DramaQueen 2.4 – Update-Report

This update contains new features and fixes bugs:

NEW FEATURES – for PLUS and PRO:

Storytelling

• There are new text fields in the Storytelling panel for Logline, Premise, Genre and Narrative Tone. These allow to capture the fundamental idea for a story.
• In addition to that text fields allow to capture all important dramatic vehicles of the story: Initial crisis, heroes fall, leitmotif, key-line, refusal, motivation, conflict, point of no return, antagonist, knowledge, mandatory scene, self-knowledge, transformation, kiss-off.

Characters

• There are additional gender options ‘X’, ‘neuter’ and ‘undefined’. The new options should cover all situations and offer the choice to deliberately leave the gender undefined when creating a new character. This may facilitate an awareness for more role diversity and can lead to a more balanced distribution of male and female roles.
• The Character panel contains the new options ‘Roles’ and ‘True self’.

Turning points

• There is now a new optional major turning-point: Last Twist. It is located just before the end of the storyline.
• The number of major turning-points can now vary between two and six turning-points for each storyline.
• Up to now there were only the options ‚positive or negative turn‘ for each turning-point. Now there are the additional options ‚no change‘ as well as ‚non-existent‘.
  • The option ‚no change‘ expresses the need to revise or unexplored potential at a turning-point. This allows to capture incomplete stories.
  • The option ‚non-existent‘ will hide turning-points that are not intended for a storyline. They will disappear from the Outline and Storytelling panel as well as from the Dramatic Chart. Only the two indispensable turning-points Plot point 1 and 2 cannot be disabled.
• The Plot-Point 2 is now defined independently from the prior direction of the action as positive or negative change.
• The Climax may now have the character of a peripetia, i.e. a sudden change that flips the plot from one extreme to the other.
• With the additional last twist and the new turning-point options, the storytelling guidance and the dramatic chart can capture the plot of a story in much finer detail and with more precision.

Numbering dialogs

• Blocks of dialog in the script can be numbered. The feature is accessible via the gear-menu of the Texts panel in the first sub-menu ‘Numbering’. Assigned numbers never change when editing text and also not when numbering again, as long as the option ‘Keep existing numbers’ was checked. The numbering is compatible with Final Draft and will be imported and exported.

IMPROVEMENTS

• Generating character and location list, profiles and descriptions: The elements can now be selected according to their appearance within certain storylines or text levels.
• Merging text elements by deleting the line break between them works now more intuitively.
• Deleting elements with the red X button no longer asks about other text levels, when these levels are not activated at all.
• Turning points from different storylines, which are not assigned to an element, are displayed on their own lines in the Outline panel.

BUG FIXES

• Creating a new storyline from within the Storytelling panel no longer switches into the global storyline mode.
• Fixes a possible crash when creating new storylines via the Storytelling panel.
• Editing a name of a character, location or idea could lead to a crash when using Undo in certain situations.
• Merging scenes in the treatment or chapters in the concept text no longer creates subdivided scenes or sub chapters respectively. This only happens when there would be text lost in the script or novel text level otherwise.
• Fixes a problem under macOS when putting the main window into fullscreen mode via the green window title icon (not to be confused with putting an individual panel into fullscreen). The main window now remains in its newly created workspace and the toolbar remains functional.
• In macOS there could sometimes be a crash when closing the main window.
• Prevents a problem when rejecting a recorded text deletion that affects more than one text level. Text elements are sometimes put back on the wrong text level. The root-cause is not yet fixed, but it can no longer lead to a corrupt document.
• Deleting text in the synopsis or treatment directly after the pre-text when a storyline is globally active could lead to a crash either immediately or shortly after.
• Opening the context menu directly at the end of the text in the Texts panel while tracking text changes was activated lead to a crash.
• The visibility of subdivided scenes and chapters in a globally activated storyline was not necessarily the same between the Outline and the Texts panel.
• DramaQueen could crash when opening a document when the dramatic chart panel was to be opened and the panels had a certain arrangement.
• Dragging an element onto the Last Twist in the Outline panel resulted in a crash.
• Closing a secondary panel could lead to a crash on certain versions of Linux.
• Fixes a rare crash when hovering text changes.