articy:draft X has quickly become a narrative design tool favorite among our community and we’re very much grateful to all of you for that. Today, we are excited to finally share what our team has been working on in this brand new articy:draft X update aimed to help you step up your scripting and writing game.
It’s no secret that scripting is one of articy:draft’s essential features and we’d long been making sure that you can script nearly anything using our narrative design tool. But just because something is possible, that’s doesn’t necessarily make it easy and we’ve been getting signals from our community that they need our help to make their scripting life a little easier and we hope this update will do just that.
So without further ado, let’s dive into the new features and improvements:
What’s new in 4.1
📜New Features:
👉seen/unseen/fallback keywords are here to better support your scripting of choice points. You can now easily model single choices, fallback paths and generally conditional paths that depend on if or how often your players have already walked a specific path. Check out the dedicated entry in our help center to learn how to use it.
And before you ask, yes they are already fully supported by the free articy:draft X Unity and Unreal importers
👉Read only template properties – Need to mark template properties as read-only for the articy:draft X UI? Now you can, and if you need them for use with technical, workflow or calculated properties you can still allow them to be changed from an MDK plugin only.
⚙️Tech update:
👉 articy:draft X has undergone a migration to .NET 8 – we were actually going to leave it at that but our inner geeks simply have to say it: this huge technological shift represents, aside from new libraries and slightly improved performance, a future-proof articy:draft X for which our team worked really hard and we’re mighty proud of that 😊
⚠️One very important note for all of you using custom plugins: please make sure to also migrate all your custom plugins to .NET 8 when you upgrade to 4.1. Follow our guides to Migrate an existing MDK plugin to .NET 8 or Migrate an existing API program to .NET 8 respectively to migrate your existing code to .NET 8.
🛠️DevKit Updates:
👉DevKit Tools plugin – The one plugin to … create even more plugins ^^ by automating boilerplate processes as well as API projects for multi-user license users, including the setup of the Visual Studio project for a new plugin and the packaging for distribution. Check out Per plugin-project setup and Per program setup to learn how this will simplify your work.
👉Articy API update – You can now get the Articy API as NuGet Package and have an easier time setting up projects. Follow the one time setup guide to get your workspace ready for development.
👉Extended capabilities – You can now create and modify templates, features, and property definitions programmatically via the MDK. Learn all about it in the how to article: Working with Templates
✨ QoL improvements:
👉In-App Help – ever wished you could have all the articy:draft knowledge at your fingertips? Now you do: the in-app help brings all the knowledge of the comprehensive help-center directly in articy:draft so you can get the exact piece of information you need, when and where you need it.
👉Creating a Dialog Fragment with Speaker will now focus the spoken text directly, placing the cursor exactly where you need it so you can go on writing with less clicks.
And since there can be no update without the good old squashing of pesky insects, there are also a few 🪲bug fixes that you can read about in our change log.
We hope you’ve enjoyed the highlights of our latest update and get a chance to try them out soon.
Don’t forget to check out our help center for instructions on how to use both new and old features of articy:draft. Should you encounter any technical issues please contact our support team.
If you’d like to try out new features before they are released, please complete this 2 min form and we’ll contact you.
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