apply rotation to an object, in any direction.

We let Ben take the Gizmo for a test drive, and he got a little carried away:

Moviestorm 1.1.7 - Wooosh! It's damn fast!

One of the first things I do each morning, after I've set a pot of thick black coffee brewing in the Short Fuze kitchen, is to check the Moviestorm forums to see what's been said while I was asleep. Recently, I've been able to get daily feedback from the members of our Pioneers Club, who've been given early access to Moviestorm 1.1.7.

I've been delighted by the amount of feedback we've received, but not as delighted as the members of Moviestorm's QA department, who spend each day eagerly aggregating the responses from our Pioneers, and diligently recording them in our issues database.

The guys in QA are very, very good, but we know we won't be able to catch every single bug: there's only a few of us, and Moviestorm is huge. So, the abundant feedback from the Pioneers has been incredibly useful to us. The comments and bug reports have come in all shapes and sizes. Overman kicked things off with a short movie demonstrating some of the new features of 1.1.7. He sneakily hid a bug report at the end of the movie - not the first time he's done that, the little scamp.



Other pieces of feedback ranged from the mundane to the bizarre. In general, the Pioneers seem to be very pleased with 1.1.7, and excited by the new features. forgeuk made a post with a title which simply read "Whooosh! It's damn fast!"


There's no denying that it was a beta release, though. Some of the errors have been very strange. czechboysonic found a bug with a custom addon that didn't seem to load in 1.1.7.

Ben eventually tracked it down to a case-sensitivity error - just the sort of thing we might never have spotted without help from the Pioneers.


A release as big as this one inevitably contains new code and fixes which we haven't explicitly talked about. Sometimes, though, things get fixed that even we didn't know about. act3scene24 has never been able to quit Moviestorm properly on his Mac, and always has to force-quit the application in order to exit. Not any more:


We'd look terribly unprofessional if we admitted that we have absolutely no blasted clue how we fixed that bug (since we have no blasted clue what was causing it in the first place) so in order to save our blushes I'm happy to lie and say that I fixed it. Yup, that was all me. Thousands of lines of late-night coding have paid off.

Ahem.

Dis-Tressed

Well, wouldn't ya know it? The hairstyles packs were all ready to roll, and then Ben comes back from holiday, takes one look at them, and finds three issues that need fixing. So after a some soul-searching, discussion, and banging of heads on desks, we decided to hold them for another week and do them properly. The upside to this is that we can also sneak in a few more things that we were reluctantly going to leave out, so it's not all bad.

That's what QA is for, after all.


The thing is, it'll only take a couple of days to fix the problem, but we have a pretty cast-iron rule round here. Never release on Fridays or Mondays. That's a rule born of painful experience. Friday releases almost always mean "c'mon, guys, just get it out of the door and then we can all go home," rapidly followed by "oops, there's a serious problem, and nobody's around to take a look at it for three days." Monday releases almost always mean, "let's shove this out first thing and then chalk up an instant win," rapidly followed by "we did go through the whole release checklist, didn't we? errr...."

Then we get to the corollary of that rule. Don't release on Thursdays unless you're sure it's going to work. Because then when there's a problem, you have to fix it on Friday, which leads to the Friday Release Syndrome, and a good chance you'll rush the fix and get it wrong.

So that's why we try to go for Wednesday releases. We have time to check everything properly at the start of the week, and time to fix it if we screwed something up. Which means that you'll have to wait for next week for the hairstyles.

But we'll tease you a bit in the meantime. We know you love it when we do that. All the screenshots are ready, so we'll post those on the main blog and make you drool. Just a little bit. We wouldn't want you messing up your keyboards.

A block of flats... no,a flock of bats!

We hinted yesterday that the upcoming Special Effects pack is for doing more than just explosions. You can use it to do this, for example...

It's just your everyday story of a woman innocently walking along, and then SHAZAM! Happens all the time. Well, doesn't it? No? Well, obviously it does to Ben...

Anyway, moving swiftly on, this is made completely in Moviestorm. No third party editing, no reshoots, no fancy post-processing. Just create two scenes, and cut between them using the smoke as a cover.

Having seen this, we're all kicking around ideas for weird and wonderful ways to use this pack. Testing this one should be a hell of a lot of fun!

Give us your suggestions for test movies we can get our work experience students to make, and we'll see what they can do.

Firework show

We really should have done this at the end of last week in time for the Fourth of July, but hey, we didn't. This is Ben testing the Special Effects pack (what we used to call the pyros pack, but it's been renamed because it contains more than just things that go bang).

OK, you all know the chorus. Sing along...
"When's it released?"
"When it's ready!"

Soon, my friends, soon you too will be able to blow things up! (In a safely controlled environment, of course, with no danger to children, pets or property.)

Carrying a torch for Love(craft)

We know it's been pretty quiet around here recently. We're sorry about that - as Matt says, it's all Daves's fault (and yes, the pluralisation there is correct).

We're as busy as Santa's favourite elf on Christmas Eve here at Moviestorm Towers, putting the final touches on Moviestorm version 1.1.5 as well as working on several forthcoming Content Packs. We've already teased you with footage from some early development code for the Pyro pack - remember the rain and the fireworks? - but Julian, Ben and Chris have just shown me some new developments, also coming in Pyro, which were so pretty I had to share them with you. Ready for some Lovecraftian exploration?

View the high-quality version at Moviestorm.co.uk

"And when tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conches in seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager vapours flock to heaven laden with lore; and Kingsport, nestling uneasy on its lesser cliffs below that awesome hanging sentinel of rock, sees oceanward only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of the buoys tolled free in the aether of faery."

P.S. It's been brought to my attention that I should probably issue a public apology for the dreadfully tortured pun-laden title of this post. I hereby do so, unreservedly.

Case swap

It's the classic move from Hustle. One person puts a case down, another picks it up and walks off with it. New animations and assets from the upcoming Criminals pack.

Walkin' out the door

Demo film by Ben Sanders

"So what?" you might ask. "It's a guy walking out of a house. Gee." Well, this is something you haven't been able to do before in Moviestorm. Look carefully about 5 seconds in. See the fireplace through the window? See the picture through the door?

This is the first composite set, which includes an interior piece and an exterior building model. The lower central portion is a standard Moviestorm set, built and dressed as normal. Then around and above it, we placed some of the new modular customisable buildings, and matched the wall textures, doors, and window styles, so that the set is now located within a larger building.

So now your characters can walk seamlessly out of the set and onto the street, without the need for clever editing or camera angles to make it look as if the interior and exterior sets are actually joined together. It may not look like a big deal, but it completely changes the way you can film many different types of scene.

Mmmm, tracking shots... watching people through the window... doing that whole Citizen Kane number... all this will soon be yours!

The forbidden love of one man for his microphone

If you've been using Moviestorm for any length of time, you'll have begun to realise that there's a lot of functionality there. Teaching people how to use Moviestorm fully and effectively is a difficult job. Unfortunately, it's also my job. It's made even harder by the fact that, no sooner have I finished a bit of documentation or a video tutorial than the blasted dev team selfishly releases a new update to Moviestorm with lots of extra whizzy bits and improvements, and I have to start all over again.

Nonetheless, I proceed undeterred. I've just put the finishing touches to a brand new (and up-to-date) set of video tutorials. They'll be going live on the moviestorm website any day now, and they'll replace the existing tutorials. As well as the four tutorials we had before ('Moving Around', 'Giving Instructions', 'Creating Characters' and 'Changing Your Set'), I've also managed to squeeze in a fifth - an introduction to the camerawork system. Each tutorial is between 5 and 10 minutes long, and designed to give you the basics of Moviestorm as quickly and simply as possible.

I've been using Camtasia Studio to produce these videos, and I've been very impressed with the package. Although it's practically unusable on anything but the beefiest powerhouse of a machine, it has a lot of incredibly useful options for video tutorials and the like. I'm also loving - and I do mean that in a slightly obsessive, scaring-your-friends-and-family kind of way - my Samson CO1U USB condenser microphone. Technically, it's Short Fuze's property, but if anyone tries to take it back, they'll have to get through me. I'm prepared to defend my precious mic with physical violence if needs be. I use Skype for voice chats fairly regularly. Since I've started using the CO1U, every single conversation now starts with the phrase "Wow, the audio quality is crystal clear - what mic are you using?".

Creating these tutorials is quite an involved process. As well as having to constantly work to tone down my usually gravel-strewn North-of-England accent, I also have to deal with the fact that sometimes I simply forget how to speak [1]:



Once the script has been written and the screen recording done, I edit the video down to the shortest length I can make it, and then add in all the overlays that show mouse button presses, screen highlights and zoom and pan. Finally, I tag the video with bookmarks at suitable points and then render it out as a streaming Flash video.

Somehow, despite my best efforts, QA always manage to get hold of these vids before they make it to the website. I live in fear of Ben_S wandering over to my desk and muttering, "Johnnie, that last video tutorial you recorded ... are you aware that you didn't mention [insert crucial bit of information]?".When that happens, there's nothing for it but to dry my tears, release Ben_S from the headlock, and re-record.

It's usually around this time that the next version of Moviestorm is released.

[1] Listen carefully at the end and you'll hear another thing that forced me to retake - the Squeakiest Chair In The Universe.