Upcoming Pack - Construction Site

After being put on the back-burner for a while due to development of Moviestorm 1.5 and various Bonus Content assets, we are now almost ready to release a complete pack, called "Construction Site".
As you may have guessed by the name of the AddOn, this pack contains a selection of Building/ Construction props for your Moviestorm Scenes. There's a back-hoe type digger, a cement mixer, scaffolding, a skip, bricks and blocks, safety fencing and piles of sand which you can drop into your set like any other Moviestorm asset. For your characters, there's overalls for both male and female characters with an option to add high-vis waistcoats. Of course, the obligatory yellow hard hat is also included in the pack - we wouldn't want your characters to get injured...
All being well, this pack will be available in the marketplace before the end of the week, and it will be priced very competitively (in Moviestorm Points) against our previous packs.

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!

Paint It Black

If you head on over to http://www.moviestorm.co.uk/ you'll see that it's all rather different.

Well - some bits are different. Some bits are still in the process of change, but a lot of it has been updated to a new shiny black look. Long-term Moviestormers may even remember our very first Web site, which was black as well. I guess that means black is the new new black or something.

Let us know what you think!

Give your friends a movie studio

We had an email the other day from our good buddy Santa, up in the North Pole, and he tells us he's had simply thousands of letters this year from kids telling him that what they want most in the whole world is some cheap, easy movie-making software. Now obviously, he may well have got into the whisky a bit early this year, and he's prone to exaggeration now and again (Round the whole world in one night, stopping off at all those houses? A likely story!) but there's probably a grain of truth in what he says.

So, since we couldn't bear the thought of all those sad little faces on Christmas Day, crying "Mommy, where's my virtual movie studio that Santa promised me?" we're in the process of fixing up a little feature on the Web site that will allow you to buy Moviestorm as a gift for someone. It's just going through testing now, and should be out later this week.

Web site planned outage - Mon 22 Nov

On Monday Nov 22, we will be doing some serious work on the back end of the Moviestorm Web site.

It will go down at about 10am GMT, and will probably be unavailable for most of the working day in the UK. Of course, if everything goes perfectly to plan, we'll get it back up much earlier in the day, and some bits may be restored sooner than others, but we'd prefer to be a little cautious (and realistic) and give ourselves a little leeway.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

(Image from boagworld - a podcast for those who design, develop & run Web sites.)

Encoding phase 1: complete

We've now completed the first phase of fixing the encoding problems that have been dogging us for a while and moved over to using encoding.com on our Web site. This means that when you upload a movie, it first goes through the default local encoding and a holding flv is put in place. Meanwhile, your original file is sent on to encoding.com for conversion to flv using their on2V6 encoding (a higher quality encoding algorithm that should eliminate the sound synch issues you've been seeing as well as providing better quality images and support more codecs).

You'll also find that clicking the "download" link under the player lets you download the original file, rather than the flv. So it's worth uploading those high quality movies again - and don't forget to note in the description when it's worth downloading rather than streaming.

And finally, you can now go to My Movies->Edit Movie and replace the current uploaded file without losing your views, comments or ratings.

After much blood, sweat and tears, some hacking, some cunning, and a few false starts, we're pretty sure it's all working as it should, but this is where we need your help - again. If you could give the new system a go - particularly anyone who previously had sound synch issues - we'd appreciate it. Let us know if you have any problems and if it actually does improve the quality! And please tell us which codecs and file formats you used, so we can start to compile a list of known good and bad ones. Put them in comments here, or post them to this thread in the forum. It really helps, not just us, but everyone.

We haven't yet done everything we're planning to do. Here's some of what's still outstanding, and will be coming in phase 2.

1. Error reporting. Hopefully you won't get any, but when this is implemented, you will get an email saying exactly what went wrong with the conversion.

2. Notification when movies are finished with their high quality conversion.

3. Progress bar when uploading isn't working.

4. High quality encoding of uploads from within the Moviestorm client isn't working (we don't think!). We're not sure why! It does go through local encoding fine, however...

Once again, thanks for your help.

Moviestorm Web site upgrade

The Moviestorm website will be unavailable on Tuesday, 12 May, 2009 between 9am and 6pm GMT while we upgrade. This will include the forums, the main blog, and the store, and you will not be able to upload or view movies.

If you use Twitter, you can follow @MoviestormWeb for further updates.

A new look for the Moviestorm site

We interrupt Johnnie's sequence of posts about coiffures for this important bulletin.

As some of you already know, we've been working for a while on a new-look Moviestorm Web site. It's now being put through its final paces with some of our pioneers, and we're gearing ourselves up for the Big Day.

It's been a long while since I was involved in any major Web rebuilding work (in a past life, I was one of the team who set up and ran the ISP UK Online) and I've pretty much forgotten almost all I ever knew about building servers and setting up DNS. The new pages are all ready, all the copy and images are in place, and the new community features are looking good. Now it's down to the tedious business of checking and double-checking the hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute rollout plan, making sure all the backup and recovery systems are in place in case everything goes horribly wrong on the day, and getting the thumbs up from every single person involved in the operation. It's getting to be like Mission Control at NASA. Or, more accurately, like the Air Traffic Control sequences out of Airplane, with Lisa doing an increasingly accurate impersonation of Lloyd Bridges.

No, you're right. We didn't say when the Big Day would be. When It's Ready™.

Johnnie will be back next week with more pretty pictures of people with hair. No, it's OK, I don't have a complex about it. Going bald is perfectly natural for a man of my age.