Five filled plates become two ghost buttons and a menu. The plates were ImGui
defaults sitting between a drawn pill and a drawn status bar -- three shape
languages in the one row a user works in, which is what the tester's screenshot
made obvious. The ghosts follow the sidebar's icon buttons: nothing at rest, a
held hover fill, the glyph lifting toward the accent.
Symbols stay outside the menu because they are used mid-sentence. Theme,
settings, screenshot and hide move in; the screenshot toggle was allowed in only
because its state moved to the status bar first, as an accent pill that shows
while the mode is on. A privacy state behind a closed menu answers nothing.
The input field paints its own rounded surface and hands ImGui a transparent
frame, so the widget draws only text and caret -- the Boutique.Inputs technique
from Character Select+, no rebuild of the widget itself. Focus is a two-pixel
accent rail on the left edge: the same mark the rows, the popups and the message
list already use for "this is where you are".
The channel pill gets the CS+ treatment, a faint white gradient and a one-pixel
light along the top edge. White over the fill rather than a second hue, so it
reads as depth in every palette.
And the popups that open from the row are made of PopupRow now -- the sidebar
row's shape, which is also exactly what CS+ draws for its own popup entries. The
channel picker was the reported case: a drawn pill opening a list of naked
selectables, the style breaking mid-click.
A hundred-odd pixels of button reserve go back to the input field.
Four elements, three variants each, drawn side by side in real ImGui against the
live theme. Reachable with /hellion lab.
The alternative was drawing mockups, and mockups are what sent this cycle wrong
once already -- they predate the settings window learning that structure is
typography and only controls get a fill. A picture also cannot show the part that
matters most here: switching themes switches which variant works.
Everything it draws comes from helpers that were already in DrawListExtensions
and had almost no callers. DrawSlipPolygon and DrawVerticalGradient had one
between them, in SegmentedControl. DrawGlowBorder had none at all.
Temporary, and deliberately not behind DEBUG: the decision happens in the build
Flo runs. It comes out once the variants are picked.
The mockup draws this band as a filled surface, and I built it that way. The
settings window used to draw its section headings the same way -- and dropped it
in v1.11.0, with the reason written into SectionHeader: a fill reads fine against
blue themes and vanishes against violet ones, because its only distinction from
its surroundings is hue. Tracking is shape, and shape survives every palette.
Side by side with yesterday's build the difference was obvious: the settings
window sets VERHALTEN and TASTENKÜRZEL as tracked caps with a rule that fades
out, while the chat window right next to it carried a lit bar. One window was
three weeks ahead of the other.
So the plate is gone and a fading rule runs between the channel name and the
world, stopping short of it. Same shape the settings headings have had since
ced7ea0.
Worth writing down because the mockups are where this came from, and they are
from before that lesson. They are the starting point of the style track, not its
target -- the target is how far ImGui can be pushed, and the plugin has been past
these drawings since v1.11.0.
Both reasons the channel-rows idea existed are gone. It was written when the
sidebar was flat and unstyled; v1.10.0 gave it row surfaces and it already groups
pinned and auto-tell tabs under headings. What was left was a change to how the
plugin is operated rather than how it looks -- and tabs are what users have
learned to use.
Next two are the input bar and the first-run wizard, the last surfaces still
drawn in ImGui defaults.
Typography cycle. Named type roles instead of one size, a channel header above
the conversation, timestamps in a column of their own, rows with a surface, and
local plus server time in the status bar.
The heaviest finding was not typographic. Screenshot mode reached one of the four
surfaces that draw a tab name, and an auto-tell tab is named Player@World -- so a
picture of the default view named the conversation partner while every message
below it was anonymised. All four share one rule now.
Config version 26. Local state only; repo.json stays on 1.5.6.0.
Reconnection cycle. Export, the tab editor, database maintenance and pinning were
unreachable after the v1.6.0 window rebuild; all four are back, the settings
window is translated into 25 languages, and the channel grid decides what gets
stored.
Local state only. repo.json stays on 1.5.6.0 and the download links are
untouched.
Version to 1.13.0 in the csproj, with the changelog and roadmap entries for the
local state. Not published: the public release stays at v1.5.6, repo.json keeps
its 1.5.6.0 manifest and all three download links are untouched.
The changelog leads with the screenshot-mode gap rather than with the typography,
because that is the part that changes what a user's own screenshots contain. An
auto-tell tab is named "Player@World", and three of the four surfaces that draw a
tab name had no rule about it -- so a picture of the default view named the
conversation partner while every message below it was anonymised. Anyone who has
shared a screenshot from an older build should know that.
Config version 26 is in there for the same reason. Its migration marks existing
tell tabs as partner-named, and it says plainly what it cannot do: a tab promoted
to permanent before this version keeps its name and loses every marker, so
nothing in the stored data says where that name came from.
Known issues carry the honest tail: the header recomputes its widths every frame
instead of on the status bar's tick, and all three font handles now rasterise the
full glyph range -- the cost of letting the channel name use the smaller face
without breaking on an umlaut.
The migration self-test asserts what v26 actually does now, rather than only that
the version number moved.
Both clocks in the status bar, in the game's own LT/ST notation. Anyone agreeing
on a time across regions reads them off one line instead of doing the arithmetic
in their head.
Server time is not computed here and must not be. Framework.GetServerTime() hands
it over, so the plugin follows whatever Square Enix does with it -- a local UTC
conversion would be right today and quietly wrong the day that stops holding.
Umbra reads it the same way. The slot drops out on its own like every other one,
and it is empty while logged out, because then there is no server to read a clock
off.
The header gives up its clock in exchange. With both times in the status bar it
would have been the third copy of the same number on one screen, and the header's
job is to answer where you are, not what time it is.
Its title also moves down to the meta size. Tracked caps at body size read like a
headline, and the header is meant to answer a question rather than announce one.
That only works because the meta face now carries the full glyph range: it was
built with an ASCII-sized one on the assumption it would only ever draw clocks
and world names, and a single umlaut in a tab name would have broken it. All
three delegate handles rasterise the full set now -- the honest cost of the
change, and the reason the size distinction is worth having at all.
Two things fell out along the way. The detail no longer needs a flag saying "draw
me in the body face", because there is no glyph the meta face cannot reach. And a
culture-pinning test lost its subject when the clock left, so it asserted nothing
and is gone rather than repaired.
It has only ever lived in the right-click menu on a player name. For a privacy
feature that is the same as not existing -- reported as missing by a tester who
has been running the plugin for months and never found it.
Now a camera in the input row, next to hide-window, and lit in the accent colour
while active. A mode whose state you cannot see is worse than no mode: the whole
point is knowing whether the names on your screen are real before you press the
screenshot key.
The button reserve goes from 130 to 156 to fit it. No new string -- the context
menu's label is already translated into all 25 languages and says exactly what
the button does.
EnsureContrast works in ABGR. I handed it the theme's RGBA on both arguments, so
it swapped red and blue in the foreground and in the background, measured a
contrast between two colours that were never on screen, and returned a result in
the wrong order -- which then went through RgbaToAbgr a second time.
On a violet surface with a teal accent that came out as dark bordeaux on dark
violet: the exact unreadable pairing the call was there to prevent. Reported from
a real screenshot, not from a test, because nothing here is testable without a
draw frame.
Every existing caller in the codebase passes ABGR -- SettingsPalette hands over
_palette.Abgr(...), SegmentedControl uses fields literally named LabelAbgr and
TrackAbgr. Mine were the only three that did not, and all three were written in
this cycle.
The comparison value comes from the message data, not from a variable carried
between rows. In 1.5.6 the loop walked every message and skipped invisible ones
with a dummy, so what it remembered was the last *visible* stamp. The virtualised
list only iterates the visible window, so the row above that window was never
drawn at all -- a carried variable would hold whatever was on screen before the
last scroll, and the first stamp after every jump would be wrong.
No predecessor means draw. Scrolling into the middle of a log would otherwise
swallow the only stamp on screen.
Both draw paths now pass an index; the linear one was a foreach and had none.
The setting is on by default and existed with translations in twenty-three
languages -- Catalan and Italian had kept the English string, so those two are
done now. It needs no fingerprint entry: the column stays reserved when the stamp
is suppressed, so hiding one changes no row's height.
The header was the only place that knew a tab name can be a person. The sidebar,
the tab strip and a pop-out's window title drew the same "Player@World" string
untouched, so a screenshot of the default view still named the partner while the
messages underneath were anonymised. Guarding one surface out of four guards
nobody.
The rule sits in one place now and all four read it. Names are replaced rather
than blanked: a nameless tab in a strip of tabs is worse to use than a
placeholder, and the sidebar has no room to explain itself. The salt is drawn
fresh on every plugin load, the same reasoning the message path uses -- a stable
label would let two screenshots taken weeks apart be tied together.
The tab strip resolves once and both measures and draws that value. Measuring one
string and drawing another would have sized every tab wrong the moment the mode
came on, which is the kind of thing that looks like a layout bug and gets fixed
in the wrong place.
The arithmetic had tests from the first commit; the table in front of it did not.
Factors is indexed by the enum, so a role inserted in the middle shifts every
factor below it -- and each one still resolves to a plausible size, which is
exactly why nothing would have failed.
Three files were missing their TEST-MIRROR marker despite having mirrors. The
marker is how the drift check finds them.
This morning's fix hung on TellTarget, and TellTarget is routing state that the
codebase clears deliberately. StripTellBindingOnPromote sets IsTempTab false,
empties TellTarget, and keeps the name -- so a promoted tell tab is called
"Player@World" permanently while carrying neither marker, and falls through both
possible checks. That state survives restarts. A pinned tab whose binding did not
survive a save is the same hole with a different cause; the auto-tell service
logs that case as expected and repairs around it.
The flag is set where the name is built from a partner and is not cleared by
promotion. Renaming clears it, because at that point the user typed it.
Config v26 carries it backwards for tabs that already exist: anything still
holding a tell binding or the temp flag got its name from a partner. Tabs
promoted before this version cannot be recovered -- nothing in the stored data
says where their name came from -- and renaming one has the same effect anyway.
Two more things the header was giving away. Its icon for an auto-tell tab is
derived from the partner and stable across sessions, which is three bits of
linkable information on a picture meant to be shareable; the message path
re-salts its name hashes on every load precisely to avoid that, so screenshot
mode now falls back to a plain envelope. And a world name that is not ASCII --
the CN and KR clients have those, and we ship translations for both -- was being
drawn in the meta face, which carries ASCII and a middle dot. It would have come
out as question marks, the same defect the split was built to prevent.
Plus two that are not privacy: the header had no FontsReady gate, alone among
the drawing components, so its band height and baseline offset were wrong in
exactly the frames this cycle made more common. And a long tab name ran past the
band and got cut mid-glyph at the window edge; it fits now, the way the honorific
header already did it.
The preview was four flat lines of text on a plain field. After this cycle the
real log has a channel header above it, a fixed timestamp column, and system
messages in italics -- so the preview had quietly become a picture of a window
that no longer exists. That is the same defect as a widget with no call site,
just pointing the other way: something on screen that stopped tracking what it
describes.
The reserved band grew with it. It is a fixed height that the sidebar mock also
divides by, so adding a row inside without raising it would have pushed the last
message out of the space -- the recurring drawing-into-unreserved-space mistake
this project keeps stepping on.
Preview stamps are fixed rather than live. A clock ticking inside a settings
panel pulls the eye away from the setting being changed.
Card density puts the sender on its own line with the body indented onto the text
column beneath it, and six pixels of air after each one. That air is what makes a
card read as a card, and it goes through the measured row height so the clipper
plans against it rather than around it.
System messages go italic in both densities. Nobody said them -- it is the game
talking -- and italics carry that in every palette. Colour would have been the
obvious alternative and is the wrong tool twice over: the rule this cycle runs on
says typography solves what typography can, and the channel colours already in
those chunks come from the game and are not ours to dim.
The italic face falls back to the game's own italic rather than to upright text
when the custom one is switched off, so the distinction survives either setting.
A wash from the left at a tenth opacity, a two-pixel accent bar on the edge, both
fading in and out on the held hover value rather than snapping.
Two draw paths, because the height arrives at two different times. On a normal
frame the cached height is already correct -- a chat message does not change
height after its first measurement -- so the surface goes down before the text
and costs nothing. On the frame after the cache is dropped no row knows its
height yet, and that is the only time the draw-channel detour is needed. Without
it the entire list would flash bare for one frame after every window resize,
which is not rare: width and display scale are both in the fingerprint.
The gradient and the rounding cannot be one call. AddRectFilledMultiColor writes
four fixed vertices and takes no rounding parameter, so the rounded base goes
down first with the gradient inside it. At two pixels the bar has no visible
corners at all and needs neither.
Needed on exactly one frame: the one after the height cache is dropped, when no
row knows its own height yet. Every other frame the cached height is already
right -- a chat message does not change height after its first measurement -- and
the caller paints the fill directly without coming near this.
Modelled on LightlessSync's SettingsCardScope, which had already worked out the
two things that make draw channels dangerous. Nesting a splitter into itself
asserts, and Dalamud does not compile asserts out, so the user gets an error
dialog rather than a glitch -- hence the depth count. And a forgotten merge is
not a dropped frame but a permanent one: the commands stay in the channel buffers
and never reach the draw list, then the next frame's split walks into the assert.
Hence the finally, by way of the struct's Dispose.
Fill switches to the background channel and switches straight back, so a caller
cannot leave the channel hanging even by returning early.
The stamp used to be text at the head of the line with two spaces after it, so
every sender name started wherever the previous stamp happened to end. It sits in
a fixed column now, measured once per draw from the widest shape the current
format can produce, and the names line up.
The column stays reserved when the stamp is hidden. Collapsing it would make a
per-tab switch change every row height in that tab, and the height cache would
have to carry wrap positions rather than just the format.
tab.DisplayTimestamp has a reader again. It was in 1.5.6 at two call sites and
lost both when cf4705e retired the old chat window; the tab editor has been
writing a setting nobody read since. Same class of defect the last cycle spent
itself on, found in passing here.
The sender draws in the heavier face and the stamp in the smaller one, both
dropped onto the body baseline -- ImGui aligns a row by its top edge, so without
that the stamp would hang. All three faces follow the same FontsEnabled or
UseHellionFont pair every other push site follows; with the game font selected
there is no heavier or smaller variant and the row falls back to one face.
Card density gets the two-line treatment only where there is a sender. A system
message has none, so a header row would be a stamp alone on a line -- an empty
gesture. Those stay single-line in both densities.
Two more axes the height cache never knew about, and the second one is not even
wired up yet -- it is about to be.
Use24HourClock changes the stamp from 15:45 to 3:45 PM. The stamp sits at the
head of the line with SameLine(0,0), so the wrap width every following word is
measured against shrinks. Rows that wrap near that boundary get a different
height, and nothing dropped the cache.
DisplayTimestamp is per tab, which is why BuildLayoutFingerprint now takes the
tab. It only ever read Plugin.Config before -- the per-tab part of this system is
the gate, one per tab, comparing fingerprints that knew nothing about tabs. The
switch is dead today and gets its reader in the next commit; the axis goes in
first so the cache is right the moment it starts doing something.
Both are toggles, so they sit in the discrete half and skip the settle window.
Eights rather than zeroes. In most faces 8 is the widest digit, and a column
measured from 00:00 gets undercut by a 10:38 -- which would shove the name column
right on exactly that row, the misalignment the column exists to remove.
Two samples because the twelve-hour form is wider. That difference is why
Use24HourClock has to enter the layout fingerprint: switching it moves every wrap
position after the stamp, and the height cache never knew.
Screenshot mode anonymises sender names in the message list. The channel header
I added yesterday sat above that list and showed two things it should not.
The home world, on the right. It narrows a player down almost as far as the
character name does, and the mode exists so a picture can be shared.
Worse, the tab name on the left. AutoTellTabsService builds a tell tab's name as
"Player@World", so a tell conversation had the partner's name and world set in
tracked caps directly above a log where every message had been anonymised. The
one place a reader looks first was the one place still naming them.
The name is suppressed only where it actually names someone -- a tab with a tell
target set. General or Trade stay readable, because they identify nobody, and a
self-named tab is the user's own text.
Found by asking what the new surface shows rather than by a test failing. Nothing
here was failing.
TypeRole.Header had no call site and could not get one. The channel header is set
apart by small caps and tracking, not by size, so the role resolved to exactly
Body -- a value that would sit in the enum being equal to another value forever.
That is the precise thing this style track exists to prevent. Five widgets shipped
once with no call site at all, and the rule that came out of it says no piece
lands without one in the same pass. Writing a caller just to satisfy the rule
would have been worse than the rule.
Also cleans two comments the pop-out rewrite left pointing at things that are
gone: a close button that lived on the removed title row, and a method
description with no method under it.
The self-test was the worst of them, because it is the only tool that makes block
A judgeable at all and it destroyed itself on use. It returned Fail while the
atlas was not ready, and its own weight buttons trigger a rebuild -- which is
asynchronous, not synchronous as the comment claimed. Click a weight, watch the
step go red. It waits now, like the two existing steps that had already worked
this out.
The translated stand-in was drawn in the meta face, whose glyph range is ASCII
plus a middle dot. Fifteen of the twenty-five translations reach outside that, so
"not logged in" would have rendered as a row of question marks in Japanese,
Russian, Korean, Greek and eleven others -- and the measured width would have
been the width of the question marks, so the right edge would have drifted too.
The plan said to keep it on the body face and the comment in FontManager says so
as well; the code simply did not. The detail is two parts now rather than one
string, and each part is measured under the face that draws it.
The header was the only place in the UI pushing RegularFont directly, without the
FontsEnabled-or-UseHellionFont check every other push site makes. With both
toggles off the window draws in AXIS and the header would have drawn in
Inter-Light, at a different size, in a band measured against a third one.
And the icon sat on the text baseline. FontAwesome is a fixed-width handle built
at Dalamud's own size and does not follow the plugin's font setting, so at any
other body size it hangs. The sidebar already knew this and centres against the
row; the header does the same now.
Two smaller ones came along: the minimum-height threshold was compared unscaled,
which would have dissolved it at higher display scales, and the height passed
into that check included the input row -- so "is there still room to read" was
measuring the wrong thing. Both callers now say what sits below them.
Drawn before the scroll child in each, so it stays put while the log moves. The
child's height is deliberately left alone: it is given as a negative value, and
ImGui resolves those against the space still available from the current cursor --
which the header has already reduced. Subtracting it a second time would have
opened a gap of exactly the header's height above the input row, in both windows.
Where the name shows follows one rule: never twice on the same screen. The
sidebar layout is the only place nothing else carries it, so that is the only
place the header says it. The top-tab strip carries it, and a pop-out with its
title bar on carries it in the title.
The pop-out's plain title row is gone, replaced by the header. The comment it
left behind is worth keeping in mind -- an earlier header row was removed exactly
because it repeated the tab name one line below the title bar. That warning is
now the rule rather than a reason to have no header at all.
The trailing detail is the home world and the clock, and the clock follows the
same Use24HourClock setting the message timestamps do. Two clock formats in one
window, with the header sitting directly above a column of timestamps, would be a
defect rather than a preference. Culture is pinned for the same reason it is
pinned in the message list.
Small caps with wide tracking, not a smaller size. The mockup asks for one pixel
below body text, and one pixel would have cost a whole additional font handle at
full glyph range -- tab names are free user input and can be CJK. Tracking reads
the same in every palette and costs nothing, which is the same argument that
settled the section headings in the settings window.
Only the world and the clock use the meta face. Its glyph range is ASCII plus a
middle dot, so anything that gets translated has to stay on the body face.
Two things it will not do. It drops the tab name where one is already on screen:
a pop-out with its title bar on carries the name in the title, and the top-tab
strip carries it too. Repeating it one line below is the exact defect that got an
earlier header row removed, and the comment left behind at that removal is what
made this rule. And it disappears entirely below a minimum message-area height --
the window minimum is 260px, already shared with the honorific header, the input
row and the status bar, and all of it scales together. A header that leaves two
readable lines is worse than no header.
Both decisions are arithmetic and sit in ChannelHeaderLayout with tests. The
gallery gets an entry despite the header needing a tab and the font handles,
because that window exists precisely because pieces once shipped without a call
site.
Visibility only. The header has to show the icon the sidebar row shows, and the
lookup table alone would not do it: it only answers for a tab with an explicitly
chosen icon, and the default is none. Most tabs reach their icon through the
derivation this method wraps.
Formatting only. The five-element fingerprint tuple and its field declaration ran
past the line limit, and preflight block E is stricter than the check I had been
running per task -- it caught what the narrower filter did not.
Block A ends with no call site in the message list -- that arrives in block C --
so without this step there would be nothing to look at and two helpers with no
caller at all.
It draws rather than asserts, because asserting proves the wrong thing here.
SimplePushedFont pushes nothing at all when a handle is not ready, silently, and
the text then renders in whatever face was already active. A step that compares
two numbers and reports Pass would sail straight past that. So this one puts a
timestamp, a sender and a body line next to each other and lets them be looked
at, with expected-against-actual printed underneath.
The three weight buttons exist because the alternative was three builds and a
plugin restart between each, and nobody compares a typeface across a restart.
RebuildDelegateFonts is synchronous on this thread, so the sample row picks up
the new rasterisation on the next frame.
ImGui lines items up by their top edge. ItemSize only shifts anything when
CurrLineTextBaseOffset is non-zero, and that stays zero unless
AlignTextToFramePadding ran -- so a meta timestamp beside a body-sized name would
sit flush at the top and float above the baseline.
The correction is the difference of the two ascents, scaled. The scaling looks
like it is applied twice and is not: Dalamud rasterises at SizePx * GlobalScale
and then divides the metrics back down, so ImFont.Ascent comes out logical.
Drawing multiplies it up again. The comment says so, because the first reviewer
to see this file read it the other way.
No call site yet -- the self-test in the next commit takes it, and the message
list takes it in block C.
The height cache keys on a fingerprint of everything that can change a row's
height. Four things that can were never in it:
- ItalicFontV2.SizePt. ChunkRenderer pushes the italic face mid-row for emphasis,
so there have been mixed sizes in a single line all along -- nobody called it
that. Changing only the italic size moved every wrapped row and left the cache
untouched.
- ItalicEnabled, which swaps between ItalicFont at its own size and AxisItalic at
the base size.
- FontsEnabled and UseHellionFont, which swap the face outright. This pair is the
quiet one: both size fields default to 12.75f, so the fingerprint did not move
at all while the glyph widths underneath it did.
On top of those, the two new role sizes. They follow the base arithmetically, but
the resolved value is what belongs in the fingerprint -- a theme override moves
the base without moving any factor.
The three toggles go in the discrete half so they bypass the settle window, the
same way density already does. The sizes are sliders and wait it out.
Falsified rather than assumed: dropping FontsEnabled back out of Discrete turns
the new test red, so it is measuring the axis and not just passing.
Two roles need a face of their own, and they need it for opposite reasons.
The sender is meant to carry weight. The mockup says 600, and there is no bold
face anywhere in the plugin -- the bundled file is Inter-Light and the game's
Axis is a single weight. So the weight comes from rasterising the same outline
denser, via RasterizerMultiply. That only works on the delegate path: with both
font toggles off the game font handle draws and has no such knob, and the sender
falls back to leaning on channel colour alone. Deliberate limitation, not an
oversight.
The meta face goes the other way: smaller, and on a glyph range of about eighty
entries instead of the full set. Timestamps and world names are Latin in every
client FFXIV ships, so ASCII plus the middle dot covers what this face will ever
be asked to draw. A full range would have rasterised the whole CJK block a second
time for nothing. Anything translated stays on the body face.
Two things in the rebuild path had to change with them. The handles now go up
inside a SuppressAutoRebuild block -- without it, one size change meant four
separate atlas rebuilds instead of one. And FontsReady checks both new handles
unconditionally, unlike ItalicFont which is allowed to be null: a handle that is
not ready makes SimplePushedFont push nothing at all, silently, and the first
frame after a rebuild would measure the wrong face and write those heights into
the row cache.
Both font self-tests were extended to match. A handle nobody asserts is a handle
that can go missing for a release without anyone noticing.
Body, Sender, Header, Meta. Three of them share the base size, which looks like
an oversight and is not: the sender is set apart by weight and the header by
small caps with wide tracking. Neither of those is a size, and solving them with
size instead would turn the log into a ransom note. Only meta steps down, because
it is meant to be skipped over rather than read.
Factors sit in a static array rather than as consts. The master spec puts
typography under theme control, and ThemeTypography is already the declared
extension point for it -- a const would wall that off before anyone gets there.
No caller yet. FontManager takes the first one in the next commit; that is the
one place in this cycle where a piece lands before its call site, and it closes
inside the same block.
Quarter-point rounding, not whole points. The base size is 12.75pt, so rounding
a derived role to whole points would move it further than the step between two
adjacent base sizes -- the scale would quantise away the difference it exists to
express.
The floor is what keeps the meta role legible when someone runs a small base
size; below about seven points a timestamp stops being readable at any display
scale.
CalcWordWrapPositionA takes a scale, and imgui means size / FontSize by that --
the ratio between the size being rendered and the size the face was baked at
(imgui_draw.cpp, CalcTextSizeA). We were handing it ImGuiHelpers.GlobalScale.
That is the same number today, but by coincidence rather than by design. Dalamud
bakes every font at SizePx * GlobalScale and then divides the metrics back down,
so g.FontSize / font->FontSize lands on GlobalScale for every handle regardless
of its size. The coincidence holds only while one face draws a line.
The typography work starting with this cycle puts a second size into the same
line, and there the two numbers separate: the wrap would be computed for the
wrong size while CalcTextSizeA keeps measuring with the right one. Measured
height and drawn wrap would drift apart, and the virtualised clipper plans
against the measured value.
No behaviour change expected here -- the expression evaluates to what the old
constant already was.
Version to 1.12.0 in the csproj, with the changelog and roadmap entries for the
local state. Not published: the public release stays at v1.5.6, repo.json keeps
its 1.5.6.0 manifest and all three download links are untouched.
The changelog leads with the storage change rather than burying it under fixes.
Until this release the unknown-channel failsafe was applied to known channels
too, so an installation that had unticked channels and left the failsafe on was
storing more than the grid said. From here the grid decides, which means those
installations store less than they did yesterday. Nothing already written is
touched, but a user who compares the database against last week should find the
reason in the notes and not have to guess.
Config version 25 is recorded there for the same reason. There is no migration
behind it -- the storage rule changed shape, and the stamp says so.
Known issues carry the honest tail: the database viewer and the emoji picker are
still English, 245 orphaned resource keys remain as the inventory of what the
v1.6.0 rebuild lost, and the licence text still contradicts itself between the
About tab and the translated resources.
Reported from a real pass through the window.
The theme categories were a static readonly array, so the five names
froze at whatever language the plugin started in and a runtime switch
relabelled the entire window except them. Same shape as the layout
labels earlier in this cycle; this one got missed because replacing the
literals with resource lookups looks finished until you actually switch.
The status bar built its counts from English literals -- tab, tabs, msg,
tell, tells -- and the privacy pill said "Privacy-First" in all 25
files. The thousands separator follows the user's culture now too, so
German reads 1,2k rather than 1.2k.
The live preview claims to show what the window will look like. It was
showing English channel names next to a translated placeholder, which is
worse than either. Channel labels come from ChatType.Name() now and the
status slots share the strings with the real status bar. The four mock
chat lines stay English on the earlier decision.
And the export wrote a byte order mark. Encoding.UTF8 emits one, and a
leading U+FEFF makes the JSON invalid for every strict parser --
confirmed against a real export from the game, where python's json.load
refused the file. CSV keeps its BOM, because without one Excel guesses
the codepage and mangles every non-ASCII name.
The self-test that was supposed to catch that read the file with
File.ReadAllText, which strips a BOM while detecting the encoding. It
reads bytes now.
The status bar tests asserted English literals and started failing on a
German machine -- they pin a fixed culture now instead of inheriting the
locale of whoever runs them.
The cleanup preview marked itself stale before it could be drawn. The
gate bumps a revision on release so a preview cannot survive a wipe; I
then made the preview take the gate, so its own release invalidated it
every single time and the apply button never appeared. The feature has
been shipping non-functional since it was written, with a self-test that
asserted the exact bump that killed it.
Read-only operations no longer move the revision, and preview and
maintenance have their own marks instead of borrowing Cleanup -- which
also stops the five-second metadata refresh from expiring previews, and
stops the UI announcing "another operation is running: cleanup" during a
VACUUM.
The JSON export produced invalid JSON. The chat relation kinds were
interpolated straight into the output, and interpolating an enum writes
its member name, so every message with a recognised relation came out as
"source_kind":LocalPlayer. That is the file a GDPR access request goes
out on. The self-test wrote a JSON file and never parsed it; it does now.
Retention with the limit at zero still deleted. The slider is labelled
"0 = never" and the sweep seeded 31 spec defaults unconditionally before
reading the user's overrides, so zero still lost free company, linkshell
and party history after ninety days -- and the short-circuit written for
exactly this case could never be reached, because the map was never
empty.
A wipe that worked reported that it had failed. VACUUM needs the
database to itself, the refilter walks a lazy reader on the primary
connection outside the lock, and the two collide -- after the DELETE has
committed. The delete paths no longer let that escape: the rows are
gone, an uncompacted file is a housekeeping problem, and telling
somebody their history is still there when it is not is a different kind
of problem.
Also:
- CSV cells starting with =, +, - or @ get a leading apostrophe. The
content is text other people typed into a chat channel and the file
exists to be opened in a spreadsheet.
- An export that matched nothing no longer replaces the previous one. It
used to write its header, move it into place, and then report that
nothing matched. Dalamud's save dialog offers no overwrite
confirmation to fall back on, so this is the part that had to move.
- The retention sweep says so when it loses the race for the gate, and
routes its notifications through the teardown check like everything
else.
The real defect first. RefreshDatabaseMetadata was the one worker of six
that never took the shared lock, and its flag was the one of six missing
from the tab's busy state. It calls MessageCount, which holds the read
lock, so a wipe could start while it was in there -- and the tab would
not have known to grey the button, because it could not see the worker.
Both halves fixed. The pattern is why: seven near-copies of one worker
skeleton, and each copy decided something slightly different.
The clear button failed silently when its thread could not start. The
most destructive control in the plugin, pressed, and nothing happens,
with no way to tell that from a wipe that worked -- while the three
harmless workers beside it do report. Maintenance was the mirror: its
comment promises refusals are said out loud, and then swallowed the
actual failure. Three start-failure paths also bypassed the notify
helper that carries the teardown check, three weeks after it was added
for exactly that.
The database numbers now wait for a real read, like the clear hint
already did. Zero bytes and zero messages read as an empty database, not
as a number nobody has fetched.
SelectionAfterDelete is gone, with its three tests. The accordion has no
selection, so its return value went into a discard -- a function
answering a question the interface does not ask, with green tests
guarding nothing. The project's own self-test README calls that the
anti-pattern of record.
Six new keys replaced by the translated orphans that already said the
same thing. A commit earlier in this cycle is literally called "stop
duplicating a key" and these went past it. The duplicate button also had
the label "Add", which is the one string out of ninety-four that was
never written.
Tests: CleanupDeleteTypes had none, and with the failsafe on -- how a
fresh config ships -- it is the path every cleanup takes. Four now,
including the one that matters: an empty list deletes nothing rather
than everything.
And a self-test for the gate wiring, which is what would have caught the
metadata worker. The unit tests prove the gate works; nothing proved the
workers use it.
Fifty-four keys across 25 files, and a script that can find the rest.
The script reports rather than deletes, because a key with no caller is
a question and not a verdict: this cycle has twice found one that only
described a feature whose button was torn out, and deleting it would
have made the restoration cost 25 files of re-translation. The answer
lives in the git history of the deletion, not in a grep.
So only the ones where that history says the feature went on purpose:
the web interface, the settings card overview the sidebar replaced, the
save-and-discard model this window does not have, the LiteDB migration
dialog, and three one-time announcements for versions long past.
Plus nine this cycle superseded itself, including the three notes
telling the reader to press Save first.
251 keys still have no caller. That is not a to-do list -- it is the
inventory the search pass turned up: timestamp layouts, collapse
duplicate messages, the About tab's prose, the honorific glow, the
novice network button. Every one of them describes something that used
to work. They stay until each has been decided one way or the other,
which is the whole premise of this cycle.
There has been no way to create a tab, delete one, reorder them, or
choose what any of them collects since the settings window was rebuilt
in May. The five tabs a config happened to have were all a user could
ever have. Every label for this was sitting in the resources, translated
into 25 languages, with no caller.
An accordion, not the list-and-detail pane the plan sketched. The
settings column is narrow, every other tab in this window is a stack of
collapsible sections, and a split pane inside one of them would be the
only thing here that reads differently without buying anything.
Channels go through the matrix that already existed, unchanged: it knows
the groups, the sub-matrices and the ExtraChat channels, and it is
localised. What it does not know is copy-on-write -- it mutates the
dictionary it is handed -- so it never gets the tab's own. Edits land in
a working copy and are published as one reference swap when the user
leaves the tab, and only if something actually changed.
Saving is deferred behind a dirty flag with a short idle, not
IsItemDeactivatedAfterEdit. That idiom defers for sliders and text
fields, which stay active across frames; a checkbox activates and
deactivates inside one click, so it would fire exactly as often as the
return value and write the config file once per box.
Deleting closes the pop-out first, or the pool keeps a slot bound to a
tab that no longer exists. The last editable tab cannot be deleted at
all: the message list has no empty state. Temp tabs are not editable
here -- their name is a conversation partner and the auto-tell service
owns their lifetime -- so they are skipped entirely.
Also E2: Tab.AddMessage stamps LastActivity for every message now. The
condition that used to gate it filtered on InactivityHideChannels, a
setting belonging to hide-when-inactive, and that feature lost its
reader in cf4705e. Which tell tab the pool drops first -- the only thing
that reads the stamp -- was hanging on a setting for something that does
not happen. The three channel fields behind it are gone.
Two decisions, both yours.
Where Square Enix ships a client in a language, that client's word wins.
German says Flüstern, French message privé, Japanese テル, Korean
귓속말, Simplified Chinese 密语. Everywhere else there is no official
client and the loanword is what players actually say, so it stays.
That meant rewriting the whole corpus in those languages rather than
just the new keys, which is the reason the split existed in the first
place: forty German values and thirty-seven French ones carried the old
word. /tell is untouched, because that is a command and not a noun.
The mechanical pass left French with three agreement errors -- "des
message privé", "ce onglet", "messages de message privé" -- which is
what happens when you substring-replace a language with gender and
number. Fixed by hand.
Traditional Chinese keeps 悄悄話, which the file already used nineteen
times; it has no official client of its own.
The appearance tab is translated as well. Thirty keys: the colour
editor's groups and buttons, the theme categories, fork and import and
export, the font labels and the preview's input placeholder. Theme token
names stay English -- WindowBg and TextPrimary are JSON keys, not
prose -- and so do the brand strings.
465 keys, 25 files, no gaps, no orphans, no placeholder drift.
Still English and not in this commit: the database viewer behind
/hellionView, which is a documented user command rather than a
developer tool, and the symbol picker. Both are their own block.
A language review over all 24 files found that the translation batch had
been written as if the file were empty. It is not: eleven years of
FFXIV vocabulary and several hundred existing values already decided how
this plugin says things, and the new strings disagreed with them.
Three said something wrong rather than something unusual:
- Norwegian called opacity "tetthet", which is density -- and the same
file uses that exact word for compact density, so one word stood for
two different settings.
- Danish called the brand section "Brand", which in Danish is fire.
- Turkish called a manifest a notification, in a window that already has
a notifications section.
Then the glossary itself. "tab" is zakładka in Polish, tab in Romanian
and Danish; "plugin" stays plugin in five languages that had translated
it; "pop-out" is a loanword in six. The Shift key keeps its name in
Swedish, Finnish and Italian, because that is what is printed on it.
Fixing pop-out also shortened the three longest row labels in the batch
past the point where SettingRow would have clipped them.
Czech was the clearest outright error: the existing file addresses the
reader informally throughout, and five new strings switched to the
formal form.
And a gap in my own previous fix: I had moved four of the five tell
strings to the established loanword and missed the fifth pair, so the
failed-tell warning still said "Flüstern" while its neighbours said
"Tell".
435 keys, 25 files, no gaps, no orphans, no placeholder drift, and every
one of the five tell keys now carries the same word in every language.
Whether German and French should say Flüstern and message privé rather
than tell is a real question -- both game clients do -- but that is a
glossary decision for the whole file, not something to introduce through
four new keys.
A review pass found the translation commit had introduced a split rather
than closed one.
Every existing string in this plugin leaves "tell" untranslated -- it is
what the game calls the thing, in twenty values across the German file
alone. My new keys translated it, so the channels tab showed "Auto-Tell-
Tabs" and, two rows below, "Flüstern automatisch öffnen". Thirteen of
fourteen sampled languages had the same break. The four affected keys
now use the established word, which also fixes a German line that had
tells "aufgehen" like a door.
Turkish said the opposite of what the control does: saydamlık is
transparency, the slider is opacity, and 1.0 means fully opaque. Every
other language uses the opacity word. Corrected, along with the inactive
one beside it.
Compact density had grown a second key for a field that already had one.
Appearance_UseCompactDensity_Name and _Description were sitting there
with no caller -- which is precisely what this cycle exists to fix -- so
the chat tab uses those and my duplicate is gone again. The German
wizard label for the same field said "Kompakter Density-Modus"; it says
the same thing as the other two now.
Also: Hungarian called a pop-out window "kiemelt" (highlighted), the
project's word is "kiugró"; German called it "ausgeklappt", which is
what a menu does; Italian and Polish had a clumsy inactive-opacity
label.
435 keys, all 25 files, no gaps, no orphans in either direction.
One claim in the previous commit was wrong and is worth stating plainly:
it said only log lines, thread names, developer tools and brand strings
remained English. The appearance tab is still English throughout -- the
theme picker, the colour editor, the font section, the live preview --
and so are parts of the database viewer, which is a documented user
command, not a developer tool. That is a separate block, not a footnote.
The settings window was rebuilt in v1.10.0 and v1.11.0 with its labels
written straight into the C#. Every section heading and most row labels
across five tabs read English in all 25 languages, which the memory
notes had accepted as a known backlog.
Forty-nine keys close it: seventeen section headings, the rows under
them, and the two layout choices. All 25 languages, 437 keys each, no
gaps and no placeholder drift in either direction.
The layout labels are a property rather than a static array now. A
static one would hold whichever language the plugin started in, and this
plugin switches language at runtime.
What stays English, deliberately: log lines and thread names, which no
user reads; the two developer tools behind Shift plus Ctrl+Shift, per
the decision that developer surfaces stay English; and the About tab's
brand lines, attributions and licence identifiers, which are names.
The two halves that can be settled without a window, before the window
exists.
Concurrency first, because the editor is the first thing that ever
writes SelectedChannels after load. All three channel-filter fields are
read without a lock from the pending-message thread, the filter worker
and the draw thread, and mutating a live Dictionary while Matches walks
it is the standard way to get a wrong answer on somebody else's stack.
ReplaceChannelFilter builds the replacements and swaps the references,
so a reader sees the old set or the new one and never half of either.
It deliberately stops short of making the three writes one atomic step.
A reader can catch the new dictionary with the old ExtraChat flag for a
single message, which the editor's closing clear-and-refilter
reconsiders anyway. Doing better would mean one reference for all three,
and all three are serialized fields whose shape the config file already
has.
Then the index maths, which is where temp tabs make this more than list
arithmetic. They live in the same collection, they are not editable --
their name is a conversation partner and deleting one would be deleting
a conversation -- and a move has to step over them rather than swap with
them, or moving a tab down and back up would not return it to where it
started. Reversible in the editable order, which is the order the user
sees; the sidebar draws temp tabs under their own headers regardless of
where they sit in the list.
Twelve facts, and one of them started out asserting the wrong property:
that the whole list is restored by a move and its reverse. It is not,
and it does not need to be.
The last editable tab cannot be deleted. The message list has no empty
state, so a window with nothing to draw is not a state to offer.
Block D of v1.12.0. The line between the two is the whole job, and I got
it wrong once on the way: six cache fields on Tab looked dead because
nothing writes them, and nothing writes them because AutoTellTabTint and
TabTintCache went out with the chat window in cf4705e. Deleting the
fields would have cemented a loss instead of recording a decision.
So they are back, and the sidebar uses them again: an auto-tell tab is
tinted and glyphed from its partner, twelve colours against seven icons.
Four open tells are no longer four identical envelopes in one colour.
Their own header promised the same partner keeps its colour "across
sessions" while hashing with string.GetHashCode, which .NET salts per
process -- every game start reshuffled every tab. FNV-1a now, with a
lowbias32 finalizer that is not decoration: without it a probe over 144
similar keys reached six of the twelve colours, because the caller takes
the low bits with a modulo and FNV leaves those correlated. Three pinned
values guard it, which is also the only assertion that can catch a
regression to a salted hash.
The same question, asked of the three hide conditions this block had
quietly orphaned: HideDuringCutscenes, HideInBattle, HideWhenNotLoggedIn
all had readers in v1.5.6 and lost them in the same commit. Two of them
are states rather than conditions -- a cutscene the user dismissed stays
dismissed until it ends, and combat must not seize a chat that is
already hidden for another reason -- so they come back as a small state
machine with eight pinned transitions, and three toggles whose labels
were already translated in all 25 languages.
Actually deleted, with a reader search each time:
- Six per-tab hide fields. Their reader was the pop-out window and it
stopped consulting them in cf4705e. Per-tab was the wrong unit anyway:
"hide during cutscenes" is a statement about the screen.
- Tab.ChatCodes, whose migration the v16 schema gate had already made
unreachable.
- InactivityHideTimeout and InactivityHideActiveDuringBattle, MaxLinesToRender
which had stopped bounding anything, and the 155 lines of
Configuration.UpdateFrom with no caller at all.
Config version 25, at all three places that carry it. No migration step:
the gate only refuses anything under 16 and Json.NET drops keys it does
not know, so the deleted fields simply stop being written.
One thing a review pass caught that matters more than any of the above:
the clone parity guard had gone hollow. It compares collections by
count, ChatCodes was the only collection the probe seeded, and removing
it left the guard comparing zero against zero. Verified by making
Tab.Clone discard both remaining collections and watching every
assertion stay green. The probe seeds them now, and the same sabotage
fails as it should.
The wizard asked for it, coupled it to a neighbour, listed it in the
summary as applied, and wrote it to the config. No code in the plugin
has ever read it. A wizard that collects a decision and reports an
effect that does not happen is worse than one that never asked.
Its partner, FilterIncludePreviousSessions, has a real reader and stays.
The coupling was two-way -- switching this on forced the partner on,
switching the partner off forced this one off -- so removing it leaves a
single checkbox that means what it says, and the summary line now
reports the setting that actually took effect.
The self-test asserted that skipping step 3 does not overwrite either
field. That assertion is rewritten rather than repaired: it was pinning
the null-semantics of the wizard's pending state, which still matters,
just with one field instead of two.
Reported by a tester: the input field in v1.5.6 had right-click actions,
the current one has no right-click at all.
Correct, and the commit before this one put those actions in the wrong
place. The v1.5.6 menu was ImRaii.ContextPopupItem("ChatInputContext")
bound to the input field itself; I hung the two token entries off the
chat-message menu, where the rest of that window's items had landed.
They are on the input field now, which is also where they are useful:
you insert a token while composing, not while reading.
Two details from the original that the misplaced version had lost:
- The agent pointers are null-checked. Both can be null during a zone
transition, which is exactly when somebody is most likely to be typing
a flag into party chat.
- Inserting refocuses the field and puts the caret behind the token.
Picking from a menu and then having to click back into the field is
the kind of friction that makes a feature go unused.
Hiding the chat is not repeated in the menu. It was in the v1.5.6 one,
but it has its own button two widgets to the right now, and one way in
is enough.
The two menu items went out with the v1.5.6 chat window in cf4705e.
Their strings stayed, in the base file only, so the feature was gone and
its labels were untranslated in all 24 other languages.
They live in the chat context menu now, next to hide-chat, which is
where the rest of that window's items ended up. The game expands <flag>
and <item> at send time, so appending the literal token is the whole
implementation; each entry is disabled while its precondition is missing
so a token cannot be sent only to expand into nothing at the other end.
ChatLog_ScrollToBottom_Tooltip is the one that stings: it has had a
caller since v1.9.0 and existed in the base file alone, so every player
outside English read that tooltip in English.
All three are translated now, and with them the resource files are at
full parity for the first time -- 25 files, every key in every one.
JonKazama-Hellion