This one is almost entirely about Bezelie — how she moves, and what her face actually tells you.
She moves like someone is there
A ground-up pass on how her model is driven. Most of what made her read as a puppet turned out to be defects rather than missing features, and they are fixed:
- She looks where you actually are. Every gaze she made was previously at maximum deflection — a cursor an inch from her nose turned her head as hard as one at the far edge of the screen. Gaze is now proportional to where you are, and when she turns to face you she genuinely faces you.
- Her head stops leaning. She had a habit of settling with her head turned or tilted and staying there. She now rests near centre with a gentle drift.
- She breathes properly — about sixteen times a minute, with a real inhale and a longer exhale, instead of a slow three-times-slower pulse.
- Blinking is human. Roughly fourteen a minute, closing about twice as fast as it reopens, with the occasional double blink, and blinks now cluster when her gaze shifts.
- She shifts her weight, breathes into her chest, and her jaw moves when she speaks — her lips used to part on a jaw that never moved.
- Gestures ease instead of snapping between poses, and she has a head-and-body vocabulary she simply did not have before: nods, a double nod, a head shake, a questioning tilt, a recoil, a sigh, leaning in.
Her expressions mean something
Her face had eight emotion tags and four of them barely showed anything — one of them was rendering the wrong feeling entirely, and an angry line came out with a smile on it.
- Thirteen composed expressions replace the old set, built from the character's own artwork: happy, excited, sad, angry, surprised, smug, blush, wink, embarrassed, dread, deadpan, thinking and sleepy.
- Expressions arrive rather than snapping on at full strength, and a face no longer gets stuck — switching or clearing an emotion leaves nothing behind.
- She can blink while making a face, which she could not do before.
- New range she never had: the light going out of her eyes, going pale, and a proper flustered look.
She listens back
- While you are talking she now behaves like a listener — small nods, a raised brow when you emphasise something, and she looks at you (without pulling her gaze off a mouse you are actively moving).
- She looks away while thinking and back to you as she answers, and takes a breath before she speaks.
- Her head moves with her own speech: beats on stressed syllables, brows on emphasis, and — the part that matters most — she goes still between phrases.
- Her mouth actually forms different vowel shapes instead of being one hole that changes size.
She has moods
Emotions used to vanish the moment they timed out. Now what she feels lingers: a mood builds from the faces she makes and fades over a few minutes, quietly colouring her resting expression, how much she moves, her breathing, and how readily she meets your eyes.
Playing games
- She can practise on her own. Off by default — turn it on in Settings → Bezelie and she will pick a game and play it while you are away, within quiet hours and a time budget you set, and she stops the moment you come back.
- She drives noticeably better: she steers toward the racing line ahead of her instead of at it, and recovers more reliably after going off track.
- Her concept-forming works without an API key. Previously the part of her that turns experience into ideas she can name was effectively paid-tier only; it now runs for everyone.
Fixes
- Her animation no longer runs at a different speed depending on your monitor's refresh rate.
- Chest and secondary motion now respond to how she moves, rather than being wired to parameters that did not exist.
- Reaction animations that were silently doing nothing now play.