Fixing the bleedin' obvious

I have quite a lot of computers in my life, and they all run Linux. In fact, the only time I leave the confines of my beloved Linux is when I'm at work (where my machine at Moviestorm Towers is a Macbook Pro). Most of my machines run a variant of Linux called Ubuntu. Last year, the Ubuntu development team announced a new project which they called 100 Papercuts. The idea was that they would identify 100 little irritations which were reasonably trivial to fix. Most of the issues identified were minor and really not too significant, but as they all pile up they start to become a serious problem. One papercut, after all, is only an irritant, but if you get enough papercuts all at once you just might bleed to death.

I was quite taken with this idea (the papercuts concept, not the bleeding to death), and spent some time talking about it with Dave and Andrew. As a consequence, we recently launched our own "papercuts" project for Moviestorm. Whilst Ubuntu's Papercuts project attracted over 1600 recorded bugs within a few weeks, our initial brainstorm generated a slightly less ambitious 200(ish) issues. We're going to be tackling these "papercuts" a few at a time, aiming to fix between 10 and 20 papercuts each time we have a code release.

Let's take a look at some of the papercuts for the forthcoming 1.3.1 release.

MS-3277 Keep window positions and sizes after the user has adjusted them

Wouldn't it be nice if, when you moved a customisation window over to the left, it appeared in the same place when you next reopened it? Now it does. We haven't implemented this behaviour for every window yet, but it's in place for all of the "adjust something" windows (what we call Activity Customizers).

MS-4887 Improve transitions between major mode views

This one's not so easy to spot, but the load time required to switch Views - to move from Set Workshop View to Director's View, for example - has been much improved. A lot of clever process threading and Clever Engineering Hacking in the background has allowed us to make these transitions faster and smoother.

MS-4826 Can't remove user images

I'm going to be totally honest with you here: this is one of those bugs that represents a lack of functionality not through deliberate choice but just because we forgot to put it in. Once you add a custom image to a set object, there's no way of actually removing that image if you change your mind later. The ring menu for such objects now features a "clear image" option, which removes the image. It also works for held props and bodyparts.

MS-4815 File overwrite message is confusing

This one was ridiculously easy to fix, but had still been sat in our bug database for a long time. Being such a small team, it's easy for small things like this to never actually make it onto anybody's "to do list", simply because there are so many other, bigger things that need to be done. That's exactly what the papercuts project is good for: making sure that issues like this do eventually get addressed. Here's the dialog as it appears in the current released version of Moviestorm:

And here's the new version:

A lot clearer, I think you'll agree.

MS- 4809 Can't find the movie I last worked on

My Moviestorm "movies" directory currently holds about a hundred different movies, in various states of completion. When you spend a lot of your working day testing Moviestorm you tend to accrue a lot of test movies. The load screen will now allow you to sort those movies, either by name or by modification date. That means that the movie you last worked on can be quickly brought to the top of the list.

MS-4806 Typo on first page of Help

Yes, well. The less said about this the better. Let's just move on, shall we?

MS-4786 Warn me if I'm not placing a character at time 0

Ever had a character appear halfway through a scene because the timeline wasn't at the start of the scene when you issued the "place here" command? Yeah, me too. Not any more:

MS-3690 Autosave

Matt has already blogged about this one.

There are about half a dozen other papercut issues in various stages of completion, but this should give you some idea of what we're hoping to achieve for 1.3.1. This is an experiment, so the choice of which of our 200 papercut issues to address first has been almost arbitrary. What about you? What little annoying niggle would you like us to fix? Comment with your papercuts, and I'll add them to our issues database.

Development blog, May 19, 2010

Watch this and then go ooh, ooh, ooh!

And then you'll have to wait till next week to find out more, because we love to tease you.

The pictures on the wall this week are a promo still from Iain Friar's Clockwork, and a drawing of Boris Karloff that Chris did for me ages ago in, I think, ArtRage.

Moviestorm 1.3 patch upcoming

Apologies for not doing a video blog this week. Text is faster, and we're trying to cram in a helluva lot before the end of the month.

Last week we shipped Moviestorm 1.3. (Hurrah!) Not surprisingly, we found one or two problems in it at the last moment, and we had a couple of bug reports that we really need to address. So this week, we're putting together a small patch that will fix these. All being well, that'll be out on Thursday 29th.

We're also aiming to ship the Filters pack this week. We're still ironing out a couple of problems, but this should contain ten new filters, i.e. the locked ones in the current version of 1.3: contrast up, contrast down, camera shake (small and large), black & white, greyscale, night time, motion blur (small and large), and red cutout.

I'm going to be busy creating more Moviestorm Made Easy tutorials, focusing on the new features in MS1.3, specifically making 3D movies, the gizmo, and the new cutting room.

OK, gotta run...

Thank you, Pioneers!

We're very close to releasing the long-awaited version 1.1.7 of Moviestorm. As part of our development process, for the first time we've let the members of our exclusive Pioneer group get early access to the new Moviestorm. We've asked for honest feedback, bugs, and criticism of both the positive and negative kind. The feedback thus far has been extensive and enthusiastic.

We're busily logging every one of your comments and issues in our database. It's been really useful to get reports on some of the more obscure aspects of Moviestorm, particularly where it relates to user-created content packs or your existing movies, as those are areas where we really can't test very much at all.

We may not have time to reply to every one of your comments, but they're all much appreciated. Please keep 'em coming!

Things you don't see

Adding new features or new artwork into Moviestorm is great. We all get to crane our necks over someone's monitor and go "oooooh". Then we make test movies which show off the new new stuff, and we can all see the results right away. And, of course, we can post nice screenies up here so you guys can go "oooooh" as well. We like that, yessir, we do. It makes us feel good.

However, a lot of what the code monkeys get up to has absolutely no visible benefit, isn't glamorous, and doesn't have any "wow factor" at all. For this upcoming release, for example, they've addressed a nagging memory issue. Whenever you switched scenes, the memory usage gradually built up, until MS was chewing up ridiculous amounts of memory and basically ground your entire machine to a halt. They've also fixed a horrid little bug where cancelling a render from a single camera could - sometimes - cause a crash. Plus they've been nibbling away at issues such as load times, graphics card support, and tiny little performance issues. Each little tweak may only improve things by 5%, so it's hardly even perceptible, but with enough of them, that adds up over time to a much faster and smoother app.

Something which is much more obvious when you're using MS, but still isn't the kind of news you go shouting from the rooftops, is that we've still been bashing away at the mouse bindings for set navigation and camera framing, trying to get something which is intuitive, consistent with what different people expect, and enables you to do all the things you need in a film tool. I don't know how many different bindings we've tried over the last two years, trying to take into account Mac users, different types of game UI, different types of 3D package UI, and so on, not to mention different people's tastes. The only way to do it is to try something, and then use it for a month or two, and see whether it "feels right" after you unlearn the previous version, and once you have any new features in and working. I've been using the new controls for a about three weeks now, and I'm finding them much better, although I do find myself occasionally reverting to the old way unconsciously. Going back to using 1.0.3 for demos feels quite clunky by comparison.

I could go on for pages, listing all the tedious and insignificant issues in our bug database that they address every day, but I'd get bored writing them and you'd get bored reading them. With around 300,000 lines of code in Moviestorm at the last count (and more every day), there are always niggling little errors to chase down and fix. And, just to add injury to insult, it's usually dealing with those evil little bugs deep down in the architecture that causes everything to fall over in a big stinking heap and stop working, at which point everyone else in the building starts to swear, curse, and bang their heads on their keyboards because their movie just broke.

It's a bug. (A stink bug, if you must know.) I just don't like posting without at least one picture. Plain text is just so 19th century!

These hidden changes aren't revolutionary, interesting to look at or world-shattering, but when you put them all together, that's how we make Moviestorm easier and nicer to use. In the background, we just keep grinding away. It's gonna be worth it.

OK, that's enough of the boring stuff. We'll have something pretty to show you tomorrow.

From the QA cave:

After the release of Moviestorm 1.0.3 on Monday, a number of changes were checked in which broke a large variety of things. Here is the first Bug of the Day, direct from ShortFuze QA:



[edit: twak]
here's another -



And while we're at lowering the tone here's the original moviestorm logo (that we only just took out of the distro...)


When your logo is wordart, the only direction is up ;)