Story Data & Performance Update

Story Thyme v1.13.0 introduces a major upgrade to how stories are stored and edited behind the scenes. Instead of saving an entire story every time a frame is modified, Story Thyme now saves individual frames separately. This dramatically reduces save request sizes, improves support for larger projects, introduces new story length indicators for readers, and includes significant improvements to the modern transition system used by both the Story Editor Preview and Theater player.

This update lays the foundation for future visual novels containing hundreds or even thousands of frames without running into request size limitations.

New Frame-Based Story Storage

• Story frames are now stored individually in the database.
• Editing a frame saves only the affected frame instead of the entire story.
• Adding new frames now inserts only the new frame into storage.
• Deleting frames now removes only the selected frame and automatically updates frame ordering.
• The Story Editor, Theater, and Admin Story Review pages now load frame data directly from the new frame storage system.

Editor Performance Improvements

• Greatly reduced save request sizes.
• Eliminated issues caused by very large story payloads.
• Improved editor reliability when working with large visual novels.
• Established the foundation for future support of significantly larger stories.

Lazy Loaded Frame Previews

• Frame preview images now load only when needed.
• Improves editor startup performance for stories with large frame counts.
• Reduces unnecessary image requests and bandwidth usage.

Story Length Indicators

Readers can now see how long a story is before they begin reading. Story Thyme now tracks frame counts and displays a story length category on story pages.

• Short Story — Under 50 frames
• Novella — 50 to 199 frames
• Long Story — 200 to 499 frames
• Epic — 500+ frames
• Story pages now display both the length category and total frame count.

Example: Length: Long Story (240 Frames)

Transition System Improvements

• Fixed an issue where dialogue could fail to appear after multiple transitions occurred back-to-back.
• Fixed transition timing issues that could cause consecutive transitions to appear merged together.
• Improved color transition sequencing to ensure incoming frames display correctly during fade effects.
• Updated the Preview and Theater runtimes to better handle chained transition events.
• Refactored scene layering in both the Story Editor Preview and Theater player.
• Character sprites are now rendered independently from background transition layers.
• Crossfade transitions now affect scene backgrounds without causing character sprites to visually fade with the scene.
• Color transitions continue to affect the entire scene, including character sprites, preserving cinematic fade-to-color effects.
• Fixed sprite positioning issues that could occur after scene transitions.
• Improved consistency between Story Editor Preview playback and Theater playback.

Testing Results

As part of testing this update, Story Thyme successfully handled a story expanded to 1,000 frames. Saving, loading, adding, and deleting frames all functioned correctly under the new system, demonstrating significantly improved scalability compared to previous versions.

Looking Ahead

This update removes one of the largest technical limitations previously affecting long-form visual novel projects. With the new frame-based architecture in place, Story Thyme is better prepared for future creator-focused features and larger storytelling experiences.

Thank you for helping Story Thyme grow. More exciting updates are on the way!