August 5th 2024

Novel Outline Updates for Chat

For those who have experienced issues with AI not recognizing or miscounting scenes/chapters, this update should significantly improve the experience:

The internal structure for the "Include novel outline" feature has been updated to use a more structured approach (XML instead of Markdown). This should

help guide the AI when discussing specific acts, chapters, or scenes

. We've also made scenes with content but no summary visible to the AI, preventing it from underestimating the number of scenes in your story.

A new use case now possible:

Create a new, empty novel
Apply a template from the "Create from Outline" feature
Open a new chat and select "Novel Outline"
Ask the AI to populate your outline with an idea
The AI should now use the exact act and chapter names, as well as the precise scene count from your plan view

If you prefer the old behavior for your custom prompts (although we consider this a major improvement), you can change your

novel.outline

call(s) to

novel.outline("hierarchical")

Other chat updates:

The
Chat prompt preview no longer requires a message
and works with a blank message
Changing the prompt and/or model for a new chat thread now properly saves it as a new chat (this was already the case, but empty chats were only visible after refreshing the page or reopening the novel)
The chat will now show a little "knowledge cutoff" warning so you know which messages will actually be sent to the AI.
Fixed some minor issues with chat extraction involving nested lists
Resolved interactivity inconsistencies when accessing chats in shared novels or subscription plans without workshop chat

Import Improvements

We've updated the novel import dialog, including a new setting to enhance imports for users who only use scene dividers. New help text has been added to better explain the options.

For those that don't want to bother with titles and the like, and only have a single-chapter novel, the importer now supports those as well!

Other Changes

Fixed the "[...] maximum context length [...] However, you requested about [...]" error caused by a recent internal change in OpenRouter
Resolved an issue where an extracted chapter, when added to your outline, would not save correctly and would lose its association with the act upon page refresh
The export button now always appears when the sidebar is collapsed
Implemented additional performance optimizations for writing in scenes
Fixed visual issues with some dropdown menus not overlaying content properly
Various other fixes and improvements