Chatfic Lab
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WEEK 32: VISUAL NOVEL MODE, LAYERED CHARACTERS, SENTIMENTS AND MORE!
🕑 Added 2024-08-16 20:49:03 +0000 UTCHi! If you were in the latest Patreon tier, you already had early access to the initial version of the new feature "VN Mode". But if you were not, then you are in for a big surprise!
Starting today, the new Visual Novel mode features 2D (actually 3D-ish) characters representing each character in a story, with support for various facial expressions like "shy," "naughty," "happy," "sad," "annoyed," etc. In addition, you can turn on background music(it has a bug tho) and sound effects for the stories!
If you support the project on Patreon (Cup of Coffee or Glass of Wine tiers), you can customize all characters; eye colours, hairstyle, hair colour, gender, skin colour and body type. Even tho these variations are limited now, there will be more and more options in the future, possibly some emotes too!
Everything is much more game-like in Chatfic Lab now. Go ahead and "play" any old story from the website, and you will see the difference!
I am an author, how can I use this?
This is the best part. You don't need to do anything! It is all automatic! And if you want to set some stuff manually, you can also do that too!
If no character data is present in the chatfic story, Chatfic Lab makes its "best guess" effort on the gender and physical attributes of the story characters. It picks or designs characters for you! If no sentiment data is found in the messages, the chatfic server does a basic sentiment analysis on story messages and decides on the facial expressions by itself!
Automatically generated characters and sentiments may not always be perfect matches. In the chatfic editor, starting today, you can manually set the gender, hair, and other features of each character if you want. However, please note that this is completely optional. The manual selection of message sentiments (such as angry or sad) is still a work in progress and will be available on the chatfic editor as soon as possible.
Layered Character Engine
These dynamically changing character images are created on-the-fly by something I developed that I call "Layered Character Engine". This uses a logic similar to renpy's layered images, but it is much simpler and uses yaml files for the character data. I hope to share this one day with the community so anyone can create their own layered character sets for the Chatfic Lab.
If anyone is interested in that, just contact me and I'll help you out. The real power of this new engine will be more noticable when I manage to have time to add new character bases, poses, emotes, expressions etc. As a programmer, I am not really a 2d artist, I am just very experienced with Photoshop and custom loras. So creating these character assets takes too much time for me. (A little community support would be amazing 😅).
Issues
As this is a new feature and a big one too, there might be some issues. If you face any, please send me a private message or share it with our discord group.
There are currently three issues I am aware of: the story "reset" function not working, background music not playing the first time chatficlab is visited, and the end of the story repeating endlessly when chatrooms are switched. I'll fix these in the upcoming days.
New Route System
Chatfic Lab was originally using an index-based progress system. This means your progress in the story was represented by the last revealed message id, and nothing else. This caused a lot of issues. One with complex, non-linear plots, as jumping "back" in the story was not really possible. It also limited the ability to reload previous user choices on a story, which caused issues with the fast-forward function too. Starting today, Chatfic Lab uses route-based progress tracking. This may cause some issues at the beginning, but once these initial issues are solved, this will allow us to implement a lot of new features like going backwards in the story, creating multiple saves of a story, loading them, and more.
