Hi everyone. It’s been quite a bit since I’ve pushed the last update. I had initially planned to ship an update almost a year ago now, and there are way too many useful features that I’ve shipped into the staging branch. I figure now that everything seems stable, now's a good time to cut a release.

So, I present Piecewise 23.01.0, “Fireworks Beneath My Shoes.” I’ll go through a bunch of the big stuff and try to highlight everything from that perspective. Without further ado:

Editor

Find block… menu

Having trouble finding exactly which block you’re looking for? Enter the Find block… menu, under Help (or you can press Ctrl-F). This will bring up a menu where you can start typing what you’re looking for (for example, discord log in), and you’ll have the option to jump to the block in your Toolbox or view the documentation instantly.

Secrets Manager

Sharing your projects with others in Piecewise is currently kinda rough. All of your bot tokens are stored directly in the project. With the addition of a secrets manager, you’re able to keep your secrets outside of your project, and have them injected into your code at runtime.

New plugin system

There’s a new plugin system starting with Piecewise 23.01. The biggest part of the new plugin system is that you can now request that end users install Node.js dependencies when using your addon (plugin? Whatever I want to call them this week), which significantly increases their utility. Additionally, there’s a (in my opinion) newer and much simpler way of creating blocks, etc., and some other changes that are laid out in the documentation.

Color wheel

The previous color blocks were frustrating because they only allowed you to select from an enumerated list of colors. Now the “color” block uses a color wheel instead of a static list of colors.

Interactive tutorials

This one was implemented so long ago that I almost forgot about it, but there are a few interactive tutorials now available to guide you through Piecewise. Check them out on the home screen.

Block highlighting

Another relatively old change is the ability to have your blocks highlighted as they execute. This can help you understand when your blocks are executing and why.

(Last, but not least,) Piecewise Together

Piecewise Together allows you to co-op edit blocks with multiple people, a la Google Docs. Share a room code with your friends, and they’ll be able to join your Piecewise session and build with you.

Of course, only the host can save the project and can run the bot. But status updates and logs are streamed to your co-op buddies, so they’ll be able to help you work through any errors you have with your bot.

This was by far one of the most requested (and in my opinion, one of the most interesting) features I’ve shipped. It’s been stalled mainly because of technical issues, but I’ve been able to look into and solve those. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Matrix

The entire Matrix integration was rewritten. This update introduces significant improvements, including the ability to connect to encrypted rooms without the use of Pantalaimon at the cost of changing up how the blocks work quite a bit.

It has most of the coverage you’d expect, but there are a few missing features that I plan to implement eventually, so stay tuned.

Discord

The Discord integration got a bunch of updates - the core engine was upgraded to a new major version which introduced a ton of new features and blocks I could implement in Piecewise. A lot of time was and effort was spent upgrading to this new version, but it bore fruit in that there were two new big features added (and quite a few smaller ones that I haven’t mentioned):

Application Commands

Discord added the ability to add context menu commands for bots. They act similarly to slash commands, so they share the same block, and the tab was renamed to “Application Commands”.

Modals

Modals allow you to open up mini-forms in response to an interaction. They were a highly-requested feature, and I’m happy to finally deliver on that.

Telegram

New in Piecewise 23.01 is support for Telegram. I initially wrote this as a mod for a forum member, but I decided to move it in-tree as it’s a chat platform I’m sure that a lot of users will want to use.

It’s still a bit barebones right now, but it should be able to get you started on your projects. Stay tuned for more updates on that front.

Miscellaneous updates

Some workshop addons are moving to itch.io as DLC

The Markov Chains and Regular Expressions addons will be moving to the itch.io storefront as free DLC. This makes it easier for me to push updates to them and makes them more visible. This will be completed shortly after this update releases as the plugins have been rewritten for the new system.

Thanks for bearing with me through the past year and a half. I hope you all are as excited as I am for this release!

Piecewise Labs

P.S. - You can always subscribe to the in-development branch of Piecewise and be the first to try new features by following these instructions. And as always, if you are having trouble with the latest release, please let me know! You can also revert back to the previous release using the "pastel_rain" branch.