Entry 120

"The chat balloons: ccChatMsg, Mac Anu's players and Kite's calls"

2026-09-25ui world test

Nothing drew the chat balloons: not Mac Anu's walking players, not the CHAT menu's orders, not Kite calling the strategy, not the party's lines (110 left them open). These are ccChatMsg, which ccMenuCtrl owns.

ccChatMsg (main 0x001a6160-0x001a6c68)

Four balloons. Each has a text, its width and 120 frames. Opening one over a speaker who already has one closes the old one.
Disp. Each balloon counts down (unless the menu holds the world still) and closes when its speaker leaves the command lists. It stands over the speaker at 0.9 of its height (ccCalcTagPosChar, mode 0).
Stacking. CheckScope moves a balloon up above the first earlier one it overlaps, until it overlaps none.
The window. DrawWindow builds it from seven 14 x 16 cells of the menu's icon sheet: four corners, two stretched edges, and the tail under its first third. The player's is in colour 18, the others' in 1. It fades over the last 10 frames, and the text is drawn at once.

piney_fieldui::chat_msg::ChatMsg is the port, in MenuCtrl.chat, drawn in Disp between the dim and the damage numbers. The runtime answers where the speakers are each frame (World::chat_at): FieldWorld::chat_point in fields and dungeons, the town World::chat_point in towns.

Who speaks now

The CHAT menu and the tutorial. Their OpenChat over the player now opens the balloon in the same frame (chat_msg::open_player). The request is still raised.
Mac Anu's walking players. Their PcEvent::Chat lines were made and never read. The town now takes them (take_pc_events) and opens each text from GCMN.PRG over its PC.
Kite's strategy call in a fight. Show::Shout is now ccSpcShoutOperationName's balloon: chatActionStr 5, chatMenuStr tactics + 1 (as the game reads the save's byte, signed) and chatActionStr 6.

Checked

tools/test_chat_msg_rs.py (new). It builds the game's ccChatMsg by its constructor in eemu. Its outside calls are answered: the sprites, the kanji, the characters, and ccCheckTarget and ccCalcTagPosChar (GCMN's, hooked by address). ccKanjiStrWidth runs natively. Twelve runs of 150-400 frames: opens and closes, still frames, speakers leaving the lists and the screen, and crowded speakers so balloons stack. chat_probe runs the port alongside. Every window cell (cell, place, size, grid, colour, alpha), every text (place, colour, alpha) and every slot's frames, width and place match each frame.
session::tests::chat::mac_anu_players_chat. From event 11's start in Mac Anu, standing, a walking player speaks at frame 2908 ("Feel a bit better!").
mac_anu_chat_shots (ignored) shows the blue balloon with its tail and the line over the square.
The workspace's tests, clippy and fmt pass.

Still unknown

The party's own lines. The ccAI::ChatMessage* functions (which line, drawn from rand(), ChatMessageModify's # codes) and ChatMessageSender's opening are not ported. The rules raise them as Show::Chat and nothing reads them. - A Grunty's line (ccPGuso::main) is not ported. - The text's texture. The port draws the balloon's text through the menus' Draw::Text, a 128-row texture (Init(3, 24)), where the game's chat kanji is Init(2, 16). One line of text looks the same.