OperatorPhone

An in-game smartphone for OPERATOR. Players get a persistent phone number and can text each other — across servers, in menus, or mid-op.

Status: early development. Identity and the app shell work. Messaging is implemented but lightly tested. Not yet suitable for general use.

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What it does

• Persistent phone numbers. Link your Steam account once, get a number like 201-9219 that survives reinstalls.
• Texting. 1:1 conversations with local history, delivered over Photon Chat.
• Contacts. Save numbers with nicknames.
• Presence. See which contacts are online. (planned)
• Media and links. Inline images with server-side previews. (planned)

Why it doesn't touch Mirror

OPERATOR uses Mirror for netcode, and Mirror's compile-time weaving makes adding new NetworkBehaviour types to a shipped IL2CPP game impractical for modders.

OperatorPhone sidesteps this entirely by running its own transport in parallel. It never registers a prefab, never spawns a networked object, and never touches NetworkServer. Consequences worth knowing:

• Messaging works outside matches — main menu, lobby, or between sessions.
• Two players on different servers can still text each other.
• The mod cannot desync or crash the game's networking, because it isn't part of it.
• Non-modded players are invisible to the phone. The fiction absorbs this fine: not everyone has your number.

Install

1. Install MelonLoader (v0.6+) into OPERATOR.
2. Download OperatorPhone.dll from Releases.
3. Drop it in OPERATOR/Mods/.
4. Launch, press F1, click Link Steam Account, finish the login in your browser.

Single DLL — dependencies are embedded. Nothing goes in UserLibs.

Keys

Key	Action
F1	Open / close the phone
F10	Input system probe (dev)
F11	Type dumper (dev)

Rebindable in UserData/MelonPreferences.cfg.

Privacy

• Your SteamID is never stored. The server keeps HMAC(steamid, secret) — a hash it cannot reverse — so a database breach yields no number-to-Steam-account map.
• Numbers are one-directional: given a number you can send a message, but you cannot resolve a number back to a Steam account.
• Messages are not end-to-end encrypted. They pass through Photon in transit. Treat the phone like an unencrypted chat, not like Signal.
• Message history is stored locally under UserData/OperatorPhone/.

Architecture

┌──────────────────────────────┐
│  OPERATOR (Unity 6, IL2CPP)  │
│  ┌────────────────────────┐  │
│  │ OperatorPhone (Melon)  │  │
│  │  ├ PhoneShell / AppHost│  │
│  │  ├ ChatService         │──┼──── Photon Chat ──── other players
│  │  ├ IdentityService     │──┼──── Worker ───┐
│  │  └ MessageStore (disk) │  │               │
│  └────────────────────────┘  │        Cloudflare D1 + KV
└──────────────────────────────┘

Auth is Steam OpenID, not a Steam auth session ticket. Validating a ticket requires a publisher Web API key scoped to the app, which only the game's developer can issue — so that route is permanently closed to third-party mods. OpenID needs no App ID and no API key: the player authenticates with Valve directly in a browser, and the Worker verifies the assertion by echoing it back to Steam.

Number assignment is atomic. The line number derives from HMAC(steamid, secret) mod 10000, then INSERT and let a UNIQUE constraint arbitrate, linear-probing on collision. Uniqueness is enforced by the database rather than a read-then-write check, which would race two simultaneous logins onto the same number.

Area codes encode join cohort — 201 for the first block, 202 next, rolling over at 50% occupancy. Retired numbers are never reissued: a banned player's contacts would otherwise start messaging whoever inherited it.

Building

Requires the .NET 6 SDK and a MelonLoader-patched copy of OPERATOR.

git clone https://github.com/<you>/OperatorPhone
cd OperatorPhone

Dependencies not in this repo (licensing):

1. Photon .NET SDK v5 — copy PhotonLibs/Release/netstandard2.0/PhotonClient.dll to lib/, and the .cs files from PhotonChatApi/ to lib/PhotonChatApi/.
2. Run OPERATOR once with MelonLoader so it generates MelonLoader/Il2CppAssemblies/.

Then:

dotnet build -p:GameDir="C:\Path\To\OPERATOR"

Builds straight into Mods/.

Fill in Core/ServiceConfig.cs with your own Photon Chat App ID and Worker URL if you're running your own backend.

Server

The identity worker lives in worker/ — Cloudflare Workers + D1 + KV, all within free tiers. See worker/README.md for deployment.

You do not need to run a server to use the mod, and there is no server on your PC. Everything is serverless and hosted.

Roadmap

• M0 — UI harness, input capture
• M1 — Steam OpenID identity, number assignment
• M2 — Photon Chat, texting (in progress)
• M3 — Offline delivery, message history sync
• M4 — Inline images
• M5 — Link previews
• M6 — Spotify remote, curated browser
• M7 — Moderation, rate limits, hardening

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome. Worth reading first:

• Input handling must never sit downstream of a network call. If the phone can't open because chat failed, that's a bug in ordering, not in chat.
• Envelope changes need a v bump and graceful degradation — an older client must ignore an unknown message type, not throw.
• Anything rendering remote content is a moderation surface. Assume hostile input.
• Thank You to the wasted bapeasaurus on discord for helping me test the mod

Not affiliated

Not affiliated with or endorsed by Vector Interactive. OPERATOR is their work; this is an unofficial mod.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Photon and Steamworks.NET are covered by their own licenses and are not redistributed in this repository.