Writer Portal Previewer/Story Previewer Update: Directing Helpers

Hey Episode Creators!

Today we’re releasing a bunch of new tools to help you work more efficiently on your story!

When we went to add some of these new tools we realized that our directing helpers were pretty messy, confusing and didn’t leave a lot of space for the new things we wanted to add…

So we set out to do some cleanup and reorganized our tools to make them more clear and most importantly pave the way for awesome new tools!

…like our brand new layering helpers!

Gone are the days of editing layers in the script editor and updating your story! You can now edit the layer of any character or overlay easily with only the directing helpers.

Easily move things forward or backward by a single layer or send them straight to the front or back.

We also know that working with the spot directing coordinates and zones can be pretty confusing and many of you have been asking us to help make that easier for a while now.

While we can’t make any adjustments to the way the tech works because it would break stories, we still wanted to help make this easier to use. So we focused on what we can change, the debug text.

Before, it was hard to tell where a character or overlay if they were in a zone since the numbers would change based on if a zone was set or not. But we didn’t show what zone you were in! So we’ve added the zone to always show.

This will also update when you drag characters or overlays into new zones or out of the zones completely.

You will only see negative numbers or numbers larger than 320 if you go out of the zone boundaries. So you will see negative numbers if a character or overlay is to the left of zone 1 and the only time you will see numbers greater than 320 will be if they are to the right of zone 3.

One of our super awesome engineers also created this chart to help make it clear where these zone boundaries are:

Check it out in action here:

Anything that is output here is also now exactly what you need to put into your script to place the character in that spot! No math required! :smiley:

And the best part? All of these updates are now live in the app AND on the web previewer!!

Happy Writing!

Love,
The Episode Team

UPDATE: These have been officially released! There is a small bug currently, described below:

If your characters are not spot directed onto layers in the Donacode, like in the example below:

INT. CEO OFFICE - DAY
@LIZ spot 1.280 120 80 AND LIZ faces right
@MELANI3 spot 1.280 200 80 AND MELANI3 faces left

the Bring to Front/Send to Back buttons will not work as intended.
However, the Forward and Backward Layer tools will! Our team is working on removing this issue in future versions.

118 Likes

This is super helpful, thanks so much, for making a tutorial. :yellow_heart::yellow_heart:

2 Likes

For real this is super helpful. Thank you
image

16 Likes

Thank you!!! I am crying tears of joy :sob::sob:

5 Likes

This is a great start. Yes! :purple_heart::zombie:‍♂

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Yay! :heart_eyes:

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I love the added layer helper. I’ve been wanting something like this for ages and really helps with a mini game I was struggling to construct yesterday lol.

A few issues I’m having however:

  • every time I touch an overlay, the previewer freezes and I get error 79. I can’t do anything unless I refresh the episode and start again, but I still physically can’t move or scale an overlay even once I’ve refreshed it all.

  • the copy button doesn’t quite “copy” the character’s placement now. “copy stage” works just fine, but if I simply “copy” and paste the character’s placement into my script, I get an error as it’s not the right script codes. See below:

COPY

@HANNAH spot 1.660 145 -212 in zone 1
CHAR: @HANNAH
LAYER -3

COPY STAGE

@zoom on 0 0 to 100% in 0
@HANNAH spot 1.660 145 -212
@HANNAH moves to layer -3
@JESSE spot 1.712 75 -238
@JESSE moves to layer -2
@overlay 6493523559579648_FOOTBALL shifts to 115 20
@overlay 6493523559579648_FOOTBALL scales to 0.118 0.118
@overlay 6493523559579648_MECHCLAW shifts to 57 296
@overlay 6493523559579648_MECHCLAW scales to 1.000 1.000
@overlay 6493523559579648_CLAWMACHINE2 shifts to 0 0
@overlay 6493523559579648_CLAWMACHINE2 scales to 1.000 1.000
@overlay 6493523559579648_MECHCLAW2 shifts to 57 134
@overlay 6493523559579648_MECHCLAW2 scales to 1.000 1.000
@overlay 6493523559579648_CLAWMACHINE1 shifts to 0 0
@overlay 6493523559579648_CLAWMACHINE1 scales to 1.000 1.000
@overlay 6493523559579648_BLUETORCH shifts to 0 0
@overlay 6493523559579648_BLUETORCH scales to 0.280 0.280
@overlay 6493523559579648_TAMBOURINE shifts to 37 67
@overlay 6493523559579648_TAMBOURINE scales to 0.334 0.334
@overlay 6493523559579648_PITCHFORK shifts to 231 -125
@overlay 6493523559579648_PITCHFORK scales to 0.676 0.676
@overlay 6493523559579648_RAINBOWEGG shifts to 164 67
@overlay 6493523559579648_RAINBOWEGG scales to 0.172 0.172
@overlay 6493523559579648_HAIRBRUSH shifts to 115 80
@overlay 6493523559579648_HAIRBRUSH scales to 0.298 0.298

15 Likes

Great @Melani3! Do you maybe know, can we get overlay rotator in the previewer? Can tech team create it?

20 Likes

No doubt, this will be fantastic help, especially with complex directing. Thank you so much! :blob_sun:

3 Likes

And nothing new in my app previewer! And mobile browser’ previewer stopped working :disappointed:

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Ummm…I can’t move overlays without getting error 79

8 Likes

This is AWESOME! :star_struck::smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

3 Likes

[quote=“misskitty16, post:14, topic:311598, full:true”]
i wish y’all didn’t do this… now i can’t write because it’s giving me error 79 every time i try to write

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im gonna test it!

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I’m getting the same error.

Can’t move my overlays. Every time I press a button it gives me the error-
I can move characters though. Weird it doesn’t work for overlays and gives me this error?

thanks now I can’t write :unamused:

same for some reason when it’s a freaking overlay it doesn’t work.

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Guess we shouldn’t touch our overlays and hope they fix it :grimacing:

1 Like

Just tested it! It’s awesome!!! Now, gotta see with overlays. XD

3 Likes