Changelog

All notable changes to OperatorPhone.

[1.0.1] — 2026-08-05

Navigation fix. If you got stuck in Settings, this is the one you want.

Navigation could wedge on entering Settings. The Settings screen reads chat state,
which forces the runtime to load Photon's assembly. When that assembly wasn't
resolvable the throw happened mid-navigation, before the nav bar refreshed — leaving
the back button hidden and no way out of the screen.
App lifecycle callbacks are now isolated, so a failure inside any one app can't take
navigation down with it. A broken app is now a broken screen you can leave, rather
than a phone you're trapped in.
Settings degrades gracefully when chat is unavailable, showing Chat: unavailable
instead of throwing.
Unlinking no longer fails when the chat service can't be reached.

Home button in the nav bar (⌂). Previously only Back existed, so returning to
the app grid from a nested screen took multiple presses.

First public release. Identity works end to end; messaging is present but unverified
between two players.

Identity

Steam account linking via Steam OpenID, in the player's browser. No API key or App ID
required, which is what makes this possible for a third-party mod at all — validating
a Steam auth session ticket needs a publisher key only the game's developer can issue.
Persistent phone numbers in AAA-NNNN format. Area codes encode join cohort,
starting at 201 and rolling over at 50% block occupancy.
Numbers derive from HMAC(steamid, secret), so the same account always converges to
the same number — surviving reinstalls and even a database restore.
Atomic assignment: INSERT plus a UNIQUE constraint, linear-probing on collision.
Uniqueness is enforced by the database rather than a read-then-write check, which
would race two simultaneous logins onto one number.
Auth token cached locally, so only the first launch opens a browser.
Relink is forced automatically if the running Steam account differs from the linked
one — on a shared machine, that prevents delivering someone else's messages.

Phone

Screen-space phone panel, toggled with F1.
Status bar showing your number and connection state, in tabular figures so digits
don't jitter as they change.
App shell with home grid, nav bar, and back navigation.
Messages — thread list, new conversations by number, conversation view with
aligned bubbles, composer.
Contacts — add with nickname, delete, persisted locally.
Settings — number, identity state, chat state, unlink.

Networking

Photon Chat transport, entirely separate from OPERATOR's Mirror netcode. The mod
registers no prefabs, spawns no networked objects, and touches no NetworkServer —
so it can't desync a match or crash a server.
Messaging works outside matches and across different servers.
Photon custom authentication against the identity worker, so a client can't connect
claiming a UserId it doesn't own.
Versioned message envelopes. Unknown types are ignored rather than throwing, so a
newer client's message can't break an older one.
Local message history in append-only JSONL, one file per thread.

Input

Game input suppressed while the phone is open, with cursor state saved and restored.
Cursor lock reasserted each frame, since the game re-locks it from its own state
machine.

Packaging

Ships as a single DLL. Photon's client assembly is embedded and resolved at load time
via a module initializer, so nothing goes in UserLibs.

Messaging is unverified between two accounts.
No offline delivery — messages to a disconnected player are lost.
Text entry untested mid-match. If typing moves your operator, that's the top-priority
fix.
Long messages may lay out incorrectly in a conversation.
The phone is a screen-space panel, not a held object.

SteamIDs are never stored server-side, only an irreversible HMAC.
Number lookup is one-directional: a number can receive messages but can't be resolved
back to a Steam account.
Messages are not end-to-end encrypted and pass through Photon in transit.