FX: Jaw hits floor

Soon, very soon, Overman is going to release his new movie. He kindly sent us a preview. Our reaction can be summed up in Chris's awestruck comment.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our users for showing us just how fantastic Moviestorm is.

Phil is pushing Moviestorm way, way beyond the envelope. And we love it.

So, thank you, Phil. And thank you to everyone else who makes movies so that we can enjoy watching them.

Things we didn’t make

If anyone knows what a bitch it is to work with our mod tools, it’s us. And what we sent out to our pioneer users is even horribler than what we’re currently using in-house. So when we see what some people have managed to do with our shoddy tools, we’re seriously impressed. Have a quick look at these bits of work in progress.

Davidwww’s spaceship, trucks, and cityscape with curving roads

Equinoxx’s window sticker

Forgeuk’s “bloke in a jar” with custom t-shirt.

And yes, we will be releasing a proper version of the Modder’s Workshop. We will, we will! Just not this month, OK? In the meantime, well done to all of you who made it through the existing Modder’s Minefield.

svn stat

As suggested by Anthony I ran StatSVN against the entire moviestorm repository. 90 minutes later and we have a wonderful graph:

Now this is everything, not just code, but makes for interesting viewing. I've taken the names out in the name of decency, but I can reveal that the top green line is Ben_S, Capin' Dave is Pink, and twak the second green line.

Now ben manages his massive line-change rate by endlessly editing all our xml structures. But Dave is a coder and has written 300K lines of code - the length of the entire code base. I've written another 250K (altho mostly UI twaddle, so it doesn't count). I think we've written the code base two or three times over since we've started. That's quite some code churn!

Something to mention here is that number of lines does not map onto how hard we work or how good the work is. It's certainly not indicative of quality, and quite possibly inversely proportional quality. It's an interesting metric that seems to be fairly constant for each person - does that mean some people can do the same quantity of work with fewer lines of code?

In other graph-related news - the most likely time for us to commit stuff to the repository is 4pm on a Friday - "quick it's the weekend, commit it, cheese it and hope someone else fixes it before I get in on monday" ;)


Those long tails are what singles startups out from the crowd - no option but to get it done.

I'm gonna rearrange your face!

You push, you pull, and you can make people's heads behave like plasticine.

Warning: don't try this on your little sister. No, really, don't. We are highly trained professionals who are licensed to smush people's faces around. (Except, as previously noted, Mark.)

If we ask Johnnie nicely, he'll do us a video of this using a proper Moviestorm face later in the week. Morphs are getting closer...

Being John Machinima

Machinima. Machinima machinima? Machinima! Machinima machinima machinima.

Commercials really are the short film art form of today, where up and coming directors get to put all of their skill and artistry into a single minute of motion picture genius. Think of the stunning ads for the Bravia, or the Guinness ad with the giant domino, or the Honda ad with the Goldberg machine. Well, the machinima world is clearly no exception. Check out Sam "Zuckerman" Midwood's promo for the Overcast, made using the Moviestorm Sci-Fi pack, and based on a classic moment from Being John Malkovich. Superbly made, and the most unexpected use of the SF pack yet!