Currently the new features are already worthy of a new release. It has an installer, it has file association and an update checker. Yep, now you can ignore my blog and still have the latest version of Story Editor.

However I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that you will have to wait untill it has been released. The good news is this release will most likely be done before the weekend. The reason for the delay is because a) it's late and b) I want to test the downloading mechanisme. Oh and of course, it needs to alert you when a new version is availabel. So I still got my work cut out for me for this week.

So what has changed?
First of all I have decided on an extension. You can still work using the old zip files, although I recommend you start using the sez format.

Second you can now reorder chapters and scenes, by selecting the chapter or scene in the outline and then use the green buttons.

Next week I will try to make the Story Editor installable with automatic updates, so that you don't have to download the whole package again.

Here is the link to my favorite creative story writing application: Story Editor V1.0.0.3.

You can download Story Editor for free from here.

Just extract it where you want it and run StoryEditor. The application should explain itself but if you really need some guidance, just press ctrl+O and open "tutorial story" and if you wonder if you should open the zip file or not, then yes, it is the zip file. If have not yet decided on a extension, so until then it will remain to be zip file. Anyway the tutorial should explain a few things.

For now I'm going to bed and get some of those fairly rare Zzz's.

UPDATE: There has already been a bug found. If you remove anything but the last scene then the scene that is selected after that will contain what was in the old scene. So don't press remove: I will have this fixed tomorrow.

Now Microsoft Word would have been a great tool were it not that I need to keep track of all kinds of things in my story. I used to do this with an Excel file but that didn't work. I have tried some of the creative story writing software out there (open-source, free and commercial) but they either provided too much, miss certain features or required me to work in a way I thought was cumbersome (I don't want a pop-up when I look at details of a person).

So I have decided to write my very own story editor.
A key feature will be that it uses a dynamic data format. In most applications you can add and edit your characters but then you only a few predefined fields available, like name, birthday, bio and notes. If you are writing a deep space story which involves many alien races you would need to define that for each character in the bio. In my story editor I want to be able to just add an extra field.

Another feature I'm going to put in for certain is that everything can have transient properties, which is fancy way of saying that some properties might not last forever. In the Lord of the Rings we see that the one ring switches quite a bit from owner. Having one field to track information about the owner would be insufficient as I want to know the owner of the ring at a certain point in time. Of course, this system is a bit cumbersome when you want to keep track of the owner of the a ball in a football match.

The first release will be when the editing of files and the outline editor fully works.

The reason I abandon Brick3 is because the system has become too hard to maintain and there are too many pieces of legacy code around for me to quickly improve it. On top of that Brick3 was the first incarnation of the Brick project series in 3D with some advanced features, the new way of memory management (a 37 MB instead of 2 GB). So I had expected I would need to rewrite it, even though I wanted to avoid it.

Brick4 will have unlike its predecessor cleaner code a new way to some things (XML instead of custom file formats) and it will make heavy use of the command and strategy patterns. This will allow me to developer faster and safer in the long run, although I fear that rewriting the application will have an heavy cost and that any advantage I gain will be lost to that.

The good is that this will allow me to revisit some off the old features and make some notes and see if I can improve it.

If I’m lucky everything should be rewritten at the end of this week and with even some more luck I will also have implemented a new feature. Guess time will tell.