Gulp, it’s been a while, hasn’t it… (I will never stop making this joke every single devlog, and you can’t stop me either.)
This will be the first AeR devlog not accompanied by a video, as decided by the Discord and Reddit community:
It’s been taking me a while to figure out what I could actually talk about in this devlog. Beyond “we committed this to git today” and other internal-only things, there’s not much to say regarding where we’re at. So instead I’ll be using this devblog as a retrospection-of-sorts regarding the stuff we’ve been doing (and some small leeks too).
Progress on AetherRoom has been constant but slow, due to the natural constraints of the size of our team. AetherRoom has been nothing short of a constant learning process for us, from hiring new employees onto the company, all the way to the problems of starting up a brand-new product from scratch. There have been a ridiculous number of firsts for us this year. While NovelAI was cobbled together quickly in just a few months, we chose to take the opposite route here. This means AetherRoom will likely be more robust by release, but it also means much much longer dev cycles. Implementing new base features becomes unexpected onion layers of complexity, but we want to avoid slapping something in just because it works well enough that way. Obviously the original release date was a horrible joke of an announcement, but I think we’re all far past caring about that anymore. We just want to make sure the product is good.
Alpha Shmalpha
I love our alpha testers, tbh. We’ve received heaps of good feedback from them over the past months, but due to the longer and longer cycles between each wave, I haven’t been doing the best job reciprocating that care with them. I’ve chosen that for now it’s best to keep our heads down and just cook as fast as possible so that they have something new to chew on sooner. It’ll always be possible to find new users to test, but there’s only so much time out there to develop something and do it right.
Alpha Wave 3 is still next, technically. No one knows when it’ll happen, but it’ll happen. Before the end of the year? Maybe. At this point if we happened to be ready this month, it’d probably make more sense for us to wait until sometime in January so we aren’t colliding with the holidays. I still want to maybe let more people in this wave than the last couple.
Alpha Wave 3, January 32nd, 2027. (this date is a joke)
Onion Layers
I’ve noted in previous Alpha announcements that we want to make sure that significant-enough progress has been made to the website before allowing more people in. This hasn’t changed. This does mean people will get allowed in less and less frequently, but I think it’s important to stay development-focused and not tester-focused at this stage in AeR’s life. The decisions we make during development are in mind of the end-product, not the Alpha.
As of late, we’ve still just been working on updates to the website’s Contact Editor. The one we had before was slapped together as a standalone page for the sake of quick model testing, without much real concern for how it should connect to the actual website. Surprisingly, the simplest things always end up being the biggest PITAs ever. I’m not going to go into technical details, but I do want to show off some of the new changes with it.
Slight Adjustments
On a structural level, the page itself has not changed too much. Fields have been consolidated to three distinct major sections, and card (cosmetic)-based information was moved to a separate modal.
Emotion Uploader
The Emotion Uploader has been optimized to reduce the pain and cognitive load of uploading 24 different images. The most common 8 emotions have been prioritized, with the rest being optional but still accessible. For those concerned about flow, you can double-click each emotion on the left to automatically start the upload process for it.
In AetherRoom, image cropping is not like most other websites. Here, we have you position the crop box over the “face” of the Contact. We use the position and size of this box as information to help us know where to place the image throughout the entirety of the website and related Contact Card. To further assist this process, uploaded images are run through a small face recognition model that automatically and (almost) instantly repositions the crop box around the face of the image. From my own testing, this works near perfect every single time, save for images with unclear faces, or no faces at all. Regardless, the time saved here with this tiny addition to the workflow is immediate and noticeable.
To let you see the effects of the box placement on your image, we have a preview where you can view the image on three different notable parts of the website.
Card Editor
This actually won’t be in the Editor update we release to our Alpha testers (I think), but I’m gonna share it anyways. This simple interface lets you choose the style of your cards, and upload a custom display image (in the case you’re not happy with one of the emotion images). You can also adjust the card’s name, description, and tags here.
Example Message Editor
Example Messages. Forever in flux, ever-changing, ever-adjusting. Our original EM editor has been the largest point of criticism from our alpha testers, and I don’t expect this one to be any less scrutinized.
This is far from the final version, but I think good steps are being made in a direction.
I’ve done my best to simplify the process for people not used to it. When you make a new entry/log/item(any name ideas?), you get a small excerpt about the usecases of EMs, and some useful keybinds. This disappears once you send your first message.
In the original, the purpose of the EMs were unclear, emotions were hard to remember, you couldn’t drag messages around, and the typing space was constrained to like two lines. The new version (I feel) fixes all of these.
There are still plenty of issues that this new UI doesn’t cover, but I expect this feature specifically to see some of the most changes and adjustments as time goes on. Not at all do I consider this the best the feature can be.
Onwards
Obviously, there’s more to show. But I’m not gonna show it (yet) :^)
I’m sorry this probably wasn’t the kind of devlog most were hoping for, but it’s genuinely difficult to know what to talk about next. So as always, let us know if there’s something you want to hear more about!
We’re glad excitement for AetherRoom is still high enough that people can complain about it, the old announcement date, and our communication, and we hope that excitement can carry itself as we proceed onwards into this next year.
— TabloidA
