================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.273.2 Beta ================================================================================ New Features - Tabs now tell you how many messages are waiting in them. A number sits on the tab's dot, up to 9+, and it clears the moment you open that tab. Whispers keep their own colour, so a private message still looks different from room chat at a glance. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.273.1 Beta ================================================================================ Bug Fixes - Holding ESC no longer cancels a room's scripts unless you are an operator. Rooms that check props or nicknames when someone walks in are no longer bypassed by holding the key down. Operators can still stop a script that is stuck. - Added a safety net to prop decoding: in the rare case it nests too deeply, that one prop is skipped instead of the client crashing. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.273.0 Beta ================================================================================ Bug Fixes - Fixed a crash that could happen in busy rooms with the translator turned on, after a lot of messages had been translated. - Translations in a busy room no longer flood all at once, they are paced so the room stays responsive. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.272.9 Beta ================================================================================ Bug Fixes: - Chat log now follows the tab you switch to, instead of staying stuck on the previous room until you reopened it. - Hidden users and hidden rooms are now readable on every theme (they were a faint gray, hard to read on some). - Fixed a rare crash from running out of memory while drawing a zoomed room, it skips that frame and keeps running now. - A failed update download now tells you what happened instead of just closing PalaceChat. - Removed a stray line break when a room name is copied to the chat. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.272.8 Beta ================================================================================ Bug Fixes - The chat log disappeared when you minimized PalaceChat and did not come back when you restored it. It only reappeared once somebody spoke. So did the Palace Directory and the other tool windows. They all come back with the window now, however you minimized and however you brought it back, including when you restore PalaceChat by clicking one of its other windows instead of the main one. - Text on the framed sections was drawn in black on dark themes and could not be read: the Password box in Operator, Line and Fill in Paint, and Smiley Set in the smiley window. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.272.7 Beta ================================================================================ New Features - Your tabs now come back to the ROOM you were in, at the zoom and the scroll position you left them at, and stop losing your place every time you switch between them. - The zoom out button goes down to 40 percent instead of stopping at 50, so a 4K room fits on the screen whole. - The name history remembers ten instead of seven. - PalaceChat opens maximized if that is how you closed it. Bug Fixes - The chat box, the translator and emoji buttons and the Users line could all disappear and stay gone until you restarted. It happened when the screen setup changed under the app, and every tab lost them at once. - The chat log window could vanish on its own and only come back when somebody said something. It now comes back as soon as you click on PalaceChat. - If you made the chat text bigger in Preferences, the Users line and the Group PM button could end up sitting on top of the room picture, and the Group PM button could land on the translator and emoji buttons. - The box where you type the wizard, god or owner password had button text you could not read, and the window ignored your theme. - The history arrows next to the name box opened a system coloured menu in the middle of your theme. - Closing PalaceChat while maximized threw away your saved window size, so the next start came up at the wrong size. - Un-maximizing left the window at whatever size Windows felt like, instead of going back to the size of your room. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.272.6 Beta ================================================================================ New Features - Every theme now actually looks like itself. Until now the windows were painted with one fixed dark and one fixed light colour no matter which theme you had picked, so Ocean, Dracula, Monokai and Nord all came out the same generic grey. They no longer do pick one and the whole program follows it. - Changing theme with a window already open now repaints that window. Before, parts of Options kept the colours of whatever theme was active when you opened it, and only closing and reopening fixed them. Bug Fixes - THE ONE WORTH UPGRADING FOR. If you have automatic operator on a palace and the star option turned on, every one of your tabs was being renamed to the same starred name a second after signing on each tab logged on correctly with its own nick and was then overwritten. Worse, that name was saved, so the nicks you had set were quietly lost for good on the next start. If you use auto-op with more than one tab, install this one. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.272.5 Beta ================================================================================ Upgrading from 5.0.272.4 - The first time you start this build, your saved tabs come back EMPTY, once. The session stored by 272.4 is in the old shape and is not converted, it is simply left behind. Open the tabs you want, quit, and from then on everything is remembered as usual. If you never installed 272.4 there is nothing to notice here. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.272.4 Beta ================================================================================ New Features - PalaceChat can bring your tabs back when it starts. Tick "Reopen my tabs when PalaceChat starts" in Options > General and, from then on, quitting writes down which palaces you had open. Next time you start, the tabs are there with their names on them, but NOT connected. Nobody sees you arrive until you say so. - A second tick underneath, "and connect them", signs those tabs in for you, one at a time, each waiting for the one before it to finish. One try each: if a palace is down, that tab simply waits for you to press Reconnect. Nothing retries in the background. Hold Esc to stop the whole thing. - Each tab now remembers the name it signed on with, and comes back as that name. If you have always used one name you will never notice this, it is already your name. If you are a different person in different palaces, that is exactly who you get back. - The connect box now offers the palace AND the name belonging to the tab you are looking at, instead of whatever you typed last somewhere else. Both histories are still one click away on the arrows beside them. Bug Fixes - Options renamed every open tab at once. Worse, it did it whether or not you went there to change your name: going into Options to flip any setting at all and pressing OK renamed all your tabs to whatever sat in the name field. If you have ever come out of Options wondering why you were suddenly the same person in four palaces, that was this. Options now shows the name of the tab you are on, and changes that tab only. Also - Both new settings start OFF. Turning "Reopen my tabs" back off forgets what was stored, it does not sit there waiting for you to change your mind. - Connecting to several palaces at once is not just slow, it can look to a server exactly like something it should be defending itself against. That is why the tabs go in one at a time rather than all together. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.272.3 Beta ================================================================================ New Features - Every tab now saves its own chat log, even when you have two or three tabs open on the same palace. The first one keeps the file name it has always used, so nothing you already have moves. The second and third get their own files, marked "2tab" and "3tab". - If a tab loses its connection and comes back, it keeps writing to the same file. Your conversation stays in one place. Bug Fixes - The chat log window kept growing forever while autoscroll was paused. If you left PalaceChat signed on for days, it got slower and heavier the longer it ran. It now trims the oldest lines and keeps your reading position exactly where it was. - The translator left something behind on every line it translated, so long sessions used more and more memory. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.272.2 Beta ================================================================================ Fixed - A crash that closed PalaceChat while it was drawing a busy room. One way it could happen is fixed, and the program now keeps a quiet record of the situation that leads to it, so if it ever happens again the bug report will say exactly where it came from. - The same change releases a room that had stopped redrawing while the program itself stayed alive. If you have ever had a room freeze on you while everything else kept working, that was this. New Features - NATIVELANG, a new script command. It tells a room script which language you have chosen, so a room can greet you and show you door pictures in your own language. Everyone standing in that room can be reading it in a different one at the same time, because the choice is read on your own computer and nothing is sent to anybody. Script writers, see the wiki. - More groundwork for the new palace server. Nothing changes for you today, and there is nothing you have to do, but the pieces keep landing. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.272.1 Beta ================================================================================ Fixed - Opening a second or third tab to the same palace worked, but once you had closed them all, reconnecting from any tab other than the original signed you in as a guest. It stayed that way no matter how many times you tried, and the only way back was to reconnect from the tab you first used. Any tab can now take the main account, as long as no other one is actually holding it at that moment. - Fit to window did nothing in rooms whose background is a video. The percentage in the title bar simply never moved, however big or small the room was. Rooms with a normal picture were fine, which is what made this one hard to spot. - Room names came out cut off in the door editor. Clicking DEST to pick where a door leads showed names ending in dots, so two rooms whose names started the same were impossible to tell apart. The names were never damaged, the list was just too narrow to show them. Every dropdown in the program now opens as wide as its longest entry. - When the server rejects your password, the login window closes and tells you. With an authenticator running, three wrong passwords get you dropped on purpose, and PalaceChat used to reconnect by itself and put the same login window back on screen, so from where you were sitting nothing had happened and you could keep trying forever. New Features - Groundwork for the new Palace server. Some of the above is preparation rather than repair: PalaceChat now understands people connecting from a browser instead of the program, and handles the new server's login decisions properly. The new server is still in development and will be in beta soon, so nothing changes for you today, but you may start seeing users listed with a different software version next to their name. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.272.0 Beta ================================================================================ Fixed - "Shrink the room instead of showing scrollbars" was quietly losing 1% of the zoom every time you changed rooms. You would walk a few doors and find yourself at 91% with no idea why, and the zoom you started with never came back. - One pixel no longer counts. Anything more still does, so a room that really is too big is still brought down to fit. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.271.9 Beta ================================================================================ New Features - A room that does not fit your window now shrinks until the whole of it does, instead of leaving you with scrollbars. Rooms still size themselves to their picture exactly as they always have; this only steps in when the picture runs off the bottom or the right. - It is OFF until you turn it on. Options, Advanced tab, "Shrink the room instead of showing scrollbars", just under the fit-to-window setting. - Your own zoom is remembered. If you are at 110% and walk into a room that cannot show it, it drops to whatever fits; walk into a room where 110% fits again and it comes back. Change the zoom by hand while you are in there and that becomes your setting instead, since you asked for it more recently than we did. - It stops at 50%, the same floor the zoom buttons use. A room that still does not fit at 50% will scroll, and that is the floor doing its job. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.271.8 Beta ================================================================================ New Features - The room can now scale itself to whatever size you make the window. Drag the edge and the room grows or shrinks to fill it, instead of you reaching for the zoom buttons every time. - It is OFF until you turn it on, because until now the edge of the window did something else and we did not want to change that under anyone. You will find it in Options, Advanced tab, under "Scale the room to fit the window". There are three settings: Off what you have today, the zoom buttons only. When I release the window the room settles once you let go of the edge. While I drag the room follows the edge as you move it. - "While I drag" is the heavier of the two. It is smooth on most machines, but it has more work to do on every movement, so if your computer is older or the room has a video playing in it, "When I release" will feel better. Both end up in the same place. - The room never stretches out of shape. It scales up or down as a whole, and whatever space is left over shows as plain background around it. - Walking into a room that is bigger than your window now fits it on arrival, so you are not greeted by scrollbars and half a room. - While it is on, the window will not shrink past the point where the room still fits. The drag simply stops instead of leaving you with scrollbars. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.271.7 Beta ================================================================================ Bug Fixes - The chat log was squashing the spacing you typed. If you lined something up with several spaces, or a room script did, everything arrived single spaced and the layout was lost. Spaces and tabs now come through exactly as they were written. - Line breaks were not arriving at all. They are back, and a message with several lines is shown as several lines in the log. Bubbles still show one line on purpose, so a long message cannot cover the room. Improvements - Emoji you paste now turn into PalaceChat emoji. Copy one out of the chat log, or paste one from anywhere else, and it is drawn like the rest instead of coming out as an empty box. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.271.6 Beta ================================================================================ Bug Fixes - Moving your palace tabs left or right no longer sends the chat log to the wrong tab. Once you had dragged a tab, every tab showed a different palace's log, and the only way out was to work out the original order and put them all back. If you ran into this before updating, restarting PalaceChat cleared it too. - A rare crash while files are downloading can no longer close PalaceChat. We have had two reports of it and neither one carried enough for us to find the cause, so this build does two things: it keeps the crash from taking the app down, and it writes down what led up to it. If it happens to you, please send a report from the Help menu. There is nothing to turn on first, and one report should be enough for us to finish this off. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.271.5 Beta ================================================================================ Bug Fixes - Right-clicking someone in the user list, or a room in the room list, now always opens the menu. There was a narrow strip along the right edge of the name column, right where the little whisper and go-to icons sit, where the menu simply refused to appear. Whether you ever hit that strip depended on how wide you had dragged your columns, which is why it happened to some people constantly and to others never. - Clicking a name and then typing no longer wipes your selection. The lists jump to whoever you type, and if nothing matches they now leave your selection alone instead of clearing it. - Right-clicking a room in the room list now acts on the room you actually clicked. If another room was already selected, the menu was quietly working on that one instead. Operators only, since those menu options only show up for wizards. - PalaceChat opens again when your props bag was left locked, for example if your antivirus or OneDrive was still holding the file. It used to close without a word before it drew a single window, and all you saw was that it stopped opening. - The chat log can no longer take PalaceChat down while it is starting up. If the log window was set to open by itself and its page had not finished loading yet, PalaceChat threw an error report at you before it had drawn anything, and the log stayed dead for the rest of the session. That is the "the log just doesn't work" some of you have been living with. The log now waits for its page and fills itself in the moment it is ready. If your chat log is still coming up empty after this update, please send a report from the Help menu. There is nothing you need to turn on first: the report now carries what we need to see why, and one of them is enough for us to finish this off. - Pages embedded in a room, like the Yahtzee board generator, no longer disappear when you move the mouse just above or below them. And if one does go missing, picking the same option again brings it back. You used to have to choose a different one and come back. - Fixed a crash in the toolbar that could happen at startup on unusual screen setups. - Some downloads that used to arrive incomplete from certain web servers now come through whole. New Features - Rooms can hold half again as much as before. If your room was full and you could not add another door or another line of script, you have space now. - When a room really is too big to save, the message finally tells you how big it got and how much fits, so you know how much to trim. It is also in your own language now instead of English for everyone. - Palaces can now tell which system you are on. Linux used to show up as Windows, and every Mac looked the same, now Linux, Intel Macs and Apple Silicon Macs each show as themselves in the operator list. (You will start seeing this once the updated Palace server goes public. It is being rebuilt and tested right now, and it is coming along.) ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.271.4 Beta ================================================================================ Bug Fixes - Avatars no longer go missing in rooms where a video or a web page covers the whole room. If your Windows display scaling is set high, people standing toward the right or the bottom of the room were simply not there, and the bigger the scaling the more of the room went blind. Zooming PalaceChat out used to bring them back, now they show at any zoom. New Features - The animated prop editor now shows the prop ID in its title, the same way the classic editor always has. - Right click a prop in your bag and the menu now opens with its prop ID, plus a "Copy prop ID" you can paste anywhere. Works for every prop, old or new, without opening the editor. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.271.3 Beta ================================================================================ Bug Fixes - In the Rooms list, picking several rooms with Ctrl or Shift now highlights all of them. Before, only one room looked picked even though the others were, so it seemed like multiple selection had been lost. - Reordering several rooms at once no longer disconnects you. Moving a room means visiting it, and going through them back to back was quick enough that the server took it for flooding and dropped you, leaving the list half sorted. It now waits a moment between rooms, so a big move takes longer but it arrives complete. - Rooms now land where you drop them when you drag more than a couple at once. The old maths never looked at how many rooms you had picked, so dragging 10 of them scattered them around instead of moving the block. - PalaceChat no longer keeps growing in memory the longer you leave it open with the translator on. The translation cache had no limit, so a long session in a busy room kept it climbing. - The client no longer shuts down a web embed when its video finishes. It did free memory, but it fired on any video or sound ending anywhere on the page, so a game running out of a sound effect, or a trailer ending in the Netflix room, could take the whole embed down with everyone who was watching it. Our own players at ElitePalaces already free more than that on their own: about six seconds after a video ends they drop the YouTube player and leave the picture in its place. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.271.2 Beta ================================================================================ Improvements - Added Swedish (Svenska) to the translator. You can now choose Swedish to read incoming messages in Swedish, and pick Swedish when writing so your message is sent translated into Swedish (and the other way around). ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.271.1 Beta ================================================================================ Bug Fixes - Fixed a crash that could happen when using "Copy To" in the Prop window. - Fixed an avatar that could disappear (leaving only the name showing) while standing over a web embed when its animation was paused or stopped. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.271.0 Beta ================================================================================ Bug Fixes - When the translation servers cannot be reached, the translator now backs off and tries again later instead of retrying nonstop. This stops the connection errors from piling up and slowing things down. Cached translations still work while it waits. - Fixed a rare crash that could happen when the seasonal emoji set updated in the background. - Fixed web links with extra parameters being cut short in the chat log, for example a YouTube link that includes a start time (the part after "&t="). The full link now posts and stays clickable. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.270.9 Beta ================================================================================ New Features - You can now rearrange your room tabs. Grab a tab in the tab bar and drag it left or right to drop it in a new spot. - Bounce (ping-pong) animated props are now much lighter and smoother. The bounce plays the frames forward and back instead of saving a duplicated copy of every frame, so a bounce prop uses about half the memory and looks the same. Making one is the same as before: just check "Bounce" when you save. Note: friends still on a version older than this beta will see these bounce props play forward only until they update. Bug Fixes - Fixed a crash that could happen when someone in the room was wearing a very large animated prop (too many frames). Oversized animated props are now capped so they can no longer run the app out of memory. - Fixed classic room scripts and in room games (the ones that use special command characters) that stopped responding after the UTF-8 chat update. They recognize their commands correctly again. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.270.8 Beta ================================================================================ New Features - Discord Rich Presence. PalaceChat can now show your activity in Discord as "Playing PalaceChat" with the palace you're in and how many people are in the room and in the whole palace. Turn it on in Options > General > Discord (it's off by default). You choose whether to reveal the palace name and the counts, so you stay in control of what your Discord friends see. - "Clear log" is now in the chat log's right click menu, so you can clear it without opening the log's menu button. Bug Fixes - Fixed a crash that could happen while moving the mouse over a room that was busy loading, for example when many people join and leave quickly. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.270.7 Beta ================================================================================ New Features - Chat log jump to bottom button. When you scroll up to read older messages, a small arrow appears in the corner, click it to jump back to the latest and resume following the conversation. Bug Fixes - The chat log no longer "loses" its contents. On some machines a slow or antivirus blocked load could leave the log blank until you closed and reopened it, it now repopulates itself from the saved history. - The chat log now opens showing the latest messages instead of stuck near the top, and follows new messages again after you scroll back down. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.270.6 Beta ================================================================================ New Features - New room script commands for spot layering: MOVESPOTTOP and MOVESPOTBOTTOM. A room owner can pin a spot to the front or the back of the room and have it stay there, even while the room keeps rebuilding its other spots. For example, an apartment can pin its full room background to the back, or a video player can be pinned to the front, so the video is no longer covered by the background. The pin only affects your own view and is not saved on the server, so room scripts re-apply it each time you enter. - The Prop window now shows a "W" next to props saved in the newer WebP (advanced) format, alongside the existing G (ghost), A (animated) and B (bounce) markers, so you can tell at a glance which props are the higher quality kind. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.270.3 Beta ================================================================================ Bug Fixes - Nametag decorations made from a video now show up for everyone. A decoration built from a large clip could get cut off on its way to the server, so other people saw it blank or not at all. Decorations are now kept at a sensible size and quality so they upload whole and the whole room sees them. - Importing an oversized video as a decoration no longer freezes or closes the app. A big or 4K clip could lock up PalaceChat while importing; it now caps the size, and if a video's resolution is too high it tells you to use 1080p or smaller instead of hanging. - The chat log (and the What's New window) no longer get stuck on a blank "navigation canceled" page. This could happen after an update when your antivirus flagged and blocked the temporary file the log draws from, the log now uses a safer local folder instead of the temp folder, and quietly retries if the page does not come up. - Fixed a few more of the rare "closes with no error" crashes: an F-key macro with a bad color, a disk-full moment while saving the chat log on disconnect, and a corrupt saved window size that could crash right at startup. New Features - The Options menu now has a "Switch to classic chat log" toggle, in case you prefer the classic log or want it as a fallback. One click switches you back to the new one. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.270.2 Beta ================================================================================ Bug Fixes - Animated nametag decorations no longer pile up memory. PalaceChat now frees a decoration's animation frames the moment you move your mouse off it or change rooms, and it only loads a decoration when you actually see it (in the picker or worn on someone) instead of decoding every single one at startup. Faster startup, and lower memory overall. - Rectangular one piece props (like the legacy 220x220 avatars) no longer look squished in the prop bag. They keep their real shape instead of being crammed into a square. To fix ones you already have, right-click the avatar in your bag and choose Rebuild Thumbnail. - PalaceChat no longer nags you with a crash report popup after an unexpected shutdown. If you just closed your laptop lid, lost power, or force-quit, it stays quiet. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.270.1 Beta ================================================================================ Bug Fixes - Fixed a rare crash that could close the client on its own when a chat translation came back at the same moment you switched rooms or a room was closing. ================================================================================ WINDOWS Version 5.0.270.0 Release ================================================================================ All fixes and new features from the previous beta series are now folded into this release. The beta list resets here, anything new rolls out starting with 5.0.270.0