All together, now!

This new feature for 1.5 brought a huge smile to my face.

You know when you've mostly built a scene, then you realize you need to change a few things early in the scene? You shift all the activities on the timeline and that's when you find that all your carefully set up timings are now just ever so slightly off and it's immensely frustrating to get them all back again.

With the new timeline grouping feature, you can CTRL-click on several activities at once and move them all at the same time. Voila! Your timings are preserved.  No more fiddly adjusting everything back to how it was.

That's going to be a huge time-saver.

Mac users lose control

If you're a Mac user, you'll like this. In the new release of 1.5 (which should be out very, very soon now) hotkeys now use the Command key instead of Control.

Copy CMD-C
Paste CMD-V
Undo CMD-Z
Redo CMD-Y
Save CMD-S

Windows users still use CTRL, of course.

At the touch of a button...

Are you ready for this? Coming up in Moviestorm 1.4 is probably the single most useful interface change we've made in ages.

When you're in the Director's view, press F2. Everything on the set that you can interact with is highlighted, and each prop tells you everything that you can currently do with it.

No more clicking around to see what does what. It's all there, right in front of you, instantly.

This is still work in progress - we haven't finalised the look and feel of this, and there are some issues with using the F2 key, particularly on Macs - but it's hard to stress just how much difference this makes, and how much this opens up Moviestorm to novices and experienced users alike. Even the dev team are finding things they didn't know were in there.

We're aiming to finalise development on Moviestorm 1.4 this week and get it over to QA. Then we'll test the hell out of it for a while, and make the awkward decisions as to what actually makes it into the next release and what's going to be held over for more development.

Slide shows in Moviestorm

This is something you'll definitely find useful if you're making a video blog, doing a corporate presentation or educational documentary, or if you're creating a news scene. Objects like TVs and computers that can display video can now also display still images in Moviestorm 1.3.

Click on the object in the Director's View, select Change Image, and then just pick your image. You get a handy little indicator on the timeline when the image changes, so you can easily get your timings spot on. And, of course, you can mix and match video footage and images.

Wallpapering made easy

Here's another of the small but useful changes in Moviestorm 1.3. In the set workshop view, click on a wall. You now get a handy little panel that pops up all the available wallpapers. Much nicer than the big list at the bottom of the screen.

What are you looking at?

One of the small improvements we've made in 1.3 is this. When a character looks at something, you get a little triangle icon on the timeline. However, you could never tell exactly what they were looking at unless you went to the script view and checked it out there.

Now, hover over a look at triangle, and the little grey pop-up tells you what they're looking at. It's only a tiny change, but veteran Moviestormers will doubtless breathe a collective sigh of relief!

Halloween Morphing Heads

A few of the heads in Chris's Halloween Morphing heads pack are proving a little elusive. Here's how to get to the Cutter, Piggy, Frank, Mouldy and Vampyre characters.

1. Select the Halloween '09 Monster Morph head - you'll need a male character.
2. Click the arrow next to the morph slider, and choose your monster.
3. You can now morph between the basic human face and the monster face, so you can make him as monstrous as you like!

Another of those changes that's so small you probably didn't notice it: the Moviestorm icon on your Windows task bar is the MS logo, not the camera.So when you glance down, look for the little orange blob amongst your open apps, not the little black blob. Why? Because it shows up better, and is more in line with the current user interface.

(Mind you, I'm still getting used to the little blue square for Photoshop Cs4 instead of the feather I'm used to from earlier versions!)

Moviestorm 1.1.7

We're currently getting ready for the release of Moviestorm version 1.1.7. This is quite a major upgrade, with a lot of stuff going on under the hood. In many ways, it's a preparation for an even bigger upgrade to be shipped in the fall, Moviestorm 1.2.

The most obvious thing you'll see is the new user interface, designed by no less than our multi-talented CEO, Jeff "Babyface" Zie. Out with the old icons, and in with a whole bunch of stylish black and white ones. Moviestorm feels like a completely new app, more professional, and more finished.

You'll also notice much better performance. As we've been promising for a while, we've massively speeded up the load times, and Moviestorm also runs at a considerably better framerate on some hardware.

More subtly, we've made huge changes to the underlying animation system. This should eliminate the ugly "popping" that you get when blending animations, and result in much smoother character motion. We've also got new walk code in there, which gives much more natural and controllable movement around the set. We'll tell you more about that later in the week, as it's a huge, huge change.

We'll also post some more about some of the other new features over the next few days, including the new catalog and asset structure.

1.1.7 will be shipped in two stages. In a week or so, maybe less if all goes well, we'll let the pioneers get their hands on it and give us early feedback. We've been testing the bejesus out of it for a while, but there are still only a few of us, and it's a surefire bet that you lot will find a whole mess of stuff we missed. This may not contain absolutely everything in the final release, but it'll be close, and it'll include the most important things. Then, when we've fixed whatever howlers you find (or taken out the bits we can't fix fast enough), we'll put it out to everyone else, probably at the very end of September or the beginning of October.

Jeff gets out the Zie-brush

Moviestorm's been through many incarnations since I did the very first design for it five years ago. Most of them never made it off the drawing board, some stayed firmly in-house, and I think we've shipped three different layouts with different icon styles since our initial pioneers release.

It gets better each time, but we've still not yet found the design that says what we want it to say. We're striving for something that has the ease and accessibility of a game, but is also a functional, powerful tool, with modern styling.

Turns out that Jeff - our CEO - used to be a graphic artist in a former life, so in between all the other myriad jobs that are involved in running this place, he decided to tackle the design himself. This is very much concept work, and all we're doing is experimenting with different styles. We may jettison this and go somewhere completely different, but here's a first look anyway.


With just the new icons in place, Moviestorm feels completely different to use, even though we haven't changed the layout or started on any of the other graphic elements.

It'll take time before we settle on the final design - the only way to do this job is to build it, and then work with it, over and over again, until we decide whether it feels right.

Moviestorm's new look

Every time I fire up Moviestorm these days, it looks different. Here's how the main menu has changed over just the last few weeks. It feels like using a whole new app. Great work by Mitch and his crew.

Moviestorm version 1.0.4 (18 April 2008)

Moviestorm version 1.1 Preview 2 (July 4 2008)

Moviestorm 1.1 Preview 3 (current dev build, 11 July 2008)
What you can't see is that the "film strip" in the middle moves. It's cute.

Pause, take a deep breath, carry on...

It's been a long, long haul between releases this time, but the finishing post is on sight. Assuming Dick Swayze doesn't find any more last-minute nasties, 1.0.4 should be good to go early next week.

This has been one of our biggest sprints to date. Just to summarise, this release includes:

• New timeline UI
• New gesturiser UI, including gesture previewer
  
• Better faces
• Improved ambient shadowing
• Name tags in director's view
  
• Miscellaneous performance & memory improvements
• Various new features to support the upcoming Sci-Fi pack
• New start sequence
• Change to way you load movies
  
• New launcher and update mechanism
• New mouse bindings for set navigation
• Improved walk pathing and step animations, and less sliding around
  
• Better rendering, especially for close-ups
• New female faces and hair
• Guns now have muzzle flashes
• New mouse cursors to show what you can do with a prop or other object
• Pack names shown in tag browser for props
• Fixes to cutting room
• Improvements to the way props are held
• ... and a host of miscellaneous tweaks, fixes, and improvements!
  

So, we're going to award ourselves a weekend off, enjoy the sunshine if there is any, and then start work on the next release...

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.

context palettes

Moviestorm is a complex bit of software - we (I'm) constantly fighting requests to add more to the interface, to keep it as simple as possible for the n00b. One of the techniques for this is only showing users options when they are applicable.

So for example we hope to only show the "add doors" or "paint walls" options once users click on a wall that they've already created. The latest move in this direction is an experimental widget for moving marks around the set.



Most apps show this widget in 3D, but this has the disadvantage that the widget isn't under the mouse when the drag is finished, so continuing the drag isn't fluent. Putting it in 2D and making it appear on demand should be a cleaner solution, but as with most of UI design, we won't know if it's the right way until we see people using it.