Critical Large volumes of repeated messages break the chat window, forcing a hard reconnect

[Noah Buttes]

How to replicate (one method, there are other ways, but this is probably the most accessible):

1. Get a skateboard
   
2. Set up a skate park (a ring of tables or similarly immobile non-wall objects)
   
3. Achieve ludicrous speeds
   
4. Wait for a while
   
5. Eventually, all the messages piling up will force your chat window to only ever show one line of text at a time.
   
6. Even once you get off the skateboard, this state will persist.
   
7. Try reconnecting using the options in the "file" drop-down menu
   
8. See that it doesn't work.
   
9. Manually close the game window and rejoin the server.
   
10. Issue is fixed.
    

[Eibel]

Another way to fix it is to clear all text messages and it'll fix without reconnecting, though you still lose all previous messages.

[ZeWaka]

hard to fix

[Wire]

oof, hard to fix indeed. it sounds like the underlying javascript is exploding from the rapid frequency of messages over a prolonged period, although in what specific way I cant say (entering a state of showing only one line of text is bizarre and something I have no explanation for). I have been wanting to rewrite browser output code for a while as I think I can generally improve on the efficiency of the underlying code, buuuut I'm about to be very busy for a while so I can't promise a reasonable timeline for that.

fortunately, this sounds rare-ish. so uhh, just don't skate for hours on end I guess. problem solved you're welcome.

[Kovirii]

Part of the issue may be that all the skating-related messages are different, and don't "stack" like repeated farts, etc.
You could also disabled/throttle messages at a certain threshold, because this makes chat relatively unusable.

[Username]

This happened recently while I was wearing a psy-link bracelet on the escape shuttle (and the other person was on the shuttle too). Neither of us were skating.

[Prichard]

I get this every time i play blob and sometimes when I’m not. Only once did I notice it slowly break instead of all at once. First the bottom few lines of the output window broke, then a few more. Slowly and during periods of high traffic, the broken area would increase until it filled the whole window

[Noah Buttes]

Part of the issue may be that all the skating-related messages are different, and don't "stack" like repeated farts, etc.
You could also disabled/throttle messages at a certain threshold, because this makes chat relatively unusable.

Actually, the entire reason this happens is because the skateboard messages *do* stack.

Something in the chat message stacking system is causing this since I have been able to reproduce this same issue with examine messages and chemistry reactions.

In fact, it seems that all stacked messages cause a permanent one-line reduction in chat log length. Normally this is unnoticeable, but the aforementioned extreme scenarios bring the issue to the forefront.

[Wire]

That was exactly the issue, thank you. The chat has a message limit and I was incrementing the current message count before grouping.

Fix pushed!