From Slima 4.0 a screenplay is not a separate studio. It is a file type in the tree. Right-click inside your work, pick New Script, and each episode becomes one .script file, sitting next to the series bible, the beat board, the relationship map, the world map and your character and location notes. Scenes are cards you drag to reorder, with summary, location and scene notes editable on the card itself. The cast is detected from dialogue, and anyone you added by hand stays put when you rewrite the lines. Runtime is estimated as you write, with the title row showing where you are against your target. Export goes to PDF and Word in both Taiwanese and Hollywood formats. Script Studio is being retired, not removed: existing projects still open and you can keep writing in them, you just cannot start a new work there, and a converter in each work’s “⋯” menu will copy one across.
The rest of this is what moving it actually bought.
The cost of keeping them apart was never on the feature list
Script Studio in 3.x had everything it should have had. A scene board, characters, locations, storylines, worldbuilding, notes. Line it up as a feature list and there is nothing to complain about.
The problem was that none of it lived where the rest of your work lived.
Say you are on episode seven. This one needs the fire your protagonist survived three years ago, and that piece of worldbuilding is in a folder in the Writing Studio, where you have been stacking it up for six months. Two options. Cross over, read it, come back. Or copy it into a note inside Script Studio, where it starts going stale the moment you paste it and nobody ever returns to update it.
With the AI it showed up more plainly, because it could only read one side at a time. Ask, from inside the screenplay, whether this scene contradicts the mother’s death, and all it holds is the screenplay. The thread about the mother is on the other tree. You get a plausible answer. It just has nothing under it.
One story, what the AI can read this turn
3.x: the screenplay lives in another studio
Series bible, episodes and the map of that city, kept apart
Only the indigo row is in reach. The rest is on the other side.
4.0: the screenplay is a file in the tree
All of it on the same tree
Including the note you wrote six months ago.
Right-click, New Script, one file per episode
You make one the way you make a manuscript: right-click in the file tree and choose New Script.
One episode is one .script file. How you split the folders is yours to decide. A folder per season and a file per episode is the common arrangement, but nothing forces it. If you are writing three-minute verticals, twenty files in a single folder is perfectly reasonable.
File names got tidied up in this release too. Tabs, screenplay cast chips and the rest no longer show the extension, so what you see there matches the file tree, and the icons are consistent.
Under one series
.script.beats.map.geomap.mdScenes are cards, not a list
The scene board is now a board of cards. Drag to reorder, which matters more than it sounds when you are working on structure: moving scene nine two slots earlier is one drag.
Three things are editable on the card itself: summary, location and scene notes. You no longer open the editor to change one line of location.
The card also shows what the scene actually says, not only the summary you wrote for it. Summary and body drift apart constantly. You rewrite a whole scene in the editor and the summary is still the one you typed three months ago. Put them on the same card and the drift has nowhere to hide.
The board has a compact and a detailed density: compact when you are scanning the shape of the episode, detailed when you are working through it scene by scene. One small thing on top of that. Clicking a card no longer drops you into edit mode by accident. Use the card’s Go to Scene when you want to be in there.
Cast: detection is a live source, manual entries do not expire
Every scene card carries a cast list, and it comes from two places that are shown differently.
One set is detected from dialogue. Write someone’s lines in this scene and they appear. Change the lines and this set follows. There is nothing to maintain.
The other set is what you added by hand. Someone in the room who never speaks will not be detected, so you put them there yourself. A name you added by hand survives a rewrite of the dialogue, because what puts it there is your judgement, not the text. A name wrongly picked up can be removed the same way, and adding it back later simply lifts the removal.
Both sets stay editable. Showing them apart is the point: you can see at a glance who put a name on the list, because the two halves are maintained differently. One you never touch, and the other only you can.
Runtime is estimated while you write
This trade measures in minutes, not words.
So a .script file keeps a running estimate of its runtime. Dialogue and action are estimated at different rates, and each scene adds transition time on top. The title row shows the current estimate against the target you set, plus how far into that target you are, and the colour shifts when you overshoot or fall well short.
Those estimation values are yours to change. The built-in defaults are a starting point, so if this one talks fast and cuts slow, set it to what this one does. The target is per screenplay too. There is no reason a three-minute vertical and an hour of television should be measured with the same ruler.
The basics that came back
Changing the file format was also the moment to add the things screenplays should have had all along:
- Undo (Ctrl+Z) and find and replace
- Select a passage and ask the AI from the right-click menu
- Focus mode
- Export: PDF and Word in Taiwanese and Hollywood formats
And comments. Every file type in this release takes comments. Screenplays, beat boards, relationship maps, world maps and story-structure timelines each have their own comment markers and panel, and clicking a comment jumps to the spot it is attached to. When two of you are reading a draft, notes can finally sit where they belong instead of in a separate document that says “that line on page two of scene three”.
On a phone, screenplay files are read-only. You can read, not write. Comments are not covered by that limit, so if a scene starts bothering you on the way home, you can leave the note for yourself.
The AI edits screenplay files too
.script is one of this release’s five structured file types, so the AI’s edits to it are field-level. Ask it to change scene three’s location and it writes that one field; the other scenes are not even writable in that turn. The change appears as a dashed card exactly where it belongs, with Accept and Skip next to it.
That deserves its own piece, and it has one: the AI edits one field, not the whole file.
Script Studio is being retired
The important part first. Retired is not removed.
Your work in Script Studio still opens, and you can keep writing in it. We will support you to the end of whatever you have in hand rather than leaving you halfway. One thing changes: you cannot start a new work there, so new ones begin in the Writing Studio.
To bring one across, each work’s “⋯” menu has Copy as new Writing Studio book. Here is what the converter does:
- Turns each episode into one
.scriptfile and keeps the season and episode folder structure - Rebuilds the season and episode structure as a beat board
- Turns characters and locations into notes
- Carries storylines, worldbuilding and planning pages over to the matching files
- Reconnects paired foreshadowing notes, so the A-pays-off-B relationship still points both ways in the new book
That last one is the fiddliest part of the converter. A foreshadowing note stores the id of another note, and every copied note is issued a fresh id, so the pairings have to be recomputed as a set. Skip that and every payoff in the new book points at something that does not exist, with no error anywhere, and you find out on the day you go looking for it.
Copying is not moving. The original stays in Script Studio, complete. The two are not linked either: edits you make in the old book after the copy do not flow into the new one, and the reverse is equally true. It is a snapshot of that moment, not a second window onto the same thing.
Which makes the safe order obvious. Copy one across, try everything you want to try in the new book, and shift your centre of gravity once it feels right. The old one is still there while you decide.
Next
- What writing a screenplay in the Writing Studio looks like: Screenwriting
- How the AI edits structured files: one field, not the whole file
- What else lives on this tree: Writing Studio