New modding tutorials coming soon!

The new website is starting to stabilize and the staff at Moviestorm Towers are beginning to get a feel for the new "engine", and how it's going to help us get more information to you, so that you can use Moviestorm to its fullest potential.

As the new engine allows any company member to create and edit pages, I thought it would be a good idea to put this to the test by means of a practical task. We're always trying to encourage our users to get into modding but it's obviously quite difficult to get started without some guidelines and tips... So, after a quick introduction on how the web interface works, we started to put together a very concise "How To" section of the website, especially dedicated to people who are trying to get their own content into Moviestorm (please see the attached image).

We're hoping to get these pages live at some point next week, and they will include tutorials on every aspect of Moviestorm Modding, from importing images, through Google Sketchup and finally some really in depth stuff for all you Max, Blender, Milkshape gurus.

For those of you who want a quick preview of the kind of stuff we'll be featuring, please take a look at the following video...

Watch this space!

New tutorials

We've now told you what Chris and Dave are doing over the Christmas holiday, so I suppose I should tell you what I'm going to be doing. I'm aiming to get some more Moviestorm Made Easy video tutorials made; it's been nearly three months since the last one.

I've done about 45 so far (here's the full list). What should we cover next? Suggestions include:

• The gesturiser
• Moods & facial animation
• Working with multiple cameras
• Working with multiple scenes
• The script window
• The timeline: basics
• Working with stock sets and characters
• More on lighting using hidden on-set lights
• The lighting rig in the Rock music set
• Making a music video
• Choreographing a fight scene
• Making props move

Any preferences? Anything obvious I've missed? I'm not planning on covering modding.

Tutorials

Dearie me, such a range of tutorials. Over the last few months we've just been investigating the time, cost and benefits of each type of tutorial. Here is a brief outline.

First the dreaded online PDF tutorial. The problem is its out of date and tends to just confuse first time users. You can however print it out and flip through it as you're reading it.

We also have the big red arrow tutorial (This started out as a demo graphic, I think this has become it's official name - take that dilbert):
We're having trouble with this because it really clashes with the oru very short (agile) development cycle. It relies upon the interface being the same as it was last time so the system knows which buttons you should be clicking. However we (I) have a habit of ripping the interface up twice daily, meaning that the tutorials have to be re-done with every release. This may be the way go when we have a bigger team and a longer lead time on updates. It also forces us to keep the tutorials up to date as they are marked as show-stopping bugs if the tutorials don't play through.

On top of this we have the static click-through text tutorial.


This is fine and dandy, but it belongs on paper in "Moviestorm, the missing manual". Again this gets out of date fast, but at least it doesn't break & stop us pushing an update. It is also a little less patronizing than the BRA tutorial.

As if that weren't enough, we still have users arriving having bought copies of Machinima For Dummies, complete with a very old version of Moviestorm on the cover disk. If they use that version, they're fine to work through the chapters in Machinima For Dummies that relate to Moviestorm. If they upgrade to the latest version, though, it's all changed and they get very confused.

In the future we have plans for an online tutorial video/flash thingy, which the most excellent johnnie is investigating. Since this seems to be what our competitors are doing, it has been favored by many people as the way to go.

And now I've just played with the most excellent Sketchup - they use a hints and tips window on startup and an "instructor" window I hadn't seen before. Whichever tool you're currently using the instructor window plays a video and gives hints on how it works.

I really like this - you just play with the application, and you're given tips depending on what you're working on. While not really for n00bs, it'd be a great tool for showing intermediate or advanced techniques with Moviestorm tools. The only downside I can see is that it'd be really cramped to use on a small/1024x768 screen.