Hello Episodians!
This week we have a LOT of exciting updates to the Web Portal. Upgrades we’ve released include: increased speed to saving scripts, a new way to preview animations, improvements on NARRATOR / NARR commands and a new spotlight/cinematic warning for your script!
Script Saving Speed
We’ve made improvements to our script editor so your scripts should now save much faster! We ran some numbers across many scripts, and were able to consistently cut down on how long you’re waiting for the spinning “Save” to finish so that you can keep writing.
Those of you who have large and visually complex scenes will get the biggest impact each time you save your work.
Behavior Catalog
Introducing the new Behavior Catalog! We realized that there was no easy way to preview a lot of animations at once, so we’ve added a new tab to the Art Catalog.
You can now preview animations side by side by going to the Art Catalog and clicking on the new Behaviors tab:
You can also access a view this catalog using the characters in your story by going to the script editor and clicking on this link:
Note that we’re still looking into how we could make this work for CLASSIC, so stay tuned for more news on that. Unfortunately, because that’s an older part of our tech, it does pose more challenges than expected.
You can also now drag characters in the previewer windows!
This will make it much easier for you to see animations that don’t fit well in the window! You’ll be able to adjust your view in the behavior previewer, outfit previewer, and previews of animations in the script editor. Just click and drag the character to move them!
Updates to the NARRATOR / NARR Commands
Next, we’ve updated the NARRATOR / NARR commands as follows:
Previously, you probably noticed that character display names only worked for 1-word names, and with the NARRATOR command:
NARRATOR (JOHN)
Sad times.
NOW, you can use all of the following and have it reflect properly in Web Previewer / app:
NARRATOR (JOHN SMITH)
WHOOHOO!
NARR (JOHN SMITH)
Isn’t this exciting?
Set Format Warnings
Last but not least, we updated our ‘set format cinematic’ / ‘set format spotlight’ warnings! You may have run into the issue where you have created a Spotlight story and try to use set format cinematic only to find it doesn’t work but your story does not receive any errors! We have added a new warning which will let you know when your story is locked into Spotlight!
And, as always, if you have any issue please let us know!
Love,
The Episode Team