I enjoyed a lunch at Carrabba's Italian Grille with Matt Kelland (sans The Hat) last Saturday. He was making several stops in Florida and managed to make it to my neck of the swampy woods.

Not surprisingly, we spent a majority of the time talking about Moviestorm, its strengths and weaknesses, and its future prospects. I failed to clarify with Matt which items we discussed are for public consumption and which are not, but suffice it to say that I am very enthused about the future of Moviestorm. As if I wasn't more than a little giddy about it already.

Probably the biggest demand on tools like Moviestorm right now is the demand for content to use in movies. Characters, clothing and accessories, props (static and interactive), animations, textures... these assets are one of the areas where game worlds currently have a bit of an advantage, in that they often ship with a good chunk of thematic content. Moviestorm has the additional challenge of providing a wide base of content, not in service of one storyline but - ideally - in service of most or all storylines that users might want to pursue.

This is an enormous and virtually insatiable demand, and one that - I am happy to report - the Moviestorm team is well aware they cannot meet on their own. So I think that 2009 will be for Moviestorm the year of user made content, the year they unlock the potential already demonstrated in the content creation communities of The Sims 2 and Second Life. I think we'll see the tools and pipeline for this become visible as a clear priority, so the fabulously talented artists among Moviestorm's users will be able to create their content and share it with the world... even market it to the world, and with Moviestorm's blessing.

And this in addition to some pretty fantastic content packs Moviestorm themselves have planned for release in the coming year!

Moviestorm's users have already demonstrated that some remarkable things can be created with the program using mostly the base stock content. I think that when the doors are opened for importing / creating content of their own and getting it easily into the program, you're going to see some jaw dropping results in the films that are created.

I'll go ahead and betray the fact that I earnestly plan to use it to try dropping your jaw myself.