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.

Where's my stuff?

One of the things we've been looking at for 1.1.7 is how to find your way around the immense selection of props you can put on your set. With just the free base and core packs, there are around 250 individual items, most of which are customisable, tintable and/or scalable in some way. Add to that all the current content packs, and you're somewhere nearer 1900 items, ranging from plants, cars, and lights to buildings, space ships, smoke machines, road markings, gravestones, curtains and beds. (And that's before you start adding in third party mods.)

In the current version, all of your props are shown as little icons in the narrow strip at the bottom of the set workshop view. Depending on the size of your screen, you may be able to see anywhere between 20 and 60 at a time. That can take a long time to scroll through, and it's really annoying when you're just trying to browse around and see what you've got. The filters and tags help a lot, but they're not so good when you just want to see what you've got.

1.1.7 has a completely new catalog interface, which has a whole bunch of new features in addition to better browsing.

1. The catalog now takes up the whole of the screen so you can see more objects at the same time. This makes browsing quicker and easier.
2. The lower ribbon now shows you which objects you've already got on your set, so if you want to clone something, it's much faster now.
3. When you hover over an object, it tells you what content pack it's from. Certainly I've had the experience of building a set, and then someone says "where'd you get that doodad", and for the life of me I can't remember what pack it came from. Now it's simple to say "it's from the Bedroom Blog pack" or whatever. OK, that in itself may not be terribly exciting, but it means we can also do this...
4. All those greyed out, crossed out icons? They're from packs in our store that you don't yet have. So you want a piano in this scene, but you don't have one? Well, would ya look at that? There's one right here in the Music pack that'll do just perfect. Phew!

So you're probably about to ask, can I buy packs straight from the application without going to the Web site? Sorry, no, not yet. We've been hinting for a while about changes to the marketplace, though, and these are the kind of features we're thinking of for further down the line. You're also maybe wondering whether we're going to go all iTunes and let you buy individual assets on demand. Again, the answer is sorry, no, not yet. We're still a bit locked into the existing AddOn structure. But we do have plans for different ways you can buy Moviestorm content. More on this in a month or two.

However - and this is the bit that will be of most interest to modders - the idea is that you'll be able to see everything in our marketplace from right inside Moviestorm. Not just our own content packs, but packs made by third parties as well. So, if you submit your mods to us, all Moviestorm users will get to see them. This may not make it into the very first version of the modders' marketplace, but the main parts of the infrastructure are now in place to enable us to do this. That's a real opportunity to showcase your work and to put it in front of a lot more people than you'd find through just a Web site. And, in due course, we'll extend this to cover costumes, animations, and so on.

To finish off, let me just point out one small, but hugely important change. The old thumbnails were, let's be honest, a bit of a mess. So we recruited Rhys to spend his summer holidays, for day after tedious day, making new thumbnails of all the props, using a constant angle and lighting, and making it much more obvious what they actually are. Gone are the days of squinting at something and trying to work out if it's meant to be a test tube, a glass giraffe, or an orchid.

So, no devastating new functionality in this bit. It won't enable you to make any movie you couldn't make before. But it should be a lot quicker and easier to do the same things, and you've got a lot more information than you had before.

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.

Pimpin' Conor's Ride

It all started as an innocent prank. Conor left his precious car unattended in the car park and forgot to switch on the CCTV linked to his desktop, and so one lunchtime, we decided to grab ourselves some free advertising space...


In revenge, Conor grabbed a spray can and did a Very Bad Thing to Rhys's shiny new wheels. (Yeah, we know he's only 15 and isn't allowed to drive, but he decided to splash his first week's pay on something spectacular. There's nothing stopping you owning a car at 15. He just has to get someone else to chauffeur it for him. There's a rota in the kitchen for whose turn it is to drive Rhys home each evening. I think we must be overpaying him. Mark and Jules couldn't afford one of these until their second week. But then again, they have kids & mortgages, so maybe it does make sense.)


OK, so that was it, we thought. But no. Rhys just had to go one step too far...

Breaking news: Work experience student forced to blog, threatened with no lunchbreak.

It's Rhys' last day with us. To celebrate, we thought we'd give him a treat. We know how much he loves blogging, so we asked him to write another blog post. After some kicking and screaming, and shouts of "You're not the boss of me!", "Yes I am", "Good point, well made", we can finally present Rhys' Work Experience Diary: Week Two.

In Week 2 of working for Moviestorm, its been slightly less ‘hardcore’ and more casual, in a sense. I've spent most of my time making videos for Andrew which may be used as templates for an upcoming Short Fuze project which I'm not allowed to talk about. Oh, and I went to Ipswich for a day with Johnnie to meet with Eddie Duggan – a lecturer at the University Campus Suffolk - and talk to his students using Moviestorm as part of their course.

This week has been a lot less erratic than last week, but certainly still changeable. Working with the latest development build of Moviestorm, often using features which are still being finished, has meant that I sometimes encountered bugs and errors which stopped me doing what I was trying to do. This has been frustrating but also relieving, giving me more time to help out with the website, watch some of the recently uploaded movies and give feedback, and submit feature requests and bugs.

The earlier part of the week involved yet more brain destroying, living with the (apparently dull) life of working in an office. But things started to turn up with my trip to Ipswich - it was very enjoyable, right down to the train ride for an hour and twenty minutes which I feel both destroyed my will of working, and bolstered it. Aye, ‘twas a very philosophical and thought filled journey.

No meetings to speak of this week though, which was a disappointment. The design meeting last week was a big insight into how Short Fuze gets things done (or not done - that’s a mystery which remains to be solved).

Undoubtedly, I have enjoyed this experience; all aspects of it. Perhaps for the fact that I haven’t been in school, or possibly because I feel it’s a glimpse into my future - though hopefully by then we'll have thought-powered computers which will make office life much less of a bore, and internal brain HUDs so I can tweet and (maybe) work at the same time. Damnit man, I’m a student, not an office worker!

I will miss this office. Maybe.

We'll miss you too, Rhys.

Maybe.

Moviestorm at University Campus Suffolk

The students on the BA(Hons) Computer Games Design course at University Campus Suffolk have been studying (and creating) machinima during one of the modules on their course. We were delighted that they chose to use Moviestorm as one of the machinima engines, and we've been keeping an eye on their progress for a while.

Yesterday, I hopped on a train to Ipswich and headed over to UCS to chat to some of the students on the course. I took Rhys with me, in an attempt to stop him attacking his own eyes with selected cutlery.

It was a very worthwhile trip. Chatting with the students on the course, and with Eddie Duggan the course tutor, gave us a lot of very honest and constructive feedback. We'll be adding all of their comments to our issues database.

My honed and trimmed physique, captured in full educational ebullience by Rhys's sneaky camera skills

It's great to see Moviestorm being put to use like this, and it's always great to talk face to face with people in the Moviestorm community - especially when, like the students at UCS, they have a lot of complimentary things to say!

Workin' for the Man

As Matt mentioned earlier this week, Rhys is here at the moment on work experience. That means that I don't have to make my own coffee and my shoes have never looked so polished. In between serving as my valet and personal alarm clock (I make him shout "Johnnie is the king!" on the hour, every hour), he's also been hard at work as the newest co-opted member of Moviestorm's QA department.



We asked him to write a few words about his first week working for Short Fuze.

In my first week at the Moviestorm office, I’ve worked on various things: screenshots, user testing, the dreaded unit testing, making templates for videos and tests. I even attended a design meeting.

Working for Moviestorm is very changeable. Parts of it have been fun (making shorts etc.) and parts have been so dull I wanted to gouge my eye out with a wooden spoon just to have something more interesting to do. All-in-all it’s been enjoyable, though, and a lot more interesting (at times!) than school.

On the Wednesday, and half of Thursday, my entire view on Moviestorm changed. I was switching constantly between Moviestorm and Excel, testing every single aspect of the soon-to-be-released version 1.1.6 to see if it all worked. It destroyed my brain, and made me want to, as I previously mentioned, gouge my eye out with a wooden spoon.

The Meeting was enjoyable. It was focused around proposed improvements to the Cutting Room View. I decided to add my two cents where it could apply, which included discussing what effects, if any, should be added to make it easier to work entirely in Moviestorm, without the need to export to movie maker or Vegas. It made me feel slightly more important than I actually am. Sitting among people debating whether to go with “A” or “2” (which gives some idea of the contrast), was both daunting and fun.

I will admit, I have been learning a lot about Moviestorm as a user and understanding the way its developers see it, which makes being a lackey for Johnnie, Ben and Andrew bearable. I do sometimes feel intimidated being surrounded by what seems like accomplished individuals, who have their own fortés, be it programming, developing, or whatever – whereas I am average Joe Public on work experience. On the upside, I feel that an adequate amount of responsibility and pressure is placed on me, which I think makes me work better.
I don’t know what I’ll be doing next week, and frankly, I don’t mind: work experience is shaping up to be quite enjoyable.

Bring on Week 2.