Moviestorm 1.5.2 coming soon!

Over the next week, we’re hoping to bring you a new upgrade to Moviestorm called 1.5.2, which has a host of fixes and features that we hope will enhance your Moviestorm experience.
Firstly, we have found and fixed a few performance issues, which means that Moviestorm can be used harder and for longer. These improvements have affected the entire program, right from loading your movies to set design, right through directing, camerawork, the cutting room and publishing.
We’ve also added some extra functionality to the shadows, so that you can specify a 2048 shadow map or even a 4096 map (up from the original 1024), meaning sharper, more accurate shadows for those of you with supporting hardware. Also, there are a few user interface tweaks, that will help you find and edit your commands with greater ease.
Most notably, new characters don’t appear in the Dressing Room in their underwear anymore. While we originally thought that this was the ideal starting point when defining a character, we’ve had a few disapproving comments made about how inappropriate this was for our younger users. These costumes are still available, but the user has to consciously select them – default characters now appear in jeans and t-shirts.
Another little “tweak” that has been added is a “Centre View” command, so that if you get lost navigating around the virtual environment, you can quickly return to the centre of the stage. For seasoned Moviestormer’s we know this isn’t that great an issue, but we really think it will help users that are new to the program.
All in all, 1.5.2 will be more stable, more user friendly, and more robust than the previous version – and did I mention that the update will be coming next week?! Keep your eyes and ears peeled for a new message of the day in your launcher, and please let us know how you get on with 1.5.2!

New update: Moviestorm 1.5.1

It’s usual for us to launch a patch soon after a major release, but this one is slightly different . . .
In addition to the usual bug fixes that inevitably need resolving when the software is exposed to an ever-increasing combination of hard ware and software, we have had time to get a couple of very useful feature requests implemented, that we hope will really help your workflow and improve stability.
Firstly, we now have a working Google SketchUp wizard for the Mac version of the Modder’s Workshop. This means that users of both Mac and PCs will no-longer have to change workstations to import a Google Warehouse model, as they can now bring the asset into Moviestorm on both platforms.
In addition to this, we have added a single level undo to the Terrain Editor, so that you can’t ruin an otherwise perfectly sculpted terrain with an accidental brush stroke.
Many of the costumes have been tweaked so that their foot-fall sounds (footstep audio), so that characters will now sound correct when walking on a variety of floor types. The WebM importer has been altered so that videos that contain no sound can be successfully imported and improvements have been made to the way Moviestorm handles navmeshes (especially with the Extra Large Set), so you shouldn’t experience any crashes, and you should now be able to navigate from one navmesh to another.
Lastly, copying scenes in your movie works correctly again, and we’ve updated the printable cheat sheets so that they are up to date with the latest UI changes.
We hope you all enjoy the new version (which is an optional update, so that you can choose to update or not), and we’ll soon have news of some new content to add to your libraries!

There's also an updated user manual available here.

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.

Micro-patch

We just shipped a micro-patch to the Moviestorm launcher to fix a problem with login error messages.

When you start up Moviestorm, it will download a tiny update, and then restart. You can then use Moviestorm as normal.

This patch introduces no new functionality.

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...