Story and Animations

#story reader
#update

Ever since the story for Lee: Hyperreal came out, Kuro has been adding more animated graphics to their stories. This really took off with the Solitary Dream skin story for Bianca, which featured animated characters and full (Chinese) voice acting.

One big thing missing from the story reader was proper support for these animations—until now! I'm excited to share that the latest Huaxu update brings these features to life, along with some other cool improvements. Let's take a look at what's new:

Story Reader Upgrades

Wherever the story uses animated graphics, you will now see them in the story reader. This includes:

  • Animated backgrounds such as the one used in the story for Lee: Hyperreal:
  • Animated characters, like Lamia and Bianca in their skin stories:

Where voice acting was available in the story, you'll now see a button to play the voiceover:

Voiceover button

Also, the reader now properly shows time skips instead of just leaving them out, making transitions clearer:

Time skip

Assets and more

Not many people know this, but my goal for Huaxu is to run mostly on its own—without me manually transcribing stories, extracting assets, and all that. Getting animated graphics to work took longer than expected because I had to figure out how to extract and render them automatically.

This was tricky because Kuro layers multiple animations in Unity, with different tweaks like scaling and moving them around, causing large errors in the final results. To fix this, I upgraded my tools to analyze Unity prefabs and get all the right settings so the animations look as they should. It was a lot of work, but I had a lot of fun working on it, and I'm super happy it's finally done!

If you're interested in looking at the code, both Huaxu's asset extraction tooling and the rendering code for the animated graphics are open source and available on GitHub.

For those who just want to explore game assets, I've added a simple file browser in the sidebar where you can check out images, sounds, and animations from the game files. Bonus: There's also a section with all the login animations ever used in the game—because they're just too cool not to share!

A quick heads-up: The asset browser organizes files the same way the game (and Huaxu) does, so some filenames might not make much sense at first. Also, assets are sorted by region, with animated graphics listed under spines.

Have fun exploring!

Signing off

Hope you enjoy these new features! I'd love to hear what you think—whether it's feedback, ideas, or just a shoutout that you're enjoying Huaxu. You can reach me through any of the socials below!

Until next time!

~ nova