Moviestorm 1.3.1 just got too big for its britches

For the last few weeks, we've been packing more and more new stuff into Moviestorm 1.3.1. And now it's got rather bigger than we were expecting. So big, in fact, that it's completely outgrown 1.3 and will henceforth be known by its new name, Moviestorm 1.4.

As we developed the character shop, we came up with all sorts of new ideas. We started with basic decals, and rapidly expanded that to cover not only make-up in the sense of a little bit of lipstick and eyeshadow, but also cyborgs, Ziggy Stardust or KISS style face painting, scars, tattoos, and all sorts of fun stuff. After playing with those for a while, we decided this was just too good to leave out, so we opted to go with the flow and create more details. We also added in more morphs, and more ways to make characters look good when you film them. We've been paying particular attention to things like how shiny the eyes should be, so the characters look properly alive.

We also came up with a few oddball ideas in testing. We mentioned the "create random character" button a while ago. We ended up with three random buttons, which give us different basic parameters. One's fine for generating normal characters, one gives you more extreme characters, and one gives you completely random ones. This was really helpful for testing the morphs, and making sure they all worked together successfully. We then realised that this would actually be a useful feature anyway: you don't really want weird freaks when you're just trying to set up a restaurant scene. So yeah, we rather like the idea of a bunch of "create a sort of random character along these lines" buttons.

Whether this will make it into this release is very much open to question. As of now, we've stopped adding new things, and we're aiming to wrap everything up and get it through QA and out to you as soon as possible. There are several features in the category of "if it works properly with minimal effort, it stays, otherwise rip it out and ship it later."

Does that mean the character designer is finished now? No. There's still plenty more that we're planning for the future. Last week, for example, we figured out how to do some neat stuff with skin shading and tinting that's not going to make it into 1.4 for sure. And even today we were coming up with more new ideas, and everyone in the team is finding things we'd want to do differently if we had the time. The priority is to get you what we have, and see what you make.

So when's 1.4 coming? You know the answer. When it's ready.

Your face looks different

Last week, we showed you some of the more extreme heads we could make with the new face creator. This week, we've got some more normal looking male and female faces, the sort of thing you're more likely to use for most of your movies.

Bear in mind that this is still in development, and we're still adding new things and chipping away at the rough edges, so these aren't final. However, it's clear that we've got vastly more variation in these characters than we've had before, even without going for pointy ears, hooked noses, or oversize chins.

Fixing the bleedin' obvious

I have quite a lot of computers in my life, and they all run Linux. In fact, the only time I leave the confines of my beloved Linux is when I'm at work (where my machine at Moviestorm Towers is a Macbook Pro). Most of my machines run a variant of Linux called Ubuntu. Last year, the Ubuntu development team announced a new project which they called 100 Papercuts. The idea was that they would identify 100 little irritations which were reasonably trivial to fix. Most of the issues identified were minor and really not too significant, but as they all pile up they start to become a serious problem. One papercut, after all, is only an irritant, but if you get enough papercuts all at once you just might bleed to death.

I was quite taken with this idea (the papercuts concept, not the bleeding to death), and spent some time talking about it with Dave and Andrew. As a consequence, we recently launched our own "papercuts" project for Moviestorm. Whilst Ubuntu's Papercuts project attracted over 1600 recorded bugs within a few weeks, our initial brainstorm generated a slightly less ambitious 200(ish) issues. We're going to be tackling these "papercuts" a few at a time, aiming to fix between 10 and 20 papercuts each time we have a code release.

Let's take a look at some of the papercuts for the forthcoming 1.3.1 release.

MS-3277 Keep window positions and sizes after the user has adjusted them

Wouldn't it be nice if, when you moved a customisation window over to the left, it appeared in the same place when you next reopened it? Now it does. We haven't implemented this behaviour for every window yet, but it's in place for all of the "adjust something" windows (what we call Activity Customizers).

MS-4887 Improve transitions between major mode views

This one's not so easy to spot, but the load time required to switch Views - to move from Set Workshop View to Director's View, for example - has been much improved. A lot of clever process threading and Clever Engineering Hacking in the background has allowed us to make these transitions faster and smoother.

MS-4826 Can't remove user images

I'm going to be totally honest with you here: this is one of those bugs that represents a lack of functionality not through deliberate choice but just because we forgot to put it in. Once you add a custom image to a set object, there's no way of actually removing that image if you change your mind later. The ring menu for such objects now features a "clear image" option, which removes the image. It also works for held props and bodyparts.

MS-4815 File overwrite message is confusing

This one was ridiculously easy to fix, but had still been sat in our bug database for a long time. Being such a small team, it's easy for small things like this to never actually make it onto anybody's "to do list", simply because there are so many other, bigger things that need to be done. That's exactly what the papercuts project is good for: making sure that issues like this do eventually get addressed. Here's the dialog as it appears in the current released version of Moviestorm:

And here's the new version:

A lot clearer, I think you'll agree.

MS- 4809 Can't find the movie I last worked on

My Moviestorm "movies" directory currently holds about a hundred different movies, in various states of completion. When you spend a lot of your working day testing Moviestorm you tend to accrue a lot of test movies. The load screen will now allow you to sort those movies, either by name or by modification date. That means that the movie you last worked on can be quickly brought to the top of the list.

MS-4806 Typo on first page of Help

Yes, well. The less said about this the better. Let's just move on, shall we?

MS-4786 Warn me if I'm not placing a character at time 0

Ever had a character appear halfway through a scene because the timeline wasn't at the start of the scene when you issued the "place here" command? Yeah, me too. Not any more:

MS-3690 Autosave

Matt has already blogged about this one.

There are about half a dozen other papercut issues in various stages of completion, but this should give you some idea of what we're hoping to achieve for 1.3.1. This is an experiment, so the choice of which of our 200 papercut issues to address first has been almost arbitrary. What about you? What little annoying niggle would you like us to fix? Comment with your papercuts, and I'll add them to our issues database.

More tantalizing hints

You can glean a lot about what's going on from the feed of the updates committed to the main Moviestorm codebase: here's just a few entries from today:

• Revision 23995 Committed by amos_willbond: - Updated icons for morph regions (character shop).
• Revision 23996 Committed by amos_willbond: - Further changes to morph area icons (character shop)
• Revision 24001 Committed by chris_ollis: - Extra face textures for morph male
• Revision 24012 Committed by ben_sanders: - Mouth height separated, and full morphs added
• Revision 24013 Committed by ben_sanders: - Added blood and blemishes to the skin detail
• Revision 24014 Committed by ben_sanders: - Beards added
• Revision 24015 Committed by ben_sanders: - Copied beard thumbs from core

The new character workshop is definitely taking shape!

Developers' diary, May 7, 2010

We've had a busy month.

In early April, we released the Metro Style pack. We followed that up with Moviestorm 1.3, which included the new Cutting Room and filters, and, of course 3D. A week later, we shipped the first filters pack plus the 1.3.0.1 patch, and then yesterday, we gave you the Dark Romance pack.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, we launched the lifetime subscription and we've been working on those nagging PayPal and issues.

The rest of May should be somewhat less hectic for us. We're aiming to ship the Dining pack in a couple of weeks (assuming, as always, we don't have any last-minute calamities), and we've already started work on Moviestorm 1.3.1. We have several more packs in development, including a second filters pack, but we're not certain exactly in what order those will be finished. We'll have a better idea towards the end of May.

We're also looking at quick and easy solutions to make it easier for you to find your way round the growing number of user-generated packs and mods that are out there. We've seen a huge rise in the number of new mods, peaking at one a day at the end of April. Most of them are free, which means there's a huge selection of extra content instantly available to every Moviestorm subscriber. The programmers are focusing on 1.3.1, so we're just going to do something simple for now.

All this secrecy is driving me crazy

We have a lot of exciting things planned for the future of Moviestorm. Some of them you'll see very soon, some you'll see a long way down the road, and some of them just won't pan out at all. The trouble is, we honestly don't know which is which yet.

We do our best to keep you up-to-date with what we're working on, but the lovely Moviestorm community is insatiable. You just want to know absolutely everything. So, in an attempt to satisfy your curiosity / tease you some more (delete as appropriate), here's a proof-of-concept video from one of our development builds.

This one' s getting a brand new tag of WhenIt'sReadyWhichMightBeNever. Enjoy!

My life sucks, I want to cry.

Look who we saw hanging around on Chris's computer today.

Like a Goth, only much less dark and much more Harry Potter. (Urban Dictionary)

You know how it goes. When we've finished making them.

Moviestorm gets the munchies

Oooh, that Chris Ollis. He loves to whet your appetites, doesn't he?

Earlier this week, he posted these two tasty videos. Check 'em out.

So, go on, spill the beans. What's cooking, Chris?

Your actors will soon be able to sit at a table and eat breakfast, soup, bread rolls, pasta, dinner, desert, coffee and wine. Tables snap together, so you can go from one person eating alone to a romantic candle-lit dinner for two, to a long table with as many people feasting as your computer can handle.

We're also building props to create classy restaurants (tasteful walls and pillars etc) and ready-made 4 and 6 seater tables.

As usual. We'll serve it when it's ready.

The worst Moviestorm crash we've ever seen

We want Moviestorm to be easy to use. We try not to dazzle you with an enormously complicated interface, with hundreds of buttons and menus. In some cases, this means that you can't get the level of precision you need for a certain task. We're always trying to find ways to let you do that, without transforming the Moviestorm interface into the control panel for a supersonic jet.

One of things that can sometimes prove difficult is precise positioning of objects in the Set Workshop View. Thankfully, we've got some new functionality currently in development which will help.



This gizmo is called the, er ... well, it's actually called The Gizmo right now, because we haven't come up with a more sensible name for it. It allows you to "nudge" an object by very small amounts, until you get it exactly where you want it. As well as allowing linear movement, the Gizmo (somehow I think that name is here to stay) also allows you to apply rotation to an object, in any direction.

We let Ben take the Gizmo for a test drive, and he got a little carried away:

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

Height is important. More precisely, differences in height. You can use height to create drama, contrast, emotion, interest, beauty, menace - a clever director can do almost anything with a good, varied set. Up until now, Moviestorm didn't handle height very well. Characters could only really move around on a single level plain, which meant it was very hard to get shots like this:



Woo-hoo! There's no cheating in that shot. It's just plain ol' Moviestorm. That tower really is as tall as it seems to be.



We're using some brand new development code, which Mark has been quietly working on for the past few months, allowing characters to walk on surfaces at different heights. The tower is Amos's work (and, incidentally, his first official art asset for us).

Just in case you don't believe that it really works, here's a clip from the movie Alex is working on at the moment. He's asked me to stress that this is a really, really rough first draft, but it is all rendered directly from Moviestorm in one single scene.



Coming soon. As always: When It's Ready.

The miracle of birth: where Moviestorm characters come from

Sometimes we wonder about Chris. There he sits at his desk, surrounded by pictures of Bjork, Ne-Yo, Rihanna, and Lily Allen, listening to My Chemical Romance, Green Day, and Bat for Lashes, while browsing Etsy, Hot Topic, Yukka and Vintage Vixen. He tells us it's research.

Then he sits in the coffee room, doodling and mumbling to himself, with that strange look in his eyes that all artists get. You know, the one that says, "I'm being creative, don't talk to me, just bring me doughnuts and drinks heavily laden with caffeine."

After a while, stuff like this gets mysteriously plastered on the walls of the office, usually half-way up the stairs. or left lying on people's desks in plain brown envelopes.

And a while later, new Moviestorm characters appear.

(More screenshots soon, but here's one of those guys in action.)

Drawing on the walls

We here at Moviestorm are responsible citizens. We would like to make it clear that in no way do we condone the defacing of public property. We believe that Banksy is nothing more than a common hoodlum, not an artist, and should be locked up for his crimes. However, we do understand that it may be necessary from time to time to depict anti-social or illegal activity in films, purely for educational and moral purposes, of course. Like this.

Work in progress: art by Chris Ollis, images by Andrew Kennedy. 100% Moviestorm.

You know the answer. When it's ready.

Get used to dissipatement

Sometimes it's the small things that make the difference. Take a look at this:

That's not a clever blend of several different renders. That's pure Moviestorm, generated in a single take from one scene. We now have the ability to make objects disappear (and reappear) during the course of a movie. This is the sort of thing that you might not immediately see a use for. The longer you have it in your arsenal, though, the more useful it begins to appear.

All I've done here is set up two barrels, one on top of the other. The burnt barrel is hidden at the start, with the rusted barrel visible. I use the show/hide functionality on both objects, using the explosion to cover the transition. Silly, yes, but fun and potentially very useful.

This new bit of functionality is already working in our current development code. Hopefully, we'll be able to ship it to you as part of Moviestorm version 1.1.7. As always, our usual get-out-of-jail-free disclaimers apply, but I'm reasonably confident about this one.

Incidentally, version 1.1.7 is shaping up to be a massive release. It's straining at the seams with tasty good stuff. I think it's our most exciting release for a long time.

Skeleton vs Bins: a walk on the smooth side

We've been dropping hints about Mark's new walk code for months, and we can finally show you what it actually does.

QA chappie Dave#6, who made this little movie, says:

In the old days, this poor skeleton would tackle these bins like a tank. Stopping to align himself, needing strict user supervision, pondering the lack of flesh on bones. Not especially like a tank then, but he felt like one.

These days, he's just pointed where he needs to go and he... just goes. Any obstacles he faces can be swiftly and most importantly, smoothly navigated. He's still concerned about the lack of flesh but feels less like a tank.

But really, this marks a big leap in visual quality and intuitive user accessibility. Less time spent navigating bins means more time thinking up clever stuff, and there's still more to come in this regard.

Sweet, huh? Combined with the rest of the animation improvements, this takes Moviestorm another huge leap forward from clunky old game style machinima to something much more natural and realistic.