0.2.4 Stability Test Release

This prerelease build of Aerochat is meant to test changes to the runtime, meant to improve performance, stability, and user experience across older Windows operating systems.

No new changes are present since 0.2.3, other than the runtime changes this update intends to test (and some changes to the installer wizard).

0.2.3

This update focuses on optimising the Aerochat experience. Due to Aerochat receiving divided attention from both main developers for the foreseeable future, this release will be split into two parts: 0.2.4 will be another optimisation release building upon changes made in this release.

Bug fixes:

• You can now paste images in chat again.

Changes we made:

• Optimising nine-slice backgrounds used for all sorts of controls
• Rewrote the home window view to optimise performance considerably
• Rewrote the code that manages non-native titlebar for performance and stability (the official implementation, which we based on Microsoft's framework, had a chance to deadlock the application)
• Made the Aerochat version display in various areas where it's appropriate, i.e. chat window (where it previously stated the beta version) or crash window
• The news area is now able to be controlled by Aerochat contributors, such as myself: for you, you will notice that it can actually change now!
• Some minor restyling of controls (i.e. image preview) was performed in order to improve the quality of the visual experience (i.e. I made some controls not stretched to a smaller size than they should show)
• Various improvements to text-to-speech notifications

Please stay tuned for version 0.2.4, which will primarily focus on improving the experience of the chat windows, as well as 0.3.0, which will focus on adding new features to the client.

[Prerelease] 0.2.3 RC1

This release of Aerochat focuses on optimising and improving the stability of the user experience. There are no new features.

This is a prerelease version of Aerochat. However, you should find it to be rather stable. I am releasing this beta copy for general users to get an idea of broader issues.

0.2.2

This update has a few goodies, but mainly revamps the logon page to fix bugs and improve user experience.

New features:

• The logon page is revamped to improve user experience. (Thanks to @luisl173 for some of the initial work.)
• Password logon now uses a secondary strategy to ensure that it works better.
• Notification parsing has been improved (cheers, @RealMCoded!)
• Text-to-speech messages are now handled and read aloud using your system's TTS (cheers, @RealMCoded!)
• Notifications can also be optionally read-aloud using text-to-speech (cheers, @RealMCoded!)
• You can undo and redo changes in the drawing editor, as well as wipe the entire image (cheers, @RedDoesStuff!)
• Mentions are now highlighted.
• An option has been added to control the display of image visibility in chat embeds (cheers, @orymizak!)
• An inline audio player has been added to the chat to preview audio files (cheers, @RedDoesStuff!)

Bug fixes:

• Extraneous crash reports have been removed.
• Some quirks with attachments have been fixed (cheers, @RedDoesStuff!)

0.2.1 Hotfix 2

This second hotfix to 0.2.1 fixes a bug with the application crashing if you don't have any server folders (#82) and with creating the local AppData folder for storing temporary files (at the moment, related to voice chat).

Changelog of 0.2.1

New features:

• You can now change your status on the home page.
• You can now pick between a pen and a eraser when drawing in chat.
• New control over notification sounds (play on any message or only on mentions).
• Mentions are now highlighted in chat.

Fixed bugs:

• Access to the path "output.ogg" is denied when installed to Program Files #78
• Custom window frame WindowChromeWorker UpdateFrameState NullReferenceException #80
• "Property of empty Rect can't be modified" from Home.Button_MouseDoubleClick #79
• "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" from BBCode.ParseText() #76
• Common NullReferenceException from AnimatedTileImage.Reset() #75
• Linq ArgumentNullException on RebuildJumpLists #73

The updater has also been improved, allowing for our hotfixes to actually update the tag (and therefore the linked commit), and it should be a lot more stable.

Because the updater in 0.2.0 is still bad, you will have some troubles with the automatic updater in the old version. I'm sorry for the trouble. 🙇‍♀️

0.2.1 Hotfix 1

This hotfix to 0.2.1 fixes a bug with the home window failing to load if you didn't have an explicit status set on Discord at any point in time. Additionally, the Tomodachi Collection banner by レイーン has had its banner colour updated.

Changelog of 0.2.1

New features:

• You can now change your status on the home page.
• You can now pick between a pen and a eraser when drawing in chat.
• New control over notification sounds (play on any message or only on mentions).
• Mentions are now highlighted in chat.

Fixed bugs:

• Access to the path "output.ogg" is denied when installed to Program Files #78
• Custom window frame WindowChromeWorker UpdateFrameState NullReferenceException #80
• "Property of empty Rect can't be modified" from Home.Button_MouseDoubleClick #79
• "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" from BBCode.ParseText() #76
• Common NullReferenceException from AnimatedTileImage.Reset() #75
• Linq ArgumentNullException on RebuildJumpLists #73

The updater has also been improved, allowing for our hotfixes to actually update the tag (and therefore the linked commit), and it should be a lot more stable.

Because the updater in 0.2.0 is still bad, you will have some troubles with the automatic updater in the old version. I'm sorry for the trouble. 🙇‍♀️

0.2.1

New features:

• You can now change your status on the home page.
• You can now pick between a pen and a eraser when drawing in chat.
• New control over notification sounds (play on any message or only on mentions).
• Mentions are now highlighted in chat.

Fixed bugs:

• Access to the path "output.ogg" is denied when installed to Program Files #78
• Custom window frame WindowChromeWorker UpdateFrameState NullReferenceException #80
• "Property of empty Rect can't be modified" from Home.Button_MouseDoubleClick #79
• "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" from BBCode.ParseText() #76
• Common NullReferenceException from AnimatedTileImage.Reset() #75
• Linq ArgumentNullException on RebuildJumpLists #73

The updater has also been improved, allowing for our hotfixes to actually update the tag (and therefore the linked commit), and it should be a lot more stable.

Because the updater in 0.2.0 is still bad, you will have some troubles with the automatic updater in the old version. I'm sorry for the trouble. 🙇‍♀️

0.2.0: the biggest update yet!

After three weeks of continuous development, I am pleased to release Aerochat version 0.2.0, which I believe is the biggest update yet.

Aside from a ton of bug fixes, this update also adds a lot of new features. Here's a huge list of all of them:

• Buttons for unimplemented features are now hidden by default. You can enable them for eyecandy purposes in appearance settings.
• Granular settings for notifications
  • Control for notifications for when your friends come online
  • Control for notifications for when you get a direct message
  • Control for notifications for when you're mentioned in a group chat or server
  • The ability to automatically open a chat window whenever you get a DM
• Granular appearance settings
  • You can now turn off the Discord server link on the home window
  • You can now turn off the news on the home window
  • You can now turn off the Aerochat version label at the bottom left of chat windows
  • Somewhat unrelated, but turning off home ads works a lot better now
• You can now toggle your status being set to busy when a fullscreen application is opened.
• Home ads now support animations. GIF ads previously technically existed, but could not play their animations. Additionally, ads may now use high-quality spritesheet-based animations rather than GIF.
• Your status is now read from Discord's user settings and synchronises properly with other clients.
• New chat features
  • The time format of messages can now be set to either 12-hour time (AM/PM) or 24-hour time.
  • You can now reply to messages (right click!)
  • You can now edit your own messages (right click!!)
  • You can now delete your own messages and those of others which you have permission to delete (right click!!!)
  • Links and emojis sent in chat now display better
  • YOU CAN NOW UPLOAD IMAGES AND FILES!!
  • Oh yeah, and the drawing feature has been finally re-enabled!
  • Apart from that, embeds are a bit better now, with clickable links and way more information displaying. At least vxtwitter embeds work alright now
• Scene preview image buttons now show the name of the scene in tooltips when hovered in the scene picker window.
• Images across the application have been adjusted to scale at a higher quality.
• The installer has been moved from Inno Setup to NSIS. This should help with antivirus false-flag detections.
• The program can now be installed for all users.
• Configuration is now stored in the user's roaming application data folder, which means that it will persist across systems with the same account. If you don't know what that means, go mod Minecraft and you'll learn all about AppData\Roaming (not really, but persistent user configuration across machines is what it's meant for, whereas AppData\Local is local only)
• Support for jump lists have been added, allowing you to have shortcuts to chats accessible from the context menu of the application in the taskbar.
• A new crash screen has been added if the application crashes due to an uncaught exception. This should be fairly reliable for displaying crash dumps. I hope you like it, because I accidentally fork bombed myself when writing it (it's completely safe now, I got that resolved).
• Attributions for home ads have been added and now appear in the credits in the about window.
• And, of course, new ads and scenes have been added from the 2025/04/25 through 2025/05/03 voting period over on the Aerochat Discord server.

Note

While attribution information records for new ads have been kept, we lost the attribution information for old ads submitted before 2024/09/27. If you submitted an ad at all before this time, please reach out to us so we can fill in the missing information.

Besides that, one of the major bugs that we fixed was one that resulted in the application not working for random users, which was entirely Microsoft's fault and not ours. It was a bug in WPF that caused exceptions to be thrown that were unreasonable to catch (because they happened in XAML generated code) if the user's monitor had a specific colour profile, which naturally led to the application crashing for a completely bogus reason. I am singling out this bug because Microsoft should be shamed for it. They are, in fact, aware of it, and even lied about fixing it.

If Aerochat was crashing for you randomly whenever you opened a chat, this Microsoft-endorsed bug is probably the reason. I added some code to monkey patch a proper exception handler, so it shouldn't crash anymore.

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Here's another fun fact about this update: there's no GUI to manage it at the moment, but the jump list feature allows you to make shortcuts for any chat or server, or open them from the command line, or whatever. You can even open multiple at once. Just supply the command line options

/opendm 123456

or

/openguild 123456

where 123456 is the ID of the channel (in the case of DMs) or the server (in the case of servers/guilds), and it should cause Aerochat to open the window in that location. They can even be chained, so you can do /opendm 23239142941341 /opendm 2738242374839274 /openguild 93894329432432849037.

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I hope you all enjoy this update. It's been fun to write and I'm really proud of the results. Remember, if you experience any problems, you can come to us on the Discord or over on the issues tab here on GitHub for assistance. 🫶

Thank you for using Aerochat.

0.0.1.3

A dialog has been added for when the user attempts to use unimplemented toolbar items (so, all of them!) in the top toolbar of a chat window. This update exists to prevent confusion from users.

2024/12/12: The setup has been revised to use ZIP compression. This is done in an attempt to avoid false flag malware detection by Microsoft Defender.

v0.0.1.2: Critical fix for attachments

Update for the previous release to disable the ability to submit attachments. This prevents users from having their accounts marked as spam.