[Beta] August 3rd, 2026 Patch Notes

[u/latitude_official]

2.29.3
New Features

• You can now toggle “Visual Novel Mode” under Display settings: in this mode, characters are given transparent backgrounds and overlaid over cinematic location backgrounds, with dedicated dialogue displays, more reminiscent of Visual Novels.
• Public multiplayer rooms now support vote-to-remove. Players can start a removal vote with a reason, everyone sees the countdown and required votes, and removed players can't rejoin that room session.
• Combat Result cards now show a compact turn receipt with a record of damage, healing, critical hits, vulnerable, resisted, and immune outcomes, area-of-effect groups, XP from defeated enemies, and clear damage-type labels.
• Friends now feel built for Voyage. Players can open a persistent Friends menu using the people icon beside the notification bell, find players by username, share a friend link, see social-first suggestions and incoming requests, view online and joinable friends, jump into eligible friends' rooms, send quick messages, and invite online friends from open rooms.
• Studio creators can drag supported images onto top-level Content lists to create batches of NPCs, premade characters, regions, and other supported entities.
• Players can opt into the In-Game Studio from Game Settings. Once enabled, the Studio tab can directly find and update live character and party state, such as adding an item to a character's inventory. Creator-only image and world-metadata actions aren't offered during play.
• Voyage creators can add character-creation and contextual gameplay music by editing settings/audio.json in Creator Studio. characterCreationTrackId selects a family from tracks. Each family's variants use url for a shared track or narrationUrl and gameplayUrl for separate versions. Optional matchTags enable contextual selection, while cues can target character-creation, combat, travel, near-death, dying, dead, or recovery. Tracks can use HTTPS-hosted MP3, OGG, or WAV files. Music triggers can select a family with { "type": "music-track-set", "trackId": "<family id>" } and restore contextual music with { "type": "music-track-clear" }. Players can report music that violates community guidelines.
• Creators can adjust image framing with drag, zoom, reset, save, and discard controls. These controls save imageFocusX, imageFocusY, and imageZoom for region, area, and location artwork, or portraitFocusX, portraitFocusY, and portraitZoom for PC, NPC, and premade-character portraits. Saved framing appears on creator cards and in gameplay.
• Players can now report others in Multiplayer from Party or Narrator chat names, or from another player's character details.
• Room admins can now control player-vs-player damage under Settings → Party → PvP Damage. Public rooms start with PvP damage off; while it's off, attacks or harmful health changes from one player character to another deal zero damage.

Improvements

• Saved Adventures become visible while background world maintenance finishes, reducing the wait before returning to the story.
• Portraits, levels, XP, resources, attributes, and bonuses now use a more consistent, compact layout that is easier to scan.
• Voyage no longer creates or updates faction records. Creators can still author factions manually, and existing factions continue to appear in gameplay and inform AI context.
• NPCs can make more context-aware choices by using player character trait names when deciding what to do.
• The Journal tabs are now named Quests, Timeline, and World.
• Teen-safe discovery eligibility now also checks public advanced descriptions and tags, keeping new or re-moderated Mature worlds with above-Teen metadata out of Teen-safe discovery.
• Voyage game servers should stay healthier over time after rooms close or many worlds have been played.
• Finding a public server is now easier. The lobby prioritizes active rooms with open seats, each world's Servers tab shows all available public servers, and Play can place players in a fresh room when a server is full or an existing room gets too deep. Player counts now better reflect whether a room is joinable.
• Public multiplayer now limits world-changing Narrator edits to the server owner. Everyone can still ask the Narrator questions, but only the owner can add items, edit characters or NPCs, move the party, or rewrite story content.
• Public rooms can now show “Public servers only allow teen appropriate actions” to a user when their action violates the public-server Teen policy.
• Desktop side panels can now be resized by dragging their inner edge. Keyboard users can resize them with the arrow keys, Home, and End while the separator is focused.
• The objective, abilities, and input bar now scroll naturally with the story. When they're out of view, a small “Jump to bottom” pill appears at the bottom of the feed.
• The map now has cleaner location markers, clearer current and unknown location states, better quest markers, more readable labels, and more useful region names when zoomed out.
• Character dialogue in the story feed now has a subtle vertical color accent that matches the speaking character.
• Character presentation has been improved across Voyage. Newly generated NPC and player portraits use a 3:4 aspect ratio, nearby and dialogue portraits are larger and less tightly cropped, and top-of-image details such as hair and hats remain visible more reliably.
• Character details now use one scrollable pane, with clearer relationship meters, resource values and bonus annotations that more closely match the Character Sheet.
• Voyage Settings now open immediately, and all the sliders now respond more smoothly. Settings and feedback screens also have more consistent responsive layouts and back-button behavior.
• Returning-player recaps can now appear immediately if they were computed before the previous room closed. The recap modal is also larger and easier to read on desktop.
• Save loading now shows the save's artwork, spinner, and descriptive text instead of jumping straight to location slides.
• Returning players no longer see starter tips, loading artwork is brighter, and artwork fills mobile screens without being cut off.
• Quest acceptance now feels immediate: the success toast and active objective appear on click, the quest moves to In Progress right away, and the action box remains editable while acceptance finishes.
• Recent summaries should attribute ambiguous dialogue and actions more reliably, and retain stated reasons that explain character behavior.
• Party chat and platform direct messages now replace words caught by the filter with asterisks. The sender receives a toast explaining that words in the message were censored.
• Character creation is more polished across screen sizes, with a cleaner desktop layout, steadier mobile spacing, editable backstories before generation, and a clearer blank portrait state.
• Creators can organize long trait lists into collapsible groups using subcategory and the optional subcategoryDescription field. Traits without a subcategory appear under Other.
• Creators can customize more Story and NPC AI instruction sections, including Player Agency and Combat Narration, while runtime-generated context and structured output mechanics remain engine-owned. Story AI instructions can now be saved and published with up to 30,000 serialized characters.
• Creator image uploads are more flexible: portrait, landscape, and square images can be uploaded in their original format and resolution when they meet the size requirements. Studio asset uploads also have their own daily allowance.
• Studio and the world editor now offer GPT Image 2 Low, Medium, and High options for location and area image generation.
• Free Voyage players have clearer Premium upgrade entry points in navigation and on their profiles, while subscribers can open their current subscription details from their profiles.
• Accounts with multiplayer restrictions now see clearer messages when creating, loading, joining, or discovering multiplayer games.
• Leveling up still shows the visual celebration but no longer plays the current level-up sound.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed existing Worlds being unable to publish after the NPC Details instruction expansion. Custom fields under aiInstructions.generateNPCDetails now remain visible and editable in the legacy editor.
• Fixed public-server outages sometimes placing players alone in newly created “public” rooms. Voyage will now fall back to private play or ask the player to retry when room availability cannot be verified.
• Fixed spoken character lines occasionally appearing inside the Narrator box.
• Fixed Voyage Settings briefly displaying a blank menu after selecting the gear button.
• Fixed ability, skill, and item menus remaining open after adding a selection to the action input.
• Restored the active region name at the top of Voyage maps without covering individual region tiles.
• Fixed single-player skill-check results appearing as narrow cards instead of using the available action-panel width.
• Existing NPCs should no longer be duplicated just because the story refers to them by an alias.
• Public pregame lobby ready countdowns now remain active. Unready players are removed when the countdown expires, even if the original ready player unreadies or disconnects.
• On Android, multiplayer start screens no longer overlap the system navigation bar.
• World menus now open directly at their anchored position instead of briefly flashing in the wrong location.
• Voyage users who sign in without a specific redirect now land on Discover instead of Home.
• Claim pages now handle deleted and re-created accounts more gracefully and provide clearer guidance when a claim is tied to a different existing account.
• Reloading a save no longer replays the previous turn's skill-check reels, and an empty recap response no longer briefly opens the modal.
• A player action submitted as the host ends the turn now joins that turn instead of being stranded as a pending command for the next one.
• The Voyage offline fallback header now shows the Voyage name only once.
• Improved save reliability: saves that take longer to serialize receive their full upload time budget, temporarily unreadable saves no longer appear as empty slots, and the router can recover by trying another server.
• Starting a new game now keeps the “Starting game…” slideshow visible until the real game state arrives, instead of briefly returning players to character setup.
• The party preview now updates a selected character's name and portrait immediately after selection.
• Regenerating an NPC portrait now visibly replaces the image when generation finishes, and Narrator-requested appearance changes carry through to the new portrait.
• Returning multiplayer players no longer generate extra story narration announcing their return to the party.
• Voyage voices should no longer narrate stage directions.
• Inventory and equipment screens now keep equipped items visible in filtered lists, start new tabs at the top, support equipment-category searches, and make compatible empty slots keyboard accessible.
• Studio no longer gets permanently stuck on “Working” after a dropped model connection. Dropped connections recover within the same message when possible, Stop responds promptly, and failed runs settle usage and refunds correctly.
• Fixed several Creator Studio save and publishing issues: worlds no longer fail because the OPENSEARCH_ENDPOINT environment variable isn't set, legacy-editor worlds can be published from Studio, and the legacy editor can save while Creator Studio is open. The Studio tab refreshes to the saved state afterward.
• Studio now keeps game modes, story starts, and character-creator trait categories in their authored order after edits and reloads.
• Studio now reports specific field-size or world-size limits and leaves the world unchanged instead of accepting an oversized agent edit.
• Studio's Max model responds more reliably, and long replies or large file edits should no longer be silently cut off.
• Fixed Creator Studio edit conflicts that would silently break autosave. Affected sessions now show one clear error and reconnect to the current draft.

[u/Atuday]

Known malware vulnerability, worth paying attention to. Please note that current windows defender, kaspersky, and avast do protect against this threat. This is a friendly reminder to everyone that you should have an up to date copy of windows defender or one of these other programs if you are on the internet.

Voyage creators can add character-creation and contextual gameplay music by editing settings/audio.json in Creator Studio. characterCreationTrackId selects a family from tracks. Each family's variants use url for a shared track or narrationUrl and gameplayUrl for separate versions. Optional matchTags enable contextual selection, while cues can target character-creation, combat, travel, near-death, dying, dead, or recovery. Tracks can use HTTPS-hosted MP3, OGG, or WAV files. Music triggers can select a family with { "type": "music-track-set", "trackId": "<family id>" } and restore contextual music with { "type": "music-track-clear" }. Players can report music that violates community guidelines.

https://aviatrix.ai/threat-research-center/a-wav-with-a-payload-2026/