Machinima for Dummies

I’m not doing a very good job of taking some quiet time, am I? Still, this one definitely deserves a post. It’s sad news, but it seems to be true: Stage 6 is shutting down.

Stage 6 is one of the premier choices for top-quality (divx) video hosting. It’s popular throughout the machinima world, but World Of Warcraft machinimators in particular are absolutely in love with it. The loss of this site is going to be a major blow. The site will close its virtual doors in just a few days time, on February 28th 2008. All hosted videos (and everything else besides) will be lost.

The official announcement on the Stage 6 site gives the reason for the shutdown as basically financial:

“So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it’s really as simple as that.”

There’s not a lot of time to make alternative arrangements, so if you currently host on Stage 6, you need to stop what you’re doing right now and investigate some alternatives. Thankfully, there are several available.

Yet again, we thank moo Money for this one. She gives good suggestions for alternative hosting in her original post on WoW Insider.

I know Hugh said we’d be going quiet for a wee while, but I had to make a quick post when I saw this: the Havoc physics engine (which is the physics engine behind all the games that tout realistic physics as one of their selling points) will be released for free in May.

Now, this is not the quantum-shift for the machinima world that you might at first think. Make no mistake – Havoc is a stunningly complex beast. It’s effectively a code library on which to build game engines. It’s unlikely to see much use in the machinima world, even from the hardest of hardcore hackers. Nonetheless, you never know. The community has surprised us before, and it’ll do so again. Maybe a dazzlingly clever use of this free physics toolkit will be the next way they do so. So, I’m doing my civic duty and posting about the imminent release of the code, just in case somebody far clever than me is reading and gets inspired. Fingers crossed.

Via kotaku – thanks to Chris Ollis for bringing this to our attention in the first place.

You may have noticed we’ve gone a bit quiet. This isn’t because the Machinima world has suddenly stopped, or we’ve dropped dead, or decided to stop writing. Far from it.

We’re just taking a short break. Johnnie’s working like a mad thing over at Moviestorm, whilst I’m taking some time off after four and a half (!) years of BloodSpell. But we’ll be back soon.

See you then.

A fairly mundane post on the official Second Life blog yesterday kicked off a discussion about the merits and practicalities of open-sourcing Second Life (a prospect which we’ve discussed on this blog previously). Unusually, a Linden Lab official chimed in to explain that open-sourcing Second Life is something that they’d still “dearly like” to do, but a number of practical security considerations have to be overcome first.

Whilst I might take issue with the assumption that open-source = untrusted, this is still very encouraging news, especially after the shock did-he-fall-or-was-he-pushed departure of Cory Ondrejka last year.

Thanks to Tari Akpodiete for flagging up this comment thread for us!

Boingboing has just reported that Second Life’s Chief Technical Officer, Cory Ondrejka, has just left Linden Labs citing “irreconcilable differences”.

Since he was the man behind the movement to Open-Source both the viewer and the server, I can’t help but wonder if those differences had something to do with the apparent reversal in policy on open-sourcing the SL servers which we reported on recently. If so, things don’t look good for Second Life Open-Source right now.

EDIT (Johnnie): The original story was broken on Massively by Moo Money. There are a few follow-ups linked from there too, including Cory’s official response.

A couple of Machinima awards popping up on the radar:

The GuildCafe awards include a section for “Best Machinima”.

The Online Machinima Film Festival awards are looking for nominations.

And in other news, I notice that film festival submissions engine Withoutabox now includes a Machinima category under Animation when submitting a film! I’ll be writing more about Withoutabox soon.

Antics 3D has been around for quite a while now, but up until very recently has had a moderately hefty price tag. Not any more! Along with a shiny new website design, the Antics team have released version 3 of their product for free! Can I get a “woo”, and also a “hoo!”?

The free version is the Version 3 Base Pack – you’ll still need to reach for the credit card if you want the Pro pack (it’ll cost you $595/£295 in fact). Having access to a powerful package like this for free is great news for machinimators everywhere, though.

In much the same way as Moviestorm has been doing, the Antics guys are planning to launch some premium content packs soon. The first 500 downloaders of the free base pack will get the first content pack for free when it eventually launches! You can’t say fairer than that.

The Characters Police pack, of course, is already available and still free.

And some less-good news. According to the Second Life Open Source page,

What source code won’t you be releasing?

We don’t (yet) plan to release the code that runs our simulators or other server code (“the Grid”).

I’m not sure whether this is seriously out of date, or if it represents a change of plan chez Linden. I hope it’s the former. As we’ve blogged before, not to mention also talked about in the book, an open-source SL server would be a fantastic development for Machinima in general, removing or limiting a lot of the existing problems with creating Second Life Machinima. If it’s not going to happen, that’s a real pity.

I’m going to try and get hold of the Lindens to see if I can get a confirm/deny on this issue. Anyone who knows what’s up, please do comment below!

Otherwise, I guess we’re all hoping that Open Simulator (the Open-source SL-compatible server that’s under development right now) comes along well.

A few days ago I wrote about the release of Moviestorm version 1.0. Among the many boasts I made was that the new release included the Modder’s Workshop that certain prominent machinimators have been jonesing for.

Alas, it was too good to be true. The decision was made to hold back the Mod Shop from this release at the very last second. Overman’s screams of frustration could be heard around the globe.

This time, it’s for real. The Modder’s Workshop has officially returned, with an all-new publishers licence key system. You’ll need to request a key if you want to use it, and we’re limiting the release of them, so if you’re a Moviestorm pioneer, head over to the forums and register your interest right now, that’s my advice.

( Disclosure: I’m employed by Short Fuze as Moviestorm’s Technical Author )

Moviestorm, which features pretty heavily in the book, officially left Beta status a few hours ago. Moviestorm 1.0 is a brand new release, featuring new base assets, a new interactive tutorial, and – best of all – the long-awaited return of the Modders Workshop! And about darned time too, as Moviestorm Beta users will attest.

Moviestorm 1.0 and the new Base pack are completely free to download and use, and any machinima you create is yours to exploit, so take a look if you haven’t already.

Moviestorm has moved on so much since we wrote Machinima For Dummies that I really wouldn’t recommend trying to follow on with the book using this new version of the software. Not to worry, though – you can safely install and run this new version and the version we supplied on our cover DVD simultaneously. Just resist the urge to click “Yes” when you’re asked if you want to do an automatic update.

If you’re already a Moviestorm user, note that Moviestorm’s automatic update process won’t update to this new release. There’s a fat goody bag of new content, so you’ll have to visit your Downloads page on the Moviestorm site to grab the new gear.

We’ll try to get an updated version of the Moviestorm sections from the book up on the blog soon – both Hugh and I are up to our necks in busy-ness at the moment!

(Disclosure: I’m employed by Short Fuze as Moviestorm’s Technical Author)