New packs for 1.5

A very harried Amos told me earlier today that testing on 1.5 is going well, and we're aiming for a release date "very early in December".  He wouldn't commit himself any further than that, and there's only so much threatening I can do on your behalf from 5000 miles away.

He did, however, let slip that the long awaited sword fighting pack will be released "in time for Christmas", and that before that, there will be an "Indian pack" that's been ready to go for a while, just waiting on some code that's in the new release.  That will include some interior and exterior sets, plus a few costumes - acha hai!

I'll try to get the guys to snap a couple of screenshots of the new stuff when they're not so busy, and we'll post them for you here.

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.

Moviestorm 1.1.7 - Wooosh! It's damn fast!

One of the first things I do each morning, after I've set a pot of thick black coffee brewing in the Short Fuze kitchen, is to check the Moviestorm forums to see what's been said while I was asleep. Recently, I've been able to get daily feedback from the members of our Pioneers Club, who've been given early access to Moviestorm 1.1.7.

I've been delighted by the amount of feedback we've received, but not as delighted as the members of Moviestorm's QA department, who spend each day eagerly aggregating the responses from our Pioneers, and diligently recording them in our issues database.

The guys in QA are very, very good, but we know we won't be able to catch every single bug: there's only a few of us, and Moviestorm is huge. So, the abundant feedback from the Pioneers has been incredibly useful to us. The comments and bug reports have come in all shapes and sizes. Overman kicked things off with a short movie demonstrating some of the new features of 1.1.7. He sneakily hid a bug report at the end of the movie - not the first time he's done that, the little scamp.



Other pieces of feedback ranged from the mundane to the bizarre. In general, the Pioneers seem to be very pleased with 1.1.7, and excited by the new features. forgeuk made a post with a title which simply read "Whooosh! It's damn fast!"


There's no denying that it was a beta release, though. Some of the errors have been very strange. czechboysonic found a bug with a custom addon that didn't seem to load in 1.1.7.

Ben eventually tracked it down to a case-sensitivity error - just the sort of thing we might never have spotted without help from the Pioneers.


A release as big as this one inevitably contains new code and fixes which we haven't explicitly talked about. Sometimes, though, things get fixed that even we didn't know about. act3scene24 has never been able to quit Moviestorm properly on his Mac, and always has to force-quit the application in order to exit. Not any more:


We'd look terribly unprofessional if we admitted that we have absolutely no blasted clue how we fixed that bug (since we have no blasted clue what was causing it in the first place) so in order to save our blushes I'm happy to lie and say that I fixed it. Yup, that was all me. Thousands of lines of late-night coding have paid off.

Ahem.

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.