Weekly Report 2: Polishing Proximity Chat
December 14, 2025
This week was all about polishing the proximity chat experience we introduced in last week's report.
Smoother Scrolling
Last week, we added infinite scroll so you can load older messages by scrolling up. This week, we fixed a jarring issue: when older messages loaded, the chat would jump around unexpectedly.
The problem is that when new content appears above what you're looking at, it pushes everything down. We solved this by automatically adjusting the scroll position when older messages load, so the message you were reading stays in place.
We also fixed a bug where the scrollbar sometimes wouldn't appear until you moved your mouse, even when there was content to scroll through.
Filtering Messages
You can now filter chat messages by typing a player's name. This makes it easy to find messages from a specific person when the chat gets busy. The search ignores uppercase/lowercase, so "ALICE", "alice", and "Alice" all find the same messages.
Automatic Cleanup
Chat messages are stored on your device for quick access. To prevent this from using too much storage over time, we added automatic cleanup that removes old messages after a certain period.
Behind the Scenes
We fixed some timing issues in how different parts of the application communicate with each other. These kinds of bugs are tricky because they only happen occasionally, making them hard to track down. The chat window should now be more reliable as a result.
Other Improvements
A few smaller fixes made it in this week:
- Improved how chat messages display when the window is very narrow
- Fixed a bug where the skin selection panel didn't animate in smoothly
- Fixed an issue with text input fields not responding correctly in some cases
- General code cleanup in the window system
What's Next
We didn't get to the admin chat window this week as originally planned. However, most of the work we did on the proximity chat window directly benefits the admin version since they share the same underlying systems. The main difference is where messages come from: the proximity chat loads from your device, while the admin chat will load from Azure Table Storage.
Next week, we'll start on the admin chat window proper, which will let moderators view and manage chat messages across the entire world.