v1.3.017 — 2026-08-17

New

• Push-to-talk voice input is here, in three places. A new voice button next to the chat input starts recording with a live waveform and timer — confirm to transcribe and send, or cancel anytime. A global hotkey (F2 by default, customizable) works in either hold-to-talk or press-to-toggle mode. And the voice indicator on the pet itself is now clickable — once to start, again to send.
• New "Music" tab — a full local music library and player. Browse by All Songs / Artists / Albums / Liked / Recently Played / Most Played / Recently Added, with instant search and sorting; title, artist, album, cover art, genre and duration are read automatically. Create normal or smart playlists, drag tracks, albums and artists into them, manage and save the play queue, view synced .lrc lyrics and a live spectrum, and keep folders synchronized automatically. Loudness normalization, crossfade and speech ducking are built in, and natural-language commands can play or resume the current queue, pause, switch tracks, or stop playback.
• Optional floating music player. Enable it from the button beside the playlist control when you want playback controls on the desktop; it is off by default and can also be closed from its matching right-click menu.
• Built-in ambient sound library. Seventeen seamless looping sounds (rain, thunder, wind, forest, birds, crickets, ocean, stream, fireplace, café, library, fan, train, clock, cat purring) on a card-based mixer with a master volume, a stop-all button, a sleep timer and six ready-made presets (Rainy Focus, Forest Morning, Seaside Break, Cozy Night, Café Work, Sleep). Ambient sounds live on their own tab with an independent volume bus, and you can also add your own files.
• New MMD pet type with its own pet tab. Import PMX models with texture-integrity validation and play VMD motion files that can be imported, renamed and deleted. No low-quality default PMX is bundled; when no model is available, the page clearly asks you to import one.
• Expanded VRM motion library. The release contains 75 built-in VRMA motions, 20 built-in VRMA dances and a replacement library of 51 full-body VRM poses.
• VRM interaction upgrades. Click interactions (head, chest and other zones react differently), IK drag posing, accessory mounting, per-chain spring-bone tuning (hair, skirt and more), and phoneme lip sync that follows speech more closely.
• Theatre (VN) mode now supports VRM models. VRM pets can perform live in theatre mode — no longer limited to Live2D.
• Your pet can dance now (VRM / MMD). VRM pets can use the 20 built-in dances or imported .vrma files, while MMD pets can use imported .vmd dances. The AI can dance when the moment feels right, dance along to your music, or respond to a direct dance request.
• Native web search for supported cloud models. With search-capable models (Google Gemini 2/3 series, Anthropic Claude 3.5/3.7 & 4 series, OpenAI gpt-5-search-api), the model looks up current information online and replies with clickable source links — no setup required.
• New "deep thinking" toggle for local models (Auto / On / Off). Control thinking on models that support switching it. A new collapsible "thinking process" block in chat shows the reasoning of both local and cloud models, without entering the chat history.
• Better click-through experience. The pet's right-click menu now enables the lock in one step ("Lock"), and the system tray toggles it anytime ("Lock Pet"). While locked, the pet fades out automatically when the cursor approaches so it no longer blocks the screen (full fade or punch-hole styles) — chat bubbles stay fully visible.
• New global frame-rate cap (Follow refresh rate / 60 / 30; default 60). Limits pet rendering frame rate to reduce GPU usage and power draw.
• Deleting a character card is now a safe two-step process. If a deletion is interrupted, the card is marked as incomplete and you can finish the cleanup later instead of leaving half-deleted files behind.

Improvements

• 3D motion management now lives in the pet control panel instead of being duplicated in the pet page. The pet page is for models; animations, dances and poses are managed from one authoritative control surface.
• VRM animation controls are split into compact icon tabs for built-in animations, built-in dances, imported animations and subscribed Workshop animations. Random Idle and Procedural remain visible on every tab, and hover labels preserve clarity without crowding the panel.
• Random Idle now uses a curated 29-motion playlist instead of every built-in motion. All 75 motions remain available for manual playback. Selected short motions repeat two or three times where appropriate, and the single-frame Lie01 pose now holds for 20 seconds.
• Manual VRM motions loop by default until you choose another motion state. Switch to Random Idle or Procedural, close the control panel, or select another motion when you want to leave the loop; a separate pause/resume control is no longer needed.
• VRM and MMD animation timing is synchronized between the desktop pet and the control-panel preview. They now share the same motion clock and root-motion policy, reducing delayed starts, speed drift and lower-body sway, while inertialized transitions blend motions instead of cutting abruptly.
• Music-driven dancing now survives a temporary manual animation override. Using the control panel during a dance no longer permanently drops the music performance; leaving the panel restores the active music-dance session when it is still valid.
• Built-in VRM dances have been reprocessed for humanoid retargeting. Corrected axis, rest-pose and bone mapping reduce inverted limbs, severe twisting and avoidable self-intersection.
• MMD models can become visible before Ammo physics finishes initializing. Rendering and physics readiness are separated, removing the long blank wait without disabling physics.
• All pet control panels have been redesigned with a unified, modern look and stay expanded. Layout and visual style are consistent across pet types, unnecessary fold controls are gone, and the Live2D control and parameter panels are merged.
• Model handling in theatre (VN) mode is smoother. Resize the model directly with the mouse wheel; each model's size and position are remembered per model and no longer reset to default when switching models or characters.
• VRM adjustments are now remembered per model. Camera, lighting, physics, spring-bone and other settings are saved per model, so switching models no longer mixes them up.
• The Workshop is easier to browse by category and format, with type badges on cards. PMX, VRMA and VMD browsing, filtering and sharing entry points are temporarily hidden while their publishing experience is refined; local imports and compatibility with existing content remain available.
• New theme color schemes. Mono (black & white), Graphite, Cocoa and Forest, each with a dark-mode variant — 11 color schemes, up from 7.
• The Memory Manager's character list now stays up to date. It refreshes automatically when a character card is renamed, deleted, created, imported, or when a Workshop subscription changes — no more stale names or dead entries.
• The local AI engine is now much more reliable when the model stops responding, crashes, or is switched mid-reply. Model startup, generation, cancellation and shutdown are coordinated per request, so a stuck or interrupted turn no longer breaks later conversations, and the conversation history stays intact across automatic restarts.
• Background AI and voice processes are now managed with exact process identities. The app can tell its own helper processes apart from look-alikes, so it never closes something it shouldn't, and leftovers from an interrupted session are handled safely instead of blocking the next launch.
• Automatic recovery from AI model failures. When the local model stops responding or crashes, the app detects it, confirms the failure, and restarts the model with the conversation preserved; safeguards prevent repeated restarts.
• Voice cloning storage is safer. Voice profiles are written atomically with integrity checks, legacy profiles migrate automatically, and a damaged engine config file no longer blocks voice lists or synthesis in other engines.
• More dependable shutdown and startup. Closing the app now waits for cleanup intelligently instead of on a fixed timer. On the next launch the app can tell a normal exit from a crash: after a crash it turns AI off to avoid crash-on-startup loops, and after an interrupted cleanup it keeps all your settings and tells you what didn't finish.
• Clearer messages for unusual model replies. When a model returns nothing usable, the app now explains the likely cause — the reasoning process used up the reply-length budget, the reply hit the length limit, or no content was returned at all — including for Anthropic models.
• Settings and cloud configuration writes are now verified as they are saved, and a storage problem shows a clear notice instead of failing silently or overwriting your configuration.
• The Live2D control panel and the pet model now verify each other's identity, so parts and parameter adjustments always apply to the intended model; this also fixes a startup crash of the control panel.
• Voice output is steadier. Loudness alignment and a peak limiter reduce clipping and volume jumps, GPU voice engines recover automatically from crashes, and a failure in one voice engine no longer affects the others.
• Cross-window chat is more reliable, with per-request synchronization and a safety fallback that prevents the input from being locked indefinitely.
• Smaller, safer storage. Pet models and animations now live outside the Steam Cloud save folder (migrated automatically on first launch, with path references rewritten), Workshop subscriptions are decoupled from cloud saves (kept as a local index plus a rebuildable cache), and imported models and animations are referenced in place instead of being copied onto your system drive. Caches are bounded and self-managing.
• Hardened file handling and package verification. Settings, registries, model edits and migrations use atomic writes, exact readback and recovery journals; temporary cleanup is ownership-scoped and cannot remove unowned paths. Workshop packing and uploads also use stricter path validation, content-package signature verification, stronger credential protection and bounded session resources.
• The in-app changelog now uses Steam-compatible BBCode, keeping the About page and Steam release notes on the same canonical format.
• All new interface text ships in 31 supported languages.
• The import button on pet model categories now simply reads "Import".

Fixes

• "Reset settings" now also restores pet preferences — window size, opacity, always-on-top, mouse tracking, VRM animation and more — not just the display mode.
• Individual slider reset buttons and module-wide reset actions now stay in sync and take effect reliably across the pet control panels.
• Legacy music tags no longer produce garbled artist names, and malformed or stale cover images are repaired instead of being shown cropped to their upper half.
• The floating music player can be reopened after it is closed, and its desktop z-order remains correct.
• Pet model switching is now transactional. A new model is verified and staged before it replaces the current pet; failed imported or subscribed Live2D/model switches preserve or restore the previous runtime instead of silently falling back to a different model.
• Deleting imported MMD and other custom pet assets no longer races an active model selection or incorrectly reports that a valid file is missing or occupied.
• Shimeji no longer starts outside the usable screen or resets other pet types to a fixed position when modes are changed.
• Speech indicators and the floating music bar stay visually anchored while a VRM pet roams, instead of retaining the previous window offset.
• Music-driven dance resumes correctly after the control panel temporarily takes over animation playback.
• Importing, renaming or deleting a custom model now reports a clear error when the change cannot be saved, instead of appearing to succeed.
• Live2D models could stay completely still. Models now animate correctly again.
• Opening the pet control panel could shift the pet tab's content left and clip it behind the sidebar. The layout now stays put.