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.

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.

1.1.7.1 released

Apologies for the slightly delayed notice: 1.1.7.1 did indeed ship on Friday.

Release notes can be found here.

Modders, please read this if you're having a problem starting the Modders' Workshop.

Selling your stuff

Right back in the early days of Moviestorm, back when it was called Machinemascope (yes, it was spelled like that), and existed only in the minds of Dave and myself, we realised that in order to be successful, we'd need to allow modders to make and distribute content. Not only that, but we'd actually benefit from allowing modders to sell content. The reasoning was quite simple. We cannot possibly make all the content required to make the movie in your head. That would require us to make every costume ever worn, anywhere in the world, at any time in history. Not to mention every costume you've seen in a movie, or in a picture, or in a comic book, or in a game, or in some strange fever dream. And then we'd need to start on props, sets, faces, hairstyles, critters, vehicles and everything else. And you'd want them in a range of styles: some hyper-realistic, some exaggerated and cartoony... basically we'd have to model the entire universe, including the bits that haven't happened yet, as well as a load of universes that don't exist. It's just not going to happen, not even if we had a thousand artists.

Instead, we opted for making the basics, and making our stuff as customisable as possible, and in due course, you guys will make the rest. This, of course, is where the modder's marketplace comes in.

Easy, so we thought. We make a site, you upload stuff, we take people's money on your behalf, we take a cut, and everybody wins. Except it's not that straightforward. This is where everyone jumps up and says, "yes it is, look at XXXX.com". Well, you're probably wrong. Unless you're a lawyer, you probably have no idea how tangled the law is in this regard. In fact, even if you are a specialist international IP/tax/commercial lawyer/accountant, you'll have problems making sense of the legislation. Bear in mind, since we're operating a global business, we're talking about transactions for virtual goods that may involve people and companies from several different jurisdictions. That immediately complicates everything. And just because XXXX.com is doing it doesn't mean it's legal, and we don't want to find ourselves sued or shut down.

Here are a few things we're having to bear in mind.

• You upload a mod. The customer pays us. Who are they buying from? Us or you? That makes an immediate difference. If it's us, then as the vendor, we have a bunch of responsibilities under EU and UK law, and a different bunch of responsibilities under US law (and who knows what under Australian, Brazilian, Chinese or Indian law). If it's you, then we have to make you aware of those. In many ways, resolving this one issue clarifies a lot of the rest of the issues, in that we can then say categorically "it's our problem" or "talk to the modder". However, it's not even clear how the law stands on this, and whether we can easily assign the role of vendor. It's likely that we have to be the vendor, and that we would have to require to to sign a warranty which allows us to come after you if anyone has a go at us. This, of course, then begs the question of what happens if you weren't entitled to sign that warranty (say, you're a minor). And, indeed, what happens when we get sued for squillions but you only have six bucks and a Gnarls Barkley CD to your name.
• Your mod causes Moviestorm (or the user's computer) to crash. How do we deal with the irate customer? Who's going to sort him out? Should we require all mods to go through our QA and be certified? If so, are you prepared to pay for it?
• Your mod isn't what it claims to be, or doesn't work. How does the customer complain, and how does he get his money back? If we've already given you your money, how do we get money back from you?
• Our server goes down and we can't sell anything for a while. So what? Well, if you're doing this as a business, then this is affecting your trade. Can you sue us? Are you expecting a guaranteed level of service?
• Tax - what taxes apply? Applying VAT (or not) is complicated enough, but we need to figure out what we have to report to the tax office. And if you're the vendor, then you may have to charge local taxes, which we don't know about.
• How do we apply special offers to a mixture of our content and yours? If someone has a "buy one get one free" offer, and they get yours free, do you get any money at all? Or are mods excluded from special offers? In fact, is 3rd party content treated completely separately?
• Your mod infringes someone's copyright. How does the rights holder deal with this? How do we avoid being sued? How do we allow you to respond to allegations? Do we have final say?
• Your mod has a different license to ours. Our content is licensed for people to use in commercial productions. You can mash it up with footage from other sources. You, on the other hand, may want yours to be non-commercial. Can you do that? If so, how do we make that clear to the user.
• Your mod contains content that is offensive to some people. What mechanisms do we have in place to address this? Is it up to us to decide what gets sold through our site, and if so, do we have to vet everything before it goes up, or only respond when someone complains? What standards do we need to put in place?
• Your mod contains content that is age-restricted in some countries. How do we ensure we comply with local legislation, and what legislation applies anyway? Do we have to be aware of what restrictions exist everywhere?
• Taking the above to extremes, your mod contains illegal content. (This is the really tricky one.) Does that mean illegal where you are, illegal where we are, illegal where the servers are, or illegal where the user is? How are we supposed to know what's legal? How are you supposed to know? What jurisdictions can you be sued in?

Let's take an example. A few years ago, at a previous company, we made a mobile phone game that contained an image of a Nazi soldier with a swastika on his helmet, and sold it to a major global telecoms company. They distributed it throughout Europe. We then discovered that images of swastikas are banned in Gemany, and we had in fact just broken the law without knowing it. Fortunately, we were able to change the image before we got taken to court in Germany, along with the telecoms company, and we managed to talk them out of what could have been a very nasty breach of warranty. (We had had to state that the content was legal, which, in the UK, it was.)

On a similar note, while watching Burn After Reading, I noted that Americans use the word "spook" to mean a spy, and asked why the British TV series Spooks was renamed MI5 for the US market. I wasn't aware that it was an offensive slang term for a black person in the US.

In other words, there are a whole bunch of issues where you can act in complete good faith, and find yourself in an unexpected and tricky situation. The law's a minefield, and so we're treading carefully through it. Yes, it's frustrating. We'd love to have had the modder's marketplace up and running a year or more ago, but until we get the OK from the lawyers and accountants, we're not prepared to take the risk.

But be assured, we are working on it.

If you want something doing ... give it to Rhys

Software engineering is a weird thing. Even though the code language and libraries are usually well-established, on anything but the smallest of projects you'll find the need to write your own custom components, which you'll then use to construct something useful. Sometimes, you see, before you can get to work on the thing you really want to do, you have to spend some time making the tools that you'll then use to make the thing you really want to make. If you see what I mean. It's as if an archaeologist were required to make his own brush and trowel before he could start excavating, or a fisherman had to build her own rod. So software engineers would have us believe, anyway.

The Moviestorm Modders Workshop is a good example of this. Although it's enabled many of our users to create some fantastic addons for Moviestorm, the primary reason it exists in the first place is because we needed a tool to assemble all our art assets into something that Moviestorm could actually understand. The Modders Workshop is the tool that we use internally to build all of our Content Packs.

We recently managed to drag Dave away from working on his exciting new asset management system for Moviestorm 1.1.7, in order to produce this:



No, not the shed. The little pop-up window in front of it. It's a small addition to the Modders Workshop, but one which makes our life a lot easier. The thumbnails that appear in the Set Workshop Object Browser for each set object are automatically generated when the object is saved in the Modders Workshop. Dave's new tool enables us to pick the rotation, angle and zoom of the object in these thumbnails. That means that we create much better, more logical thumbnails for each object.

Of course, that means we'll have to go through our entire back catalogue of tables, chairs, doors, rugs, mugs, cars, trees ... everything. Every single asset needs a new thumbnail. It's going to be a tedious and time-consuming job. It's not a job I want, I don't mind admitting. What we need is a lackey of some kind. If only there was someone in the office to whom we could give all the boring and mind-numbing jobs that nobody else wants to do .... wait a minute!

Hooray! Rhys is back!

Yes, undeterred by his experience as my personal slave for a week of work experience last May, Rhys has returned for a whole month of work in the QA department. Maintaining the proud tradition we've established for all our interns, he's got the boring job. Today is his last day with us, but you'll be seeing the fruits of his labour in a future release of Moviestorm.

Moviestorm 1.1.6.1 update

Just after releasing 1.1.6 , we found a couple of nasty bugs: some of the stock sets don't load properly, and saving animation transitions in the modder's workshop stops other animations from working. Ooops.

There's now an update that fixes this.

The Wizard of Mods

We've been promising an improved Modder's Workshop for a while, not just because we're altruistic and want to give you nice tools, but because it makes life a whole lot easier for us too. The new version is now based around wizards, which makes the whole process not just quicker and easier, but a lot less error-prone.


Here's a basic Moviestorm mug. Not very exciting, is it? And, much though you love us, you may not want to put Moviestorm branding all over your movie. So let's open it up and retexture it.

First, define an addon which your new model is going to live in. This will be the thing that you can distribute to other Moviestorm users so they can use your mod too.

Next, give your cup a name. We've picked the highly innovative and original MyMug.

Now pick the parts of the mug that you want to retexture. The mug only has one part, so this is easy. If you're dealing with a more complex object, then you can retexture each part of it independently.

We're going to replace the existing texture with one we made earlier, so we select the Replace option. (We previously made the new texture using Photoshop and a public domain image to edit the .dds file attached to the original mug. It's in AddOn\DomesticDrama01\Data\Props\Mug\Textures if you want to try this yourself. However, it's even easier if you use the Edit option to create a copy of the original object and then you can get straight to the textures and edit them in your preferred graphics editor.)


Now we simply select the file we want to use as the new texture.

Et voila! Here's our new mug!

Finish off by publishing the new addon. This will contain a new template and your new texture, so the file size is pretty small and it's easy to distribute. This one's all of 86Kb.

The entire process takes slightly under 30 seconds once you've done it a couple of times.

Simple, huh?

Moviestorm 1.1.5 in test

We've just sent Moviestorm version 1.1.5 over to the QA team, so that Synnah and Dick Swayze can break it before they leave. All being well, it should be ready to ship in a couple of weeks.

Most of this build is fixes to the modders' workshop, and a few minor changes necessary to support the next couple of content packs. When those are nailed down, we can finally get the criminals into QA, and hopefully you'll get them soon as well.

We'll let you know as soon as we get a firm release date.

Things we didn’t make

If anyone knows what a bitch it is to work with our mod tools, it’s us. And what we sent out to our pioneer users is even horribler than what we’re currently using in-house. So when we see what some people have managed to do with our shoddy tools, we’re seriously impressed. Have a quick look at these bits of work in progress.

Davidwww’s spaceship, trucks, and cityscape with curving roads

Equinoxx’s window sticker

Forgeuk’s “bloke in a jar” with custom t-shirt.

And yes, we will be releasing a proper version of the Modder’s Workshop. We will, we will! Just not this month, OK? In the meantime, well done to all of you who made it through the existing Modder’s Minefield.