Slowburn Update v1.36.0

Hi everyone- saltyrain here, slowburn dev :}

This update tag probably doesn't mean much to those not in the Discord, but it essentially means the website has received 36 feature-oriented, significant updates since release nearly two months ago. Time sure does fly!

Just wanted to take this opportunity to update those of you who prefer the Community pages here, over Discord or Reddit- a lot has changed since the last update blogpost, probably way too much to even list out, but here's what I've been working on in the past week or so- some things you might've missed if you haven't been on the website in a while, and what I plan to try and do for the future!

Mobile UI/UX Improvements Spent a lot of time going through most screens / surfaces through a mobile view to try and improve the experience- it's not perfect, but should be a bit better now.

Stories & Worlds In an effort to make things even more immersive, there are now more fleshed out hidden reputation systems, factions are tracked better, goals are tracked better, and Cast Members / Character Lorebook entries can now be assigned a 'Group' that they belong to. This is best used when assinging a character to a particular faction that they are apart of.

Chat I spent a lot of time going through the system prompt, cutting and replacing things to try out some new techniques I've been researching and working on. As a result of this you may or may not notice some changes in chat, let me know if quality dipped- and you may sometimes see inner thoughts woven into the response through prose, by default.

'Choices' are now also a thing! Yay! They enter you into a 'suggested replies' mode, and allow you to approach the story with a laid back, choose your own adventure, type of experience. And you can see dice rolls sometimes if you go through the response preferences menu in the formatting section.

Also there's a language picker in response preferences in hopes of making the language detection more reliable.

UI/UX Story Edit and Character Edit screens have been changed into a tab format for less vertical scroll hell- I hope this is especially helpful for mobile users. There's also been some changes made to the public character/story/world pages as well.

QoL

• Users can now edit, and manually complete goals within stories through the 'Goals' UI in chat. Quests are a thing too- they're something you give yourself as an objective, and the story becomes aware, in a way, of 'what you're trying to do'.
• Implemented a slightly more robust 'Cast' panel.
• Users can now bookmark characters- bookmarked characters can be inserted into private stories, and if Co-Authoring is enabled, you can publish stories with them, too.
• Character definitions can now be shared- you'll see the option to enable it through your character edit page, in 'Advanced'.
• Some more CSS effects on text- better bolding, too, and characters can now use all caps for heavy emphasis/shouting, as well, though it's not guaranteed.
• Merged Author's notes- so no decision paralysis can ever occur between 'what's a narrative vs character note?'
• Models should now show health status next to them. Hope this works.

Added collections :}

Bugs

• Fixed a crap ton of bugs- can't and won't list them all out, but probably not enough.
• Banner covers now render in higher quality- if you upload a proper image, at least. Re-upload your banners if you want!
• Author's notes made a bit stronger, regenerations now show proper POV lens, and they might work better now, as well- as long as you give it some direction.
• "Where you left off" now includes world stories.
• Improved some of our output validators and response repair

After this weekend, the next couple of weeks' roadmap will probably look like this- though I might make a poll to see what people want sooner rather than later.

Creator Program Perks (with a more dedicated Creators page) > Community Initiatives Brainstorming (Community Rep Roles coming soon?.. ) > Referral Program (maybe!) > Group Chats / Multi-Char Easability (I want to square this one away sooner rather than later since ik a lot of people have it on their wish list) > Events, Challenges & Rewards (a more relaxed objective- but very good for community engagement. Sad I couldn't get to this earlier) > More Cosmetics (Badges Included) > Chat Themes- like the background. . . and stuff > Inline image generation(??? i have no clue how this works at all so i'll have to do research) > Story Generation Mode (this would require a larger lift in terms of the backend, but i know it's on a user's wishlist and i think it could be cool to try out so i'm tacking it on there.

the roadmap for the next few weeks is in no particular order, and ofc UI/UX changes and memory/chat optimizations, quality of life updates, etc, will always be sprinkled in.

That's pretty much most of it for the past week! There've been a lot of optimizations made to the backend in an effort to improve response times, as well- which I hope people start to notice and benefit from 😄

There's also an Annual plan for subscriptions now- perfect for people who believe in this thing long-term, though I urge you to only buy in if you've built enough conviction and have the money to spare to support us.

That is all I have to report on for now. I'm super grateful to everyone who has tried the website out and enjoyed it- your satisfaction and happiness are really what drives our passion to grow and keep going, so I hope we can continue this journey together!

enough blabbering from me- this post was far too long, I should get to bed now ;-;

good night!

-saltyrain