Conversation

Apr 6, 2022

all in an interface that's simple to use. Right now there's a big learning curve to doing animation, as there are plenty of programs that can do it, but they're all designed for more complex work, so their learning curve is massive. 3D Movie Maker is simple.

427

not to mention that with an open source version, we could enable a hybrid approach: You make a movie in 3D Movie Maker, then when you get to something it can't do... you export your movie into Blender or Source Film Maker and now you can continue in the more complex program.

424

right now that's impossible. If you make a movie in 3D Movie Maker, it stays in 3D Movie Maker, and your only options for showing it to others is to send them the .3mm file, which requires another copy of 3D Movie Maker to play. This made sense in 1995, with dial-up.

415

but in 2022 we have youtube and other streaming services. Open sourcing it would let us easily just have an "export to AVI/MP4/MKV/Whatever" button.

410

basically I think it's a great program that should be preserved and maintained and expanded. It's survived this long, but it's bitrotting. It's amazing it runs at all this long after it was made, but it is developing problems and glitches.

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It would be a great gift to the world to let everyone play with it on modern systems. It would also allow a whole new generation to watch the movies made with it, and share their own with others.

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and this isn't just me who wants this. The most recent film uploaded to 3dmm.com (the leading fan site for the program) was put up on Monday. 3D Movie Maker's fanbase has never given up on it, and continues to this day.

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There's been a ton of fan work over the years to expand and fix it, but we're inherently held back by not having the source.

338

We can build tools to create new props and actors, but it's unwieldy to put them in. we can build patches for some bugs, but others are too tricky to fix without source.

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And there's even cases of 3D Movie Maker showing up again and being widely popular. Back in 2014 the streamer Jerma985 made a video in it called "Rat Movie: Mystery of the Mayan Treasure" and the official upload has nearly 3 million views: