The last real SuperWoW feature, and one piece of work closed three
things: `CREATE_CHATBUBBLE` (which could not honestly be fired, because
its payload can only be the bubble), `C_ChatBubbles.GetAllChatBubbles`
(which answered an empty list, truthfully, for the same reason) and
pfUI's whole bubble skin, which walks that list.
`benilla-ui`'s `script/chat_bubble.rs` is a pool of real frames —
anonymous WorldFrame children with a backdrop (`0x4b0a35` IS
`SetBackdrop`), a tail texture and a FontString, which is what the
reference's own `CGChatBubbleFrame` is and how addons of the era found
bubbles before SuperWoW published the event. The app keeps everything a
bubble's existence depends on — the spawn gate, the lifetime, the fade,
the range re-test, the stacking sort and the text measurement that sizes
the frame — and hands it over as `BubbleState`: the same split
`vplates.rs` already makes for the plates, so the engine decides what is
on screen, the widget layer decides what Lua sees, and neither can
disagree about a bubble because there is one feed.
Three things improved by the move rather than being preserved by it:
- The bubbles sit at frame levels 2, 3, 4… over the V-plates at level 1,
which is the reference's own order (`0x4b12d5`-`0x4b1312`). The quad
band had them UNDERNEATH — a deviation `overlay_z` carried in a
comment. That band is gone and the lane is down to one tenant.
- The art is loaded, tiled and bleed-inset by the UI pass like any other
frame's, so this file drops its own texture resource and its own
half-texel inset helper.
- The system moved BEFORE the paint. It sat in `UiQuadAppend`, the window
*after* the extract: right for an appender, a frame late for a feed.
The test that matters transcribes pfUI's own `ScanBubbles` loop — it
finds the FontString with the line and its chat-type colour, blanks the
one Texture region and parents its own frame to the bubble — and then
checks the EXTRACT for drawn quads: both backdrop halves, the tail, and
the text at the em the app measured the box with. A test that only
checked the widgets would have passed with nothing on screen.
Two architectural gates caught this and both were answered rather than
silenced. The one-shot gate: `drive_bubbles` now holds the VM and drains
a queue, so it is EXEMPT with the argument — the queue's product is
app-side state, the widget sync is idempotent and binds on the first
frame there is a WorldFrame, and gating the system instead would pile
lines up and spawn them all at once with fresh lifetimes. The VM wall:
its ceiling rises by one with the reason, which is that this file is
`vplates.rs`'s exact twin.
`CREATE_CHATBUBBLE` fires per APPEARANCE, not per pool slot ever built —
the opposite of `NAME_PLATE_CREATED`'s rule, because a recycled frame has
been re-anchored, re-sized and re-texted since it was last seen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SgstFWtn1RxEJ5kVrpgYwn
gromandClaude Opus 5
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