A free Desktop Mate alternative with a lightweight interface and custom VRM support, though with fewer features.
- APP LICENSE: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
- DEFAULT AVATAR LICENSE: All Rights Reserved by Yorshka Shop — Do not redistribute this model in your own builds!
Mate Engine is a free alternative to the app Desktop Mate. This project exists because of the high price of Desktop Mate models, which range from $10 to $25 USD. Considering that full games are available at these prices on Steam and other platforms, paying $20 to $25 USD for a simple idle model feels unfair to many users.
Another reason for developing Mate Engine is that Desktop Mate removed mod support, making it difficult to add custom VRM models.
Now, with Mate Engine, you get most of what Desktop Mate offers for free, including support for custom VRM models!
Funds Raised: 194.34 USD / 100.00 USD Date: 26th of March, 2025
Legendary List – These amazing people made it possible to publish this game on Steam for just $3.99 and helped cover the license cost needed to distribute my app there.
The app will cost $3.99 on Steam, but don’t worry — it will always be FREE here on GitHub! If you’d like to support future updates, feel free to grab it on Steam. And if money’s tight for any reason, no stress — you can always download the app for free from this GitHub page, and yes, it will always stay up-to-date!
Supporters:
- Gra**** Ja***** – $94.00
- Co**** Da***** – $96.00
- Dym**** Sk***** – $5.59
In order to publish this app on Steam once it's stable, I need to pay a one-time fee of $100 USD. Since this project is completely free, I would truly appreciate any donations!
I'm only collecting enough to cover the one-time fee—I don’t plan to accept anything beyond that. If you’d like to support the project, please send any amount you can spare to my PayPal: [email protected]
Be sure to include a note saying "MateEngine Donation" so I can keep things organized on my end. Thank you so much for your support!
MateEngine features smoother transitions between animations compared to Desktop Mate—see for yourself! Desktop Mate often feels clunky, with glitchy transitions between different states. In contrast, MateEngine delivers seamless and fluid transitions, no matter the state.
MateEngine is more lightweight compared to Desktop Mate in terms of CPU and GPU usage. Depending on the model you use, RAM usage may increase or decrease.
In the example model "Alice", we use a high-quality model with around 190MB of texture memory, which is why the program consumes approximately 200MB of RAM in the example image.
Using models with lower texture memory will result in lower RAM usage. Overall, MateEngine is slightly more performant and lightweight.
- Idle Animations – The avatar will play looping idle animations while staying on your desktop.
- Drag Animation – The avatar will float when you move it around.
- Dance Animation (Experimental) – The avatar will dance when you play music on Spotify, Mozilla Firefox, and other apps.
- Inject Mode – You can inject your own custom model as long as it's a .VRM model that is correctly rigged and has valid bone names.
- Options Menu – Click on the avatar and press
Mto open the Mate Engine options menu.
- Always on Top – Toggle whether the Desktop Pet stays on top of all windows or moves behind them when you focus on a new window.
- Particle System – Adds magical particle effects to your mouse or the pet itself for a more whimsical feel.
- Wallpaper Engine Integration – Adds support for injecting the project into your Wallpaper Engine designs. You’ll be able to embed the entire Unity project directly into your wallpaper!
- Window & Taskbar Sitting – Not 100% confirmed yet, as it’s a bit tricky to implement—but potentially allows your pet to sit directly on windows or the taskbar, just like in Desktop Mate.
- Menu Color Customization – A fun little feature to let you personalize the menu colors—because who doesn’t love some flair?
- Initial Avatar Loading – In the future, a "ModAvatar" folder will let you place your VRM files inside. The pet will automatically load your VRM on startup, no more re-injecting each time!
- Re-injecting Custom Models – Each time you launch Mate Engine, you need to re-inject your own model.
- No Window or Taskbar Sitting – This feature is disabled due to the risk of getting banned in games like CS2, CSGO, League of Legends, and others. If a safe workaround is found, it will be implemented in the future.
Q: The VRM doesn't inject, or my model doesn't work with your app!
A: This issue is not caused by the app itself but by your .VRM model file being invalid or improperly formatted. If you created the .VRM file yourself or received it from someone who converted an .fbx, .obj, or .mmd file to .VRM, please ensure the conversion was done correctly.
For guidance on properly converting files into the .VRM format, you can follow tutorials available here:
Please note, assistance with converting models into .VRM files is outside the scope of support provided here.
Setting up to contribute to this project is super easy!
- Clone the GitHub repository and extract the project folder.
- Open Unity Hub and click on "Add project from disk".
- Select the
Mate-Engine-BRANCHfolder. - Open the project in Unity Hub.
- Once the project has loaded, go to the folder
Scenes - USED FOR MATE ENGINEand open the scene Mate Engine Main.
Important Do not open any other scenes like Mate Engine InDev, as they belong to different branches. For contributions and development, always use Mate Engine Main only.
If Windows Defender detects a potential virus named Trojan:Script/Wacatac.B1ml, you can ignore it. This is a false positive caused by the application not being digitally signed.
To verify that the application is safe, you can scan it using VirusTotal or other security services.
I hope you enjoy Mate Engine! Thank you for supporting this project! ❤️