background-position can't run on the compositor, so every frame of the
animated chat backgrounds repainted the whole chat area: 51 to 72% main-thread
busy while idle in a room at 60 fps. The drifts are slow (3 to 22 px/s,
under a pixel per frame), so each animation now uses steps(): about 12
updates/s for fireflies, stars and aurora and about 24/s for rain and
pulse.
Measured headless (20 s idle in a room, CDP TaskDuration):
none 0.7% → 0.9%; rain 50.7 → 5.9; stars 71.2 → 4.5;
pulse 64.9 → 5.8; aurora 58.9 → 4.2; fireflies 71.7 → 3.8.
Aurora and pulse used ease-in-out; with steps() their motion is now
even-paced. Pause animations / reduced motion still strip the animation.
Fixes#337
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017PCb59uY3UKqDqt7B6hzd5
Same treatment as the seasonal themes: split the 502-line chatBackground.ts
Record into one premium module per background under lotus/backgrounds/ (each
exposes a tuned dark + light ChatBgVariants), one Opus agent per background
against a shared brief. chatBackground.ts now assembles DARK/LIGHT from the
modules; getChatBg is unchanged. Carbon + Aurora are kept inline as-is (user
favorites); none stays the empty layer.
Every redesign: layered oklch palettes, seamless tiling with worked-out tile
math (integer-multiple periods; edge-wrapping inline-SVG data-URIs for
circuit/hexgrid/waves/herringbone/chevron/tactical), independently-tuned
dark+light (not a recolor), and low "felt-not-read" opacity so chat text stays
WCAG-AA legible. The 5 animated backgrounds (rain, star drift, grid pulse,
aurora flow, fireflies) each colocate a vanilla-extract keyframe .css.ts,
animate only background-position for a jump-free loop, and — since getChatBg
strips animation for reduced-motion — render a finished static frame too.
Redesigned: blueprint, stars, topographic, herringbone, crosshatch, chevron,
polka, triangles, plaid, tactical, circuit, hexgrid, waves, neon, anim-rain,
anim-stars, anim-pulse, anim-aurora, anim-fireflies.
Gates: tsc clean, ESLint clean, Prettier clean, build OK, 551 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Lotus CIandClaude Opus 5.5
jaredandClaude Opus 4.8