Moviestorm 1.4 is imminent

It's taken a while, but it's going to be worth the wait. We've just assembled a complete build of Moviestorm 1.4, and it's looking good. We're dealing with a few minor issues over the weekend, then we'll be putting it through its final tests on Monday & Tuesday. If all goes well, we'll release it mid-week - and then our entire programming team is taking a well-earned holiday!

Moviestorm 1.4 includes a whole bunch of new features that you're just going to love. If you've been following the dev blog, you'll have seen us getting excited about them over the last couple of months. Individually, they're pretty cool. Now that we've put them all together, though, they add up to a huge leap forward.

• For a starters, there's a whole new dressing room, and a completely new head creator. You can morph faces in a huge variety of ways, add make-up and decals, and you can create random characters to give you inspiration or fill out your extras quickly. Oh, and we fixed those annoyingly visible neck seams. That's something we've wanted to deal with for absolutely ages!
• There's a totally new lighting system, which gives you much better lighting and really brings out the relief in your movies. It's a tri-light system which allows you to create effects similar to the traditional three-light system used on real-life movie sets. It includes lighting presets, so you can quickly flip to day, night, or low-light scenes. You can still use the old ambient & directional system if you want, but once you've used this, you won't want to go back. There's also a new color chooser which remembers the last colors you picked, which is handy for so many reasons.
• The help system has been completely revamped. It's now much easier to use, and links through to the video tutorials. There's also a beta of the prop info tool: press one key and it shows you what every prop on the set can do. We also made a printable cheat sheet that you can stick in front of your keyboard or on top of the screen.
• One of the most important "under the hood" updates is the auto-save and backup system. You can store up to ten backups of each movie, which means that it's easy to experiment with a scene, decide you don't like the way it's going, and get back to a previous version.
• And, as we promised, we worked our way through a bunch of "papercuts", those little annoying things that irritate the hell out of you. Like the save dialog, which always confused people, and now makes sense. Or the load movie screen, which you can now order by date and quickly find the last movie you worked on. And when you load a movie, it goes back to the last view you were in. And so on.

The test team keep telling us how much easier and quicker it is to use Moviestorm now, and how the new characters really allow you to get much more variety into their movies. We're really looking forward to seeing what you guys do with it. The movies you've created so far have amazed us, and we're sure that you're going to do something truly astonishing.