Character Engine 1.0 Release Candidate Now Available

We’re pleased to announce a new stable release of Character Engine that we’re confident enough in to label version 1.0! After more than a year of iterative improvements, our release this month includes a number of updates and fixes to the tool, engine, and infrastructure, representing the most advanced version yet of Character Engine. We’re releasing this version on our developer portal a bit early to give beta users time to experiment before the official release, expected within the next few weeks.

If you’ve been a part of our developer program, you might have expected this version to be called “Release 12.” In some ways it’s just another incremental improvement to the tool and SDK we’ve been shipping for over a year. But there are a couple nice features in this one that we think users will appreciate. Some of the highlights of this release include:

• The “Play in Editor” functionality now works with both Natural Language and Dynamic Menus projects, making it possible to test projects of both kinds directly within the tool.

• Some major speed and usability improvements: faster export, more organized Tag lists, quicker navigation of large projects, a cleaned-up top toolbar, word-wrapped long lines in more places, and more.
• On the SDK side, a new startup and initialization flow that’s more consistent across multiple use cases
• Documentation is now incorporated directly into the tool in a separate panel, making it easier to keep this reference close at hand.

• Improved support for using third-party natural language classifier stacks, non-English projects, Unicode, and more

If you’re a part of our developer program, we hope you’ll give this new release and try, and celebrate this milestone with us as we look forward to the next steps!