TextChatService Text Box not expanding while typing long messages

While typing messages in games that use the TextChatService, the text box does not expand downwards until the message contains enough characters to fit on 3 lines.

This is an issue that was previously reported as a bug in 2022 and was marked as resolved. I am unsure of a specific month when I started encountering this issue, but as far as I am aware, I’ve observed this behavior since sometime in 2023 (maybe earlier).

Video Example:


Date First Experienced:

  • 2023 (or earlier)

Reproduction Steps:

  1. Join any game that is using the TextChatService.
  2. Open the in-game chat.
  3. Start typing a message until it is too long to fit on the first line of the text box.
  4. Observe that the text box does not expand to display your message until it reaches the third line of text.

System Information:

  • Windows 10 OS. Version 10.0.19045 Build 19045
  • Relevant Display Settings:
    • Monitor resolution is 2560x1440
    • Windows “size of App and Text” scaling is set to 225%
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20GHz
  • Memory: 32.0 GB
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080

Expected behavior

The expected behavior is that the text box should immediately expand to display what I am typing if there is not enough room for the message to fit on the currently visible lines.

4 Likes

Thanks for the report! We’ll investigate and follow up with updates.

1 Like

I am not able to reproduce this, what I am getting is that the Text Box would expand to the next line like it should but it sometimes would create an extra space for no reason.

image

So far I have got this behavior on Doors and Granny.

A long space on the second line can appear if you write a sentence that reaches the second line and then spam letters too.
image

Same thing if you spam emojis and symbols but it would also create a long space on the first line too. Not sure if this is expected or not.

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Hey! I wanted to follow up regarding this bug report now that TextChatService is becoming mandatory to use within a few months from now.

The issue outlined in the original post is still occurring as of today, February 2nd, 2025.

It’s alright if there hasn’t been much progress on this yet, however, it would be greatly appreciated to hear back before April 30th, which is when every game will be required to use TextChatService (because if this issue is not resolved by then, it would go from an issue that only affects games that use TextChatService to instead impacting the ability to communicate with other players in every experience on the platform).


The inconvenience caused from this bug is not the worst part of it, either. To put this into perspective, the bug puts users who experience this issue at risk of unfair chat moderation, as they are unable to review the full text within medium to longer-length in-experience chat messages.

This makes it incredibly challenging to fix typos when writing messages directly in the chat and almost completely prevents users from making sure that the message is written how they intended it, without having to manually add extra characters to the end of the text box to prevent the text from disappearing before sending the message.

To provide some additional information, I discovered that this may have something to do with the combination of the viewport’s size and the TextBox.LineHeight property.

Here’s a video demonstrating this:

For context:

  • The TextBox for the in-experience chat can be found through CoreGuiExperienceChatappLayoutchatInputBarBackgroundContainerTextContainerTextBoxContainerTextBox

  • After writing enough characters in the TextBox for the bug to occur, I adjusted the TextBox.LineHeight property until the text became visible.

    • Later in the video, I experimented with a combination of LineHeights and viewport sizes (by adjusting the size of the Output window to make the viewport smaller or larger, which affects the size of the experience chat)