Pictoria

Weekly Report 3: Proximity Chat History Window ​

December 21, 2025

This week we completed the proximity chat history window, a moderation tool that lets admins view and search chat messages from any player.

Opening the proximity chat history window by player name and by player ID

Proximity Chat History Window ​

In last week's report, we mentioned we'd be starting on the admin chat window. We decided to call it the proximity chat history window instead.

Putting it together was a multi-step effort:

Azure Table Storage Integration ​

We built a service for retrieving chat messages from Azure Table Storage with proper pagination, then wrote a bunch of integration tests.

Admin Panel Update ​

We updated the admin panel to include controls to open the proximity chat history window. Admins can look up a player's chat history by their username or their ID.

History Window UI ​

The history window shares much of its design with the standard chat window. Messages scroll infinitely, loading older history as you scroll up.

Performance Optimization ​

Apart from working on the proximity chat history window, we spent time this week optimizing performance in two key areas:

Fixing Stuttering Issues ​

We tracked down a stuttering issue caused by excessive use of will-change in CSS.

Typically, the browser creates a separate compositor layer for elements with this property. Too many such layers can cause performance issues.

The mistake we made was that early on, we added will-change to a commonly used button's styles, and as we added more buttons we forgot about it and the number of layers ballooned.

Adding WebGPU Support ​

We added support for WebGPU, the successor to WebGL. While WebGPU is already faster for some operations, the real gains will come once it gains support for bindless textures.

UI Cleanup ​

A few visual improvements made it in this week:

  • Drop shadows: Cleaned up shadow styles across the application for a more consistent look
  • Native scrollbars: Improved the appearance of native scrollbars (they appear sometimes when horizontal scrolling is needed)

Bug Fixes ​

  • Fixed a bug where email verification wasn't working correctly during account creation

What's Next ​

We're working on @mentions in chat. We intend for these to show up in the feed (bottom-left of the screen) - this way, if you're in a create mode, other players can still get your attention.

We've started work cleaning up the feed system but there's still some way to go, and then we'll need to hook @mentions up to it.