Where things are
The launcher
Phantom opens on the launcher. Your Animal Jam accounts are on the left, and the one you've picked is on the right, where you can play, change or remove it. Scripts, Plugins and Settings are in the footer.
Tabs
Each game you open gets a tab across the top of the window, named after the jammer and the tool you're on, like localhost / Play. The dot on a tab is amber while the game signs in and starts, green while it's playing, and red if it couldn't start. Closing a tab ends that game.
Games keep running when you switch tabs or open a page like Scripts or Settings.
Loading screen
Phantom shows its own loading screen until you're standing in a room. It names the step it's on: signing in to Animal Jam, opening the game page, loading the client, then the client's own startup, which takes the longest. The marks under the line show how many steps are done. It comes back when you switch server or reconnect.
If a step takes too long, the screen offers Try again and Show the game. Half a minute after that it gets out of the way by itself, because Animal Jam sometimes shows its own errors on its loading screen.
The sidebar
With a game open, the sidebar lists the tools in three groups, Game, Inspect and Tools, with your plugins' pages under Plugins:
| Tool | What it is |
|---|---|
| Play | The game. |
| Canvas | A page you lay out yourself. See The canvas. |
| Packets | The messages the game sends and receives, live or saved, with the composer, the spam queue and breakpoints. See Recordings. |
| Activity | What Phantom did: the game page, the Flash loader, crashes and connections. |
| Scripts | TypeScript run against one game or all of them. See Scripts. |
| Playbooks | Automation built from steps. See Playbooks. |
| Plugins | What's installed, what each plugin is allowed to do, and which games it runs on. |
The switcher at the top of the sidebar picks which game you're working with. All accounts in its menu takes you back to the launcher.
The game bar and the dock
Each game has a bar above it with the plugins menu and Restart. Plugin panels open in a dock beside the game. The dock floats over the edge of the game unless you pin it, because the game scales to the width it has and pinning the dock makes it smaller.
The canvas
The canvas is a page you lay out yourself. Your own notes, plugin widgets and panels, Scripts, Packets and the game itself all go in cells. Drag a cell by its bar and resize it from any edge. Cells never overlap: anything in the way moves down, and everything else stays put. Tidy up closes the gaps, and Lock stops the layout moving by accident.
The layout is saved. It belongs to the window, not to one account, so anything on it that needs a game uses the game in focus.
Add widget lists Phantom's own widgets first, then the ones your plugins make, then their panels. A widget arrives at the size its plugin asked for and you can resize it from there. Widgets show every open game at once and don't change when you switch tab.
A panel can only be in one place. Put it on the canvas and it leaves the dock, and the dock's panel list says where it went. Take it off the canvas and it goes back to the dock.
To use the canvas, turn on Canvas under Settings › General.
Settings
These are the settings the rest of the docs refer to:
- General: the Flash player Phantom uses (the one AJ Classic installs), reconnecting, the game's layout, and which panes show beside the game, the canvas among them.
- Graphics: how the game is drawn and how it moves.
- Packets: how many messages each game's log keeps, which is also how far back a recording goes.
- Appearance: Phantom's theme.
Reconnecting
When Animal Jam drops a connection, Phantom signs the account back in and reloads the game. Turn it on with Start a game again if it is dropped, and set How many times it tries. It waits a bit longer after each try.
It waits before doing anything, because Animal Jam drops the first connection when a game joins and the client handles that itself. It also listens to the client, not only the socket, so it notices when a session ends for being idle. Closing a game, logging out or switching server doesn't count as a drop.