Retail colors chat lines by the 34-value wire LogTextType (ACE's
ChatMessageType), NOT by acdream's synthetic 9-value ChatKind. The old
ChatWindowController.RetailChatColor(ChatKind) collapsed distinct retail
colors onto one bucket per ChatKind — e.g. every Channel line rendered
colorLightBlue (Magic's slot) when retail's actual palette spans five
different colors across the Turbine rooms and legacy allegiance family.
Ports ChatInterface::BuildChatColorLookupTable @0x004F31C0 verbatim
(RetailChatColorTable, all 34 RGBA floats read from the PDB-paired
binary's .data section) and threads a new ChatEntry.LogTextType field
through every ingestion site to the correct retail wire value:
HearSpeech/Tell pass the wire chatType through verbatim; Emote/SoulEmote
hard-code 0x0C; the Tell self-echo hard-codes 0x04; legacy ChatChannel
broadcasts derive their type from the channel bit via the new
LegacyChannelChatType helper (ported from the decompiled
Handle_Communication__ChannelBroadcast dispatch, hear vs. own-send);
TurbineChat rooms map through TurbineChatDisplayNames.LogTextType;
CombatChatTranslator's hit/miss/evade lines map to ACE's CombatSelf/
CombatEnemy per Player_Combat.cs; kill/death lines use retail's
decompiled 0x00 Default (not a combat color). ChatWindowController's
transcript now folds LogTextType through RetailChatColorTable with
retail's exact "out-of-range keeps the previous line's color" carry
rule; ChatPanel's combat highlighting sources the same table.
Corrects HearSpeech.cs's doc-comment ChatType legend (4 of 6 entries
were wrong). Adds register row AP-175 for the pre-existing (unchanged)
Popup-renders-in-chat divergence and updates AP-39's stale per-ChatKind
description. Narrows ISSUES #139 — its chat-colors half is done.
Retail renders no chat timestamp prefix path exists in acdream today,
so the "timestamp is always colorGrey 0x0C" rule has nothing to attach
to; noted here per the research doc rather than left silent.
Research: docs/research/2026-08-09-chat-retail-color-table.md
Full Release suite: 11,833 passed / 4 skipped / 0 failed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three follow-up fixes from the 2026-04-25 live verify session.
1. CRITICAL: BuildTell wire field order. Our outbound layout was
[target_name, message] but ACE's GameActionTell.Handle reads
[message, target_name] (verified against
references/ACE/.../GameActionTell.cs:17-18 verbatim). Result: every
/tell since Phase I.3 has been failing with WeenieError 0x052B
(CharacterNotAvailable) because ACE was looking up the message
text as the recipient name. Swapped the field order in
ChatRequests.BuildTell so message is written first; updated the
pinned BuildTell test to expect the corrected layout. The
WorldSessionChatTests round-trip continues to pass since SendTell
delegates to BuildTell.
2. Retail-style FormatEntry. The user asked for the canonical retail
strings:
/say (own): You say, "text"
/say (incoming): Name says, "text"
/tell (own echo): You tell Caith, "text"
/tell (incoming): Caith tells you, "text"
channel: [Trade] +Acdream says, "text"
/shout (own): You shout, "text"
/shout (incoming):Name shouts, "text"
Discriminators: SenderGuid == 0 distinguishes our own outbound
echoes (set by OnSelfSent) from real incoming whispers (carry the
sender's player guid). Sender == "" or "You" distinguishes our own
/say echoes (OnLocalSpeech substitutes "You" when the wire sender
is empty per holtburger client/messages.rs:476-487).
ChatEntry gains a new ChannelName slot so Channel-kind entries
render with the friendly room name ("Trade") instead of "ch 3".
Falls back to "ch {ChannelId}" when ChannelName isn't populated
(legacy ChatChannel inbound or older callers).
3. Suppress optimistic Channel echo. The user saw duplicates per
/trade /lfg in the live trace:
[ch 0] Trade: hello <-- our optimistic
[ch 3] +Acdream: [Trade] hello <-- ACE's TurbineChat broadcast
ACE's TurbineChatHandler at Network/Handlers/TurbineChatHandler.cs
broadcasts EventSendToRoom to ALL recipients in the room including
the sender, so the canonical echo always arrives via 0xF7DE. Drop
the optimistic OnSelfSent for Turbine kinds in GameWindow's
SendChatCmd handler; trust the server. Legacy ChatChannel paths
(Fellowship / Allegiance / Patron / Monarch / Vassals / CoVassals)
keep the optimistic echo because the legacy 0x0147 broadcast may
not always come back to the sender.
Inbound TurbineChat also stops embedding "[Trade] " into the
message text — passes the friendly name out-of-band via the new
channelName parameter on ChatLog.OnChannelBroadcast.
11 tests updated for the new format strings (8 in ChatVMTests, 1 in
ChatVMCombatTests, 1 BuildTell, plus the format additions cover
incoming/outgoing variants per kind). Solution total: 1007 green
(243 + 114 + 650), 0 warnings.
Tells should now actually deliver. Channel echoes show as
[Trade] +Acdream says, "hello" without the duplicate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adds a second real panel behind ACDREAM_DEVTOOLS=1. Shows the tail
of ChatLog (last 20 entries by default) formatted per ChatKind:
"Caith: hello" — LocalSpeech
"Regal says distantly: hi" — RangedSpeech
"[ch 7] Caith: g'day" — Channel
"[Tell] Regal: psst" — Tell
"[System] Your spell fizzled!" — System
"[Popup] A door stands..." — Popup
Why now: proves the D.2a IPanelRenderer contract survives beyond a
single progress-bar panel. ChatPanel exercises Text() + Separator()
on a variable-length list where VitalsPanel was a fixed three-widget
layout. No renderer primitives needed to grow — the contract held,
which is the whole point of the abstraction layer.
Files:
- src/AcDream.UI.Abstractions/Panels/Chat/ChatVM.cs (new)
Snapshots ChatLog tail every frame. Cheap at default 500-entry
cap. Per-kind formatting lives here (not in the panel) so the
D.2b retail-look swap inherits plain-text fallbacks.
- src/AcDream.UI.Abstractions/Panels/Chat/ChatPanel.cs (new)
IPanel implementation. Separator + N Text lines. "(no messages
yet)" fallback when the log is empty.
- src/AcDream.App/Rendering/GameWindow.cs
Registers the ChatPanel alongside VitalsPanel in the devtools
init block. Uses the existing GameWindow.Chat field already
fed by H.1's wire layer + GameEventWiring.WireAll.
- tests/AcDream.UI.Abstractions.Tests/ChatVMTests.cs (new)
12 tests covering tail selection, display-limit bounds, every
ChatKind's formatting, null-log + zero-limit guards, no stale
caching across appends.
Also fixes one stale "Hexa.NET.ImGui" mention in VitalsPanel's xmldoc
(pivoted to ImGui.NET in 55aaca7; doc needed a trailing update).
Build: 0 warnings, 0 errors. Tests: 23 UI.Abstractions (up from 11,
all Core + Core.Net still green), 0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Erik