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.

Metro Style - correction

Despite what I said in the video blog yesterday, the Metro Style pack won't contain any costumes from Photostorm or Greetingstorm. They're all new and the pack will include 12 customisable stock characters (barring last-minute changes).

Metro Style

First look at the costumes for the Metro Style pack, which should be out this week if everything goes to plan.

Another video blog

More news on what we're up to.

My life sucks, I want to cry.

Look who we saw hanging around on Chris's computer today.

Like a Goth, only much less dark and much more Harry Potter. (Urban Dictionary)

You know how it goes. When we've finished making them.

This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.

Back in the olden days, when Moviestorm was still a young whipper-snapper of a movie-making tool with very few of the cool features it has today, we made a series of short parody movies to show what Moviestorm was capable of. The movies were made by Michelle Pettit-Mee (a leading light of the machinima community, now working as part of Bioware's cinematic design team but back then the Machinimator-in-residence for Moviestorm) and were parodies of well-known scenes from film and television. We had a Pulp Fiction scene, a Phoebe-like Friends song ... and a short sequence that looked suspiciously like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet.



We released the Romeo and Juliet costumes as part of a very early Content Pack, and they're still kicking around. We've learned a lot since then, though, and we've also improved what Moviestorm is capable of. Since it's Valentine's Day very soon, we thought it was about time that these two old favourites got an upgrade.



As you'd expect, both of these costumes are tintable.

We'll be making these available to you (along with a handful of other new assets) very soon. Stay tuned for some more sneak previews over the next few days!

Here Come The Girls!

You wanted a version of the crowd scene with the ladies? Here you go.

The sweet thing about machinima is that this only took a couple of hours to put together. All I did was start up my movie, save it as a new movie, and go through the cast list one by one, converting each of the 60-odd characters into their nearest female equivalent. Then, just for the hell of it, I made some small changes to the set and the lighting, adjusted the colour of the intro text, and hit render. Lovely.

I also did some quick calculations as to how long it would take me to get those shots in real life. Say, a few hours booking the hall, and sorting out the people to do the shoot, making sure they knew when to arrive. Another hour or so making sure the more outlandish costumes were ready. A crew of three or four would spend a couple of hours putting out chairs and getting the room ready before the cast arrive. That's about 13 or 14 man-hours already. Then the cast arrive, we get them changed, run them through what's needed, and shoot it a few times. Say, if we're really lucky, an hour each for the male and female versions. That's another 125 man-hours for the cast, and another 10 or so for the crew. All in all, about 140 man-hours to get those two shots filmed, then we take the footage home and edit it. I'd have to put in, say, about 16 hours.

And that, of course, assumes everything went swimmingly. I didn't even think about insurance costs, actor releases or other legal stuff. And what's the likelihood of getting 60 people to perform flawlessly in an hour, even if all they have to do is walk onto a stage?

Doing it in machinima took me about 12 hours for the first one, and another 2 for the second one. That's about the same effort on my side as doing it for real, but only 10% of the total number of man-hours and a fraction of the hassle.

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!