tgchat

[stylemistake]

About The Pull Request

Fixes #52898
Fixes #52663

It has finally reached a full feature parity with goonchat, and is ready for review!

It is as fast as goonchat was (if not faster in certain circumstances), and is very extensible. It has all the necessary code for sorting messages into categories, which means that one of the next features will be multiple tab support.

Additional features that you will get with tgchat right now:

• Massively faster server-side performance compared to goonchat, especially if batching multiple messages to one client.
• Message persistence across rounds and reconnects. (All messages are stored client-side in IndexedDB)
• More robust scroll tracking. If you scroll up, it will not change the scroll position on new messages like goonchat did.
• Multiple message combining. (Currently set to combine up to 5 messages over last 5 seconds).
• If using the highlighting feature, it highlights the whole message as well as the matching word.
• "Now playing" widget, with preview of the song title, a knob for adjusting the volume and a stop button.

---

Architecture is as following:

to_chat() -+
           |
        SSchat
   (queue, batching)
           |
  window.send_message()
           |
           v
+-------------+
| tgui-panel  |
|+-----------+|
|| tgchat    ||
|+-----------+|
+-------------+

Subsystem is basically goonchat, but without all the garbage that slows the servers down (string concatenation, double urlencoding, sanitizing, etc). Now, instead of all that, it's being slowed down by json_encode in /datum/tgui_window/proc/send_message, which IMO is completely worth it, and allows sending various templates and widgets to tgchat.

/datum/tgui_window abstracts the whole window away from you, establishes a nice message-passing interface between DM and JS, with two message queues on each side, automatically loads js/css assets for you, basically does everything. You as a developer only have to worry about sending/receiving messages and write javascript.

tgui-panel is a slimmed down version of tgui, and functions as a container for various widgets, and tgchat is one of them. It of course can be expanded with more stuff.

It's also a separate entry point and a JS bundle, so it's not bloating the main tgui bundle, and is currently sitting at about 230kB.

The grand plan is to replace the whole side panel, and have absolutely everything written in inferno, with mindblowing features and customizability.

[bobbah]

i feel like you should remove the nanotrasen n from the background of the panel for chat but maybe thats just me

[Mothblocks]

Is this going to force dark theme? I quite like the light theme for chat.

[optimumtact]

finally light theme users will be executed

[RaveRadbury]

@stylemistake being received by a grateful community after finishing tgchat.

[MrDoomBringer]

the start of an absolutely legendary feature
great work fam

[infoman-cor]

Icons do not appear to render correctly. They instead just show up as a missing image box.

[Couls]

From the Testmerge, using ghostears and examining things when you have more than 1000 chat messages stored seems to freeze up the client and make it entirely unresponsive for a few seconds. Hasn't crashed my game yet but turning off ghostears stopped the freezing

this is especially bad when you examine mobs

[infoman-cor]

I realize that this is still in its infancy but I would suggest adding string highlighting. As it really helps me know someone is attempting to talk to me in game.

[ShibaInuLord]

Personally, I prefer the old style of the settings area just in the corner, and that having a whole bar with it saying chat and the amount of chat messages is kind of redundant.

[stylemistake]

It's ready for merging (doubt anyone will review it). Most of the bugs were squashed and it was testmerged for a full day with no errors in the logs, so it's safe to merge.

Begin the new era of /tg/station now!

[TheSilverNuke]

When filtering by dead chat the ghosts become unfollowable.