Comic Chat Web

Modern TypeScript port of the 1996+ Microsoft Comic Chat IRC client w/ Cloudflare Durable Objects as the network layer.

Live Demo @ comics.remsky.art

Features

The composition rules follow the SIGGRAPH '96 Comic Chat paper by David Kurlander, Tim Skelly, and David Salesin.

Validated against traces from an instrumented C++ client of the original to accurately reproduce the original engine including:

• 31-character cast, automatic panel layout
• Emotion detection, speech balloon splines
• Avatar posing, reactive angles and camera

Note

Rooms are anonymous (no accounts); moderation is rudimentary: a content filter with escalating mutes.

Deploy usage defaults are intentionally bounded by the fixed room list, but can be extended to create-on-join. If deploying publically; add Cloudflare rate-limiting rules (demo settings described below).

Technical

Local Run

Spin up locally to test via:

git clone https://github.com/remsky/comic-chat-web
cd comic-chat-web
npm install
npm run preview:worker

Deployment Details

Suggested best-effort default settings against roving bots or bad actors are listed below.

• Live rooms operate over Cloudflare Durable Object WebSockets
  • Bounded, chunked message history with per-socket abuse limit
• For Cloudflare Workers Builds, use npm run build as the build command and npx wrangler deploy as the deploy command.
• Only the rooms in the ROOMS var (wrangler.jsonc, or the dashboard) accept connections, bounding how many Durable Objects a public deploy can create.
• Each room caps active sockets (12) and per-socket send rate.
• New joins receive the latest 50 messages and load older history in 50-message chunks. Each room retains at most 500 messages.
• For a public deployment, add a Cloudflare rate-limiting rule on /api/* and a usage notification: worker invocations could scale with heavy automated abuse.

Testing

npm ci
npm run dev          # Vite dev server at localhost:5173
npm test             # both vitest projects: node + worker
npm run test:browser # Playwright desktop + mobile smoke
npm run check        # biome + strict tsc over src, worker, test, and tools

npm test runs two vitest projects, selectable with --project:

Project	Runs in	Covers
node (test/)	node	Engine units and golden trace suites
worker (test/worker/)	workerd, via @cloudflare/vitest-pool-workers	Durable Object behavior against real SQL storage and the live WebSocket protocol

Worker tests get isolated storage per test and read their bindings from wrangler.jsonc. They typecheck under their own test/worker/tsconfig.json, since workers types collide with the node and DOM types the rest of the suite uses.

Trace validation

The engine is validated against JSONL traces from an instrumented C++ client, the Comic Chat trace harness:

Trace	Validation focus
smoke-01	Core two-speaker flow, balloon modes, emotions, and panel breaks
balloon-01	Interleaved say, think, whisper, and shout balloon geometry
edge-01	Single-character, punctuation-only, and repeated messages
emotion-01	Shouting, laughter, greetings, smileys, pointing, and waving rules
long-01	Multi-panel overflow, retries, continuation, and three-speaker ordering
speakers-01	Six-speaker avatar selection, placement, flipping, and ordering
wrap-01	Long text, wrap boundaries, URLs, and unbreakable words

Art pipeline

All steps are deterministic and byte-reproducible, sourced from a sibling checkout of the Comic Chat trace harness:

• npm run assets:avatars: packed per-character avatar atlases and runtime manifest in public/assets/avatars/ from the original .avb files.
• npm run assets:backgrounds: backdrop PNGs in public/assets/backgrounds/ from the original .bgb files.
• npm run fixtures:avatars: the test fixture.

Screenshots

Related projects to check out

• TimBroddin/comic-chat-macos: a macOS port of Comic Chat
• gyng/comicchat (archived): quick and dirty web client and node.js server based on Comic Chat
• codegod100/comic-chat: fork of the official Microsoft source starting a Qt6 desktop port
• comicchat/comicchat: unofficial TypeScript port from the official source; connects to IRC servers over WebSockets, no backend
• theAlexes/comic-chat-deslopped: fork of the official Microsoft source sans AI cruft; with Windows build fixes

License and attributions

Except for the third-party material identified below, this project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 only. If you operate a modified version over a network, the AGPL requires you to offer its corresponding source to the people using it.

Microsoft-derived code and artwork retain Microsoft's MIT license and notice. See Third-Party Notices and the preserved Microsoft MIT license for details.

This is an unofficial community project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft; based on the open-source Microsoft Comic Chat repository.