Wednesday 28 October 2020

Captain's Blog: Privateer Part One and Moviestorm Projects for the future...

As discussed briefly here and elsewhere, Privateer is also a go!

Part One (reminiscent of my writing of old, in that it's 12 mins of mostly dialogue, required to fill in the background and kick start the story) is available in the usual places...

I enjoyed getting back into MS* and reacquainting myself with my projected "replacement" for The Movies; I could never get the hang of iClone (I just never had the time to delve into it's complexities, even back when all my free time was "free" to spend on movie making activities, and I certainly don't have the time (and money, and suitable machine!) these days!).  I'm just sad that Moviestorm appears to have just been dropped wholesale (despite the assurances as recently as 3 years ago that development was "on hold" while they concentrated on their new endeavour); no new posts can be made to their forum since July this year (it looks like the forum was effectively "shut off" around then); no staff contact works, the membership has probably scattered to the four winds and their only method of contact now appears to be through Leakbook (which I refuse to use for a variety of reasons), but it still does the job nicely, with all the extra content that's been added over the years by the talented modding community.

If only I could get to grips with the texturing and additional model content side of the modding workshop; I can bring in Sketchup models fine, but adding new textures to models is currently beyond me, which precludes certain types of movies from being made.

Still, got more plans for MS movies going forward (the resurrected idea for Shadows of Albion, my "between seasons" project vaunted in 2009 that morphed into me joining forces with K4 to create Blackstar Rising, went to my wife to be written then disappeared when her laptop effectively exploded and the WIP script (such of it as she'd managed to get written) bit the dust as she had no backups of anything; this one may be revisited and finally made as MS now has the available content to do a sci-fantasy tale).

Lots of life left in the "old dog" yet, and testament to the incredible community and developers who came up with it to begin with that it's still more than capable of turning out decent flicks even after 5 years of sitting fallow on the shelf, gathering dust...

 

* - as a "bronze subscriber" of old, I have the option to sub for a fiver a month or £25 for a year, so bit the bullet and went for the latter; as mentioned elsewhere on here, I originally thought that  £150 was the only perpetual option available, but there is a £50 "theme bundle" license that, because I own all the other packs I've purchased over the years, might be a better long term option when I've got 50 squid free to chuck at a piece of software; just about to go through the pain of moving home so have other priorities at present!

No comments:

Captain's Blog: TMU has resurfaced!

Happened to notice the dial on my browser suddenly showing the TMU site thumbnail again today, so tried going onto tmunderground and... it w...