Simple Chat

SimpleChat is a Unity-based chat application prototype designed to display a list of conversations, individual profiles, and messages, using JSON files to emulate server-side data. The project focuses on reusable components, modular design, and scalability, while prioritizing simplicity and maintainability.

List of Targeted Goals:

• Show a list of conversations
• Display a friend name, icon/photo, time of the last message
• Clicking on name should display a conversation with that person
• Have about 30 conversations in the list
• Show friend’s profile
• Clicking on the friend’s icon in conversation list should display a profile dialog showing name and a larger version of photo
• Display a conversation with a friend (list of messages)
• Show your icon, friend’s icon, message and date/time message was sent
• Have about 300 messages, display last 50, consider implementing ‘show more’ button or load more by scrolling. Or propose another way of dealing with many messages.
• Make all the data come from various JSON files (please design data structure), emulating data that would be received from the server
• Break up chat components into reusable prefabs

Project Contributions and Observations:

• Icons/Images are downloaded off the internet in real-time.
• Json files are stored locally.  I imagine that Json is downloaded through SQL, but I don't have any way to create a new server for it.  And the format and order of the values are set on the server-side
• Views are Conversation, Profile, and Message
• Json for the Conversations List is stored in Resources/Conversations/conversations_#.  please click on the buttons below to start.
• Type of Conversations:
  • 0. Show only the Selectable Conversation #0-6
  • 1. Show up to 30 Conversations. all other Conversations cannot be selected as message but is still able to open profile.
  • 2. Shows the 1st two conversations. So that you can see what it looks like if there's isn't much of it.
  • 3. Shows the 1st four conversations.
  • 4. Has no conversations

• Conversations in the list are not being sorted. From my understanding, the SQL server should have returned the array in order.
• Profile is loaded using User's ID, Images will be redownloaded again. In case there's a change in the internet.
• Json for the User's data are stored in Resources/UserData/*UserID*
• I kept User's data in its Json in case we need to add more variables to it. Last time Online, Male/Female, Location, Ect.
• Both Conversations and Message List in the UI fill out from bottom to top.
• Json for Messages are stored in Resources/Messages/*ConversationID*/*Files with "Recent" or the index number of the Message-ID:
  • It is stored by Recent file and index number because I believe I would be passing in an SQL to either get the most recent and the past 50 messages, or I pass in the ending index and get the pass 50 from there.
  • "Recent" will have an index with their Messages.  I can look at the lowest one and subtract one from it to tell the SQL to get the next set of messages.

• The Messages Json will contain the MainUserID, OthersID, a boolean if there's are more messages and an array of Messages.
• I made it so that there can be multiple users in the Conversation.
• The array of messages will have the ID, index of the user (-1 is the Main User, any number above will be the speaker.)
• Type of Messages:
  • 000000: One full page of 50 messages.
  • 000001: Split the first one into 2 parts. 25 messages and another 25 messages. 
  • 000002: Only the second part with an error of "hasMoreMessage" when it doesn't load more messages will show you an error.
  • 000003: Split the first one into 2 parts. while the second part is an empty array.
  • 000004: Have 300 Messages going 50 at a time.
  • 000005: Have 2 Messages. to shows that it goes from bottom to top.
  • 000006: Have an array of 0 messages.
  • 000007: Start at Message 250 - 300 and then 225 - 249.

• The Conversation shows the last messages but it doesn't match with the Message View of it. This is because I believe that the SQL server will spit out the last DateTime for the conversation.

Additional Features Planned for Future Implementation:

• When the user goes back to the List of Conversations page it will reload the data again. In case there's a change on the Server.
• Have a button to show's the Main User's profile.
• add a loading icon for when Data is being pulled.
• Image size change to fit the ratio of the texture downloaded.
• Added a circle image mask to the icons in the conversations list.
• fix the Mouse wheel bug. It's going slow and in the opposed direction.
• Wanted to do a timestamp for the Messages. I already added it in the Json.
• I wanted to optimize the UI more. Turn on-off rendering of items.
• Drag down more to load in more data instead of clicking on the button.
• Make a way to loop backward in the messages. The last index is 0 the one previous should be at 9999 or something so that we can delete data off the servers.
• Have Conversation UI have multiple other users on the icon.
• Code refactoring. I notice a few objects could have benefited from Child-Parent Classes.