WhatsDab changelog

All notable changes to WhatsDab are documented here. This project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

[1.1.0] - 2026-08-07

Added

• Press Enter and WhatsDab opens on the Everyone chat with the cursor already in the message box, so the next thing you type is the message. Your phone does not have to be out.
• With a conversation on screen, everything you type goes into the message box. It used to walk your character forward, crouch you and swap inventory slots unless you clicked the box first. Escape and right-click still leave, on the first press.
• Enter still belongs to the game where the game wants it: nothing happens while you are typing, paused, or at a station, a shop or the console, and nothing happens outside a lobby.
• Needs Sideload 1.10.0. On an older one WhatsDab works as before, just without the key.

[1.0.5] - 2026-08-07

Fixed

• Spamming the chat no longer freezes the game. Every message rebuilt the whole app, and a conversation was kept without end, so each rebuild cost more than the last. Redraws are collapsed into one per burst and a thread keeps its most recent 200 messages.
• The unread badge counts again. A thread you had open marked itself read whenever a message arrived, phone in your pocket or not - so nothing was ever unread.

[1.0.4] - 2026-08-07

Fixed

• One-to-one chats are back. The member list was never rebuilt, so there was nobody to write to and only the group thread worked. 1.0.3 fixed the same broken lobby lookup in the transport and missed a second copy of it here.
• A message cut at the 500 character limit can no longer be cut through the middle of an emoji.

[1.0.3] - 2026-08-06

Fixed

• Messages send again. WhatsDab read the lobby id from a game property that Schedule I stopped filling in 0.4.6, so every message was dropped before it left your machine - no error, no hint in the app. It now reads the id from where the game keeps it since that update.

[1.0.2] - 2026-07-28

Fixed

• A long player name no longer breaks the timestamp. The name and the time share one line, and the name could take all of it, so “02:55” wrapped onto two lines inside a row 58 pixels tall. The name is cut with an ellipsis instead and the time is never squeezed. The conversation header clamps the same way.

[1.0.1] - 2026-07-27

Fixed

• Opening the app could show a conversation header with nothing under it. WhatsDab reopens whichever thread you last read, and thread ids are the people you were in a lobby with - so the next lobby has different people and the stored id resolves to nothing. It now falls back to the group chat, which always exists, and the header no longer carries placeholder markup that made the empty pane look like a rendering failure.
• Notifications are back for the case that matters: a message arriving with the phone closed. Needs Sideload 1.0.1, where the underlying check was fixed.

[1.0.0] - 2026-07-27

First release, alongside Sideload 1.0.0. WhatsDab is the reference app: a complete chat client for the in game phone, written as index.html / app.css / app.js and rendered by Sideload. It exists to prove that somebody else can build with the framework without knowing its internals.

Added

• WhatsDab on the in game phone. Contact list and conversation side by side in the phone’s landscape panel, a search filter, unread counts per thread and in total, coloured avatars with an initial, day separators, bubbles carrying the sender’s name in group threads, timestamps, a delivery tick, a typing indicator in both the conversation and the contact list, and a send bar.
• Both orientations, one stylesheet. The app declares both and the player turns the phone with the game’s rotate keys - no button of its own. Landscape keeps the two pane split; portrait becomes push navigation - the list, then the conversation, with a back arrow - driven entirely by @media (orientation: portrait) in app.css. The choice outlives a reload.
• Right-click goes back, exactly as it does in the vanilla Messages app: out of a conversation first, and only from the list does it close WhatsDab. Two lines in app.js, on Sideload’s cancellable back event, and the visible < button in the portrait header does the same thing.
• Real messages between players, over the Steam lobby chat the game already uses for its own control traffic. No FishNet, and nothing from any other mod - a lobby is a lobby, however it was opened. Messages are session-only and in memory; nothing is written to your save. One-to-one is filter-level privacy: the bytes reach every member and non-recipients drop them, which is the honest description of game chat.
• A scripted other side in development builds: a contact starts typing shortly after you send and answers shortly after that, so the whole app is exercisable from a single-player save.
• The whole mod as a worked example. Core.cs is one Apps.Register call plus data. Chat/ChatBackend.cs is the entire seam to the interface, five calls in and one event out, JSON strings both ways. Chat/ChatModel.cs is the only file holding sample data, so swapping in a real transport leaves the handlers and the whole interface untouched.
• No Unity assembly, no IL2CPP interop and no reference to Sideload itself. Only MelonLoader plus the single file Sideload.Api shim compiled in as source, so the mod ships as one DLL and does nothing rather than throwing when Sideload is absent.
• preview.html + s1-mock.js next to the app: the shipped app.js and app.css run in Chrome in a 733x400 frame with a mock bridge, so layout and logic can be iterated without launching the game. Both are excluded from the embedded bundle.
• File overrides: anything under Mods/whatsdab/ beats the copy embedded in the DLL, which is the same mechanism players use to reskin an app.