Where StoryCAD is going, how the team plans new features, and how you can suggest or vote on what gets built next. Plain English; no GitHub experience required.
- StoryCAD is currently at version 4.2. The next public release is 4.3.
- Work on 4.3 is already underway. It covers the optional Collaborator AI plugin (including macOS support) and subscription tiers. You can track progress on the GitHub milestone page; nothing is planned publicly beyond 4.3 yet.
- All public planning lives on GitHub: https://github.com/storybuilder-org/StoryCAD.
- Releases ship when they're ready. There is no fixed calendar for any version, by design.
StoryCAD groups work into releases. Each release has a list of issues: bugs, feature requests, and improvements that the team plans to include. The full list of releases is here:
https://github.com/storybuilder-org/StoryCAD/milestones
Click any release to see the issues in it. Closed issues are done; open issues are still in progress or planned. The mix of open vs. closed gives you a feel for how far along that release is.
To see only the issues in a specific release, use a search like:
https://github.com/storybuilder-org/StoryCAD/issues?q=is%3Aissue+milestone%3A%22Release+4.3%22
Replace Release+4.3 with another release name (for example Release+4.1 or Release+4.2) to see a different release.
You don't need a GitHub account to read any of this; everything in the StoryCAD repository is public.
The team picks what goes into a release based on three sources of input, in roughly this order of formality.
Best for clearly-defined bug reports or feature requests. Go to https://github.com/storybuilder-org/StoryCAD/issues and click New issue. You'll need a free GitHub account.
Be specific: describe what you want, what problem it solves, and (for bugs) the steps to reproduce. If a maintainer agrees the idea is worth pursuing, they'll assign it to a release milestone. That's when it joins the public roadmap.
Best for half-formed ideas, "wouldn't it be cool if...", or just gauging whether anyone else wants the same thing before going through the trouble of writing a proper issue.
The StoryBuilder Discord server is at https://discord.gg/bpCyAQnWCa. The feature-requests channel under StoryCAD Support is open to everyone, free members included. Post your idea and react to others' ideas with emoji to signal what you'd like to see.
The team reads this channel and uses it to spot patterns: ideas that get a lot of reactions are candidates for becoming proper GitHub issues and getting on a release.
Once per quarter, the team picks 4–6 candidate features from the GitHub backlog and posts a poll in the feature-voting channel. The winning feature gets added to the roadmap, with a comment posted on the corresponding GitHub issue noting the community vote.
This channel is part of the StoryCAD Pro subscription tier ($2.99/month via Discord Server Subscriptions). Pro members get a direct, binding vote in what the team prioritizes next. Free members can still influence the roadmap through paths 1 and 2, but a Pro vote is the only mechanism that the team is committed to honoring on a fixed cadence.
This is one of the seven perks that come with Pro; see the Discord server for the full list and how to subscribe.
The 'how' of a production release is an internal decision for the development team and StoryBuilder Foundation's board. We fix bugs, we have things we need to update to remain current, and we even have improvements of our own we'd like to see.
But we believe the 'what' of a release, the features that it contains, should be user-driven as much as possible, and particularly for the features that enhance StoryCAD for you its users. Feature voting is our attempt at putting control of the product (as much as is practical) in your hands.
In case you might ask, the reason we restrict feature voting to StoryCAD Pro users is to make sure you have some skin in the game. We don't think this is onerous: a StoryCAD Pro subscription costs less than a cup of coffee.
You'll notice none of the milestones have due dates set. This is deliberate. StoryCAD is built primarily by volunteers; commercial-software-style ship dates would be set up to disappoint. The team prefers to ship a release when the issues in it are actually done, rather than rush to hit a calendar.
If you want to know roughly when something might land, the best signal is the open-vs.-closed issue count on the milestone page. A release with mostly closed issues is close; one with mostly open issues is further out.
The public StoryCAD GitHub repository holds the high-level picture, showing feature release targets and ongoing work. The StoryBuilder Foundation keeps the detailed planning (task breakdowns, prioritization spreadsheets, internal release boards) on private GitHub Project boards. Because the StoryBuilder Foundation is small (one paid system administrator and a four-person volunteer board), we believe over-promising features that slip is worse than under-communicating.
If a feature isn't on the public roadmap yet, it doesn't mean nobody is thinking about it; it usually means the team isn't ready to commit to a release for it.
Three options:
- Watch the StoryCAD repo on GitHub. Click the Watch button at https://github.com/storybuilder-org/StoryCAD and choose Releases only. You'll get an email when a new version ships.
- Follow the announcements channel on Discord. We announce new releases there and include notes on what changed.
- Check the production user manual occasionally. New features land in the manual at https://manual.storybuilder.org/ when they ship.
StoryCAD has an optional AI plugin called Collaborator that, when it's released will ship separately. It has its own roadmap on GitHub (also organized by Release 4.3) but the repository itself is private; you won't see its issues directly. Coverage of Collaborator features will appear on the StoryCAD roadmap when they reach the user-facing surface.
| What you want | Where to go |
|---|---|
| All planned releases | https://github.com/storybuilder-org/StoryCAD/milestones |
| What's in 4.3 specifically | https://github.com/storybuilder-org/StoryCAD/milestone/6 |
| File a bug or feature request | https://github.com/storybuilder-org/StoryCAD/issues/new |
| Suggest an idea informally | #feature-requests on Discord |
| Vote on quarterly priorities (Pro) | #feature-voting on Discord |
| Read the current user manual | https://manual.storybuilder.org/ |
| Discord server | https://discord.gg/bpCyAQnWCa |
| Foundation's main site | https://storybuilder.org/ |