Millennium Whisper news & patch notes

Hello everyone!  We’ve got a cheeky update to announce! This a little prelude before the Inventory System finally makes its dramatic entrance on stage. We hope you enjoy it! What you can expect:

• New and bespoke Personal Life events: These random events will give you insights into each character’s life. There’s love, there’s loss, there’s ice-picks. Get to know each character that little bit better and get to the bottom of what is really making them tick. Some of these Personal Life events also come with some brand-spanking new characters, so be on the lookout!

• Rumour event fixes: Don’t let anything ruin your date flow, with new options not to discuss positive rumours on date now available! We have given the Rumour Events a narrative trimming.

• New background art: Those crazy adventures just got better, now you have to visually confront the consequences of your actions…These can for now be found at the Park, so go see if you can track them down! Much more to come soon.

• Emotes: Courtney won’t stop talking about swimming again? You can now pull a multitude of faces using our new Emotes to passive aggressively get her to zip it and express your emotions to the characters in a whole new way. 

• Home screen changes: You may notice that the shoes have been replaced with a map of Escafeld, this is the facilitate some exciting new systems in later updates, so watch this space…

• General Bug Fixing: Found a bug with AI quality being borked by old config files on most peoples machines which is now resolved so the new models should now be able to really shine. Ongoing maintenance and bug-fixes for any issues currently in-game. Bugs can be reported to us on our Discord server!

As always, the Dev Team wants to say a massive thank you to everyone playing and enjoying Millennium Whisper, it means so much to each of us. Have fun and we will see you for the Inventory Update! Parable Studios.

Here it is... The update you've been asking for!

🩵 Millennium Whisper now has full Steam Deck support! 🩵

We have tested and trialed this, but if you find any bugs or anything we have missed, please report it through the form below!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1jow3-WNPq5KY155KmLlQ1T0sDcUptQvktML-MCuKcLA/edit?usp=drive-dynamite&ts=69f4aeb4

And not only that, but we have also added some QOL updates:

🩵 New UI implementations: Updated text boxes, fonts and a revamped chat log

🩵 Rumour Issues Addressed: Rumours are now less volatile and don't trigger as easily, and there is now no rumours related to guts!

🩵 MeetCute Reduction: Made it less easy to encounter 7+ characters in a run unless you're really trying to, to give you more time to focus on each LI!

🩵 Old save files will now be able to run the NYE event without issue

🩵 Bug report button added into the main menu

So what’s new?

Rumour system revamp: New rumour system, notes, and defusal opportunities!

• New Rumour System Rumours have been completely updated and changed, with a wider variety of topics that can be spread about you! 

• New Notes Find rumour notes in multiple different ways, these will be shown in red writing!

• Defusal Opportunities View the rumour in our new relationship map and find out how to diffuse the rumour! This can either be focusing on stats, or even confronting who spread it!

And that's not all! We have also added:

• Relationship Map Use your diary or meet with Tutor to see your relationship map and better understand your connections. Different colour threads will show how close you are to a character, and you can also view any rumours against you here too!

• Faster, better models Our newly trained models have a much faster response time, making the characters up to 8x faster to respond than they did previously. They have also had a personality revamp and been trained against any repetition.

• Mac Support You want it? You get it! Millennium Whisper is now playable on Mac devices.

• New Lessons & Assemblies Now there's even more to discover at Escafeld College! Will you pay attention in class and pass your exams or decide to mess around instead?!

We’re so excited to share this update with you, we listened to your feedback and implemented as much as we could into this update, and we will continue to do so for further upcoming updates too.

We hope you love these improvements as much as we loved creating and implementing them.

If you have any questions, need any help, or just want to talk to other fans about the game, please join our Discord.

March 0.5 Update - Rumours

• Relationship Map

• Rumour Revamp

• New Lessons & Assemblies

May 0.6 Update - Inventory

• Inventory, Clothing & Money Systems

• Part-Time Jobs

• Player Facial Expression Reactions

June/July 0.7 Update - Drama

• Weather System

• Character to Character Relationships

• Addition of Pets With Minigames

• Two New Characters

Autumn 1.0 Release - Storylines

• Fully Fleshed Out Storylines

• Improved & Expanded Ending

So what’s new?

New Years Event Completed New outfits, locations, and a sweeter ending with your Millennium Whisper.

• New Lessons & Assembly Events Your timetable just got busier, and school feels like, well, school! 

• New Beach Location A brand new location for dates and solo adventures. What will you discover there?

• All Locations Fully Illustrated Expanding on the V03 update, we have now implemented full illustrations of each location. This includes the Shopping Centre, Stadium, Observatory and more!

• Stat Rework for Clarity & Accessibility Stats now start lower but no longer decrease when training other stats. This means clearer progression, and stops you feeling like you have to spin 500 plates at once.

• Millennium Whisper Reworked How your Millennium Whisper is chosen has been reworked, making the process feel more intentional and satisfying.

• Calendar System Added Simply click the calendar on your phone at the weekend to see your booked dates, and hopefully stop accidentally standing people up in the process!

• Social Behaviour Improvements Characters will no longer get upset if you don’t sit with them at lunch, or when they don’t ask you to walk with them.

We’re so excited to share this update with you, we listened to your feedback and implemented as much as we could into this update, and we will continue to do so for further upcoming updates too.

We hope you love these improvements as much as we loved creating and implementing them.

If you have any questions, need any help, or just want to talk to other fans about the game, please join our Discord.

The holidays will be upon us very soon and another year comes to an end, and do you know what that means? Discounts, discounts, discounts!

• Added updated backgrounds for the library and the shopping centre
• Added an in-game pause menu to edit options and exit to main menu mid-event
• Added zoom buttons on the map
• Fixed an issue with the ruffian sprites not appearing at the park in solo adventures
• Fixed an issue with the wrong character silhouette sprite appearing in the gossip event
• Fixed bugs with a bunch of the character sprites not appearing correctly
• Fixes for when switching saves which caused AI inference errors
• Fixed issues with the cafe's event and backgrounds
• Fixed the map not appearing the correct size with the pixelation filter off
• Fixed various locations not loading their special event images
• Fixed position of controller enter icons on phone screen

Welcome to our biggest update yet! We’ve got AI improvements, heaps of new art and a whole new map to explore!

• New City map - explore Escafeld by selecting the shoes on the home screen. You can now buff your stats and experience new events, maybe even running into someone on the way. Locations can be explored on your own, or select the location when you have a date booked there to go with someone else. We can’t wait for you to see the plethora of shenanigans and secrets now possible throughout the year.

• New Environment Art - we’ve revamped more than half of the in-game backgrounds, including all school locations and most of the locations with city map activities. There’s even new borders and UI elements! We hope to have all the locations revamped by the end of the year.

• New AI Model - We’ve played around with this one and anticipate it being a noticeable step up from before in terms of not getting confused quite so much and remembering things. It’s also smaller and faster!

• New AI Engine - We’ve done a huge overhaul to the AI’s inference system and so you should see a major speed up after the first interaction of every event, as well as much lower memory usage, overall giving a much quicker and smoother experience. Let us know how much of an improvement it gives on your machine! Make sure to fiddle around with the settings in the new options menu to see what works best for you.

• More Character Outfits - the characters now have a different outfit for every season, let us know which is your favourite in the discord...

Thanks so much for playing Millennium Whisper and your ongoing support. Expect more frequent content updates after this along with community events, competitions and activities in the discord and across our social media. So if you’re not in the discord already, join it here: https://discord.com/invite/aGByhG2FfJ

General announcement regarding GPU compatibility:

Change List:

• Controller improvements: We found many issues with the original controller support that are now fixed. This should lead to a much more seamless experience. Scrolling text is now with the right stick.
• Discord Presence: Let your discord friends know you're playing Millennium Whisper! They can even see who you're talking to!
• Changes to Reputation: Reputation labels are now related to popularity as we shift it away from being about how in the loop on gossip you are. We also added a mechanic whereby high reputation can prevent others from spreading rumours, whilst low reputation causes rumours to be spread automatically.
• Facial Expressions: Found a bug where certain character facial expressions weren't working. You should find the characters much more expressive than before.
• Prevented bug causing save bricking from leaving tutorial midway through.
• Fixed a bug where Arlo could send a rumour to himself.
• Added text popup to show when a character leaves early.

It’s been a long time but we’ve been busy… super busy! This is Millennium Whisper's first major update since release and with it we’ve laid the foundation for what’s to come whilst polishing the current experience. We’ve been focussing on the tech behind MW recently, trying to make it run on as many devices as possible, but as we start to move away from trying to get the damn thing working on your machines we’ll be spending a lot more time on exciting new content and AI improvements! 

What’s New:

• Voice Input: Typing can be tiring, but that’s not the only reason we added speech input. We find it makes for faster paced and more spontaneous! And don’t worry, you can still edit your response afterwards if you’d like to slightly reword anything…

• Controller Support: With the addition of voice input we found it made perfect sense to add controller support as well. This works through Steam Input if you want to fiddle with the settings. Now is the perfect time to play MW from the sofa!

• New Character Outfits: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… Character’s actually dress for the season! Each character now has two additional, lovely outfits to switch between, many with different hairstyles too!

• New Narrative System: We basically had to remake a lot of the game from the ground up and events are now able to be more dynamic, fleshed out and check and change player stats! In the process revamped a couple locations:

  • The Cinema: We’ve altered how characters interpret each film, so you’ll have to be a lot more careful about who you take to what film. But you could get a nice stat bonus for getting it right…

  • The Stadium: Tired of the same old England v Germany football match? Well, all sorts of crazy stuff can go down at the Stadium nowadays! Why not take a date there and find out for yourself?

  • The Library: Pick which book to read and get a stat boost. Can you remember what you read already?

  • And some more secret ones…

• These changes allow us to create content more regularly, so keep an eye out for more story content and date location improvements.

• New Compatibility Mode: Anyone with a GTX card should now automatically be switched over to the new compatibility mode that will (hopefully) get the game up and running, but you’ll still need to meet the minimum VRAM requirement. Just remember to update your nvidia drivers first!

• Memory Improvements: The game is now officially supported on 6GB graphics cards and the new voice input mode is supported on 8GB cards! In addition, anyone with these specs can expect to be able to up their context length for better AI memory. A more comprehensive AI memory patch is planned for a future update.

• New Option Selection System: We found the original option system a little confusing so we’ve completely revamped how options are displayed and selected.

• Revamped Phonecalls: Speaking of options! Now when calling someone to organise a date you get to pick between two random options to ask them out with.

• Stress Scaling: The…ahem… severity of the options presented to the player during Phonecall, Gate and Corridor events is now scaled based on your stress stat so be sure to find time for some R&R if you find yourself faced with some spicy choices.

• Rumour Event CG: Rumours were a bit dull given how frequent and important they are to gameplay so we spiced it up with a lovely CG that depicts (or doesn’t depict) the character in question talking behind your back. We plan to add many more CGs in future.

• Linux support: The game is now available on Linux! We are working hard on getting the game on Steam Deck but the performance isn’t yet up to our standards (same for Mac Silicon). But for now if you have a desktop or laptop that would run the game on Windows, it’ll run just fine on Linux.

• Minor Bug Fixing and Performance Improvements

We’re incredibly glad to have our community supporting us through this early stage and we deeply deeply appreciate every single one of you. Please join the discord, even if it's just so you can admire the amazing fan art and hilarious AI screenshots! 

We hope you enjoy the update and look forward to what we have in store for you next! Keep whispering! - The Parable Studios Team

• Fixed an issue where the enter button wasn't working. This also fixed the case where the leave early button would disappear, so now if said button is missing it's only because you need to get to the point where you're chatting first.
• A fix to how corridor dates invites are tracked so there should be less issues with those getting voicemails for missing dates even though you went, or from accepting invites but closing the game and having to reject them later.
• A couple fixes to save files introduced by Steam Cloud integration.

• There's a new "compatibility mode" which should allow some people who have been having issues running it on their graphics card more ability to do so. This is also the case for 4GB card users to see if you can run the small model now with 1100 context length. If you've got a 4gb card we want to hear about how it goes in the discord!
• Leave events early whenever YOU want! Sick of someone? Press the little button and say goodbye.
• Saves are now put into the cloud! So you can switch computers with ease 😎 Now that we've integrated the steamworks API we should hopefully have a lot of fun little features on the way soon (like achievements!)
• New visuals for the tutor note event, like a little wink ;)
• A fix for a bug where the space bar would stop working when you mash the button to choose options
• a fix for when it's a full moon where you've had no rumours where it tells you you successfully defused all them all instead of saying nothing.
• added steam overlay integration
• green enter button on the phone screen for that aesthetic goodness

• Going to the Circus special event now has the proper background and music
• A fix to a bug in how affection level was parsed when characters gave you a 10
• The AI crash error now tells you what GPU you have too. Which helps us a lot when debugging your issues, so send that along too!

New Random Events!

• Lunchroom events - who will you choose to sit with at the lunch table?
• Gossip events - listen in on some of the rumours circulating the school, and maybe try and figure out who’s spreading it…
• Tutor note event - okay we get it, the tutor’s not the most helpful in solving rumour problems (yet), but he’s trying to make it up to you by acquiring (stealing???) the diary notes of your classmates following dates with them. The tutor’s noble (???) deeds can give you a better grasp on how you did in events.

Random Event Improvements

Standard Model Improvements

Misc Improvements & Bug Fixes

• The background you choose changes your initial stats! This will become a lot more important in a later update…
• Added a new tutorial for how characters are met and fixed a bug where the game would break if you turned the tutorials off.
• Changed “Trivia” stat to “Reputation” which is more representative of the AI’s perception of it.
• Can press enter to leave the voicemail screen and it’s more obvious of how the voicemail button works.
• Connor now has a secret glasses-less sprite.
• Added the day of the week to the top righthand corner of the chatting screen.
• Implemented save backups upon game open to stop certain issues with corrupted saves.
• New years event interactions have been shortened to stop them dragging on too long.
• Pivot events now scale off of number of events, not just average affect, to prevent getting pivots from low interaction-high affect characters, before long-term relationships.
• Fixed bug where you could end up with a character you never met if you ruined your relationship with everyone else lol
• Implemented a number of AI context optimisations so that they hopefully remember more and remember better.
• Fixed a bug with which characters are picked as starting characters from each pool based on background picked as some characters were missing.
• Added measures to avoid back to back random encounters with the same character.

Small Model for 6GB VRAM Users (+CPU Model)

New Font!

Other Misc Improvements & Bugfixes

• The names of locations is now shown when selecting you date location whilst on the phone
• Stat label changes are now displayed on the day change screen.
• A check to make sure you really want to delete your savefile when overwriting.
• Discord button on the homescreen! Hop in and say hello!
• Backgrounds chosen at the start of the game now have their titles shown in the character creator, which should give you slightly more of an indication to their effect.
• Some fixes to saving and quitting often showing incorrect save file information
• Blowbees no longer is just a black screen! Enjoy the wonderful blowbee's mascots visage and beautiful musical accompaniment.

New Models

Options Menu

Full Moon Popup

Other Misc Changes & Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug with rumours where it was causing characters to lose their minds on full moons
• Added a popup for when the AI has crashed for whatever reason, with a more useful error message (if you're feeling generous you can send to us on our discord server)
• Redid a couple of random events, locations and story event formatting
• Many more secret and embarrassing bugs we don't want to tell you about