Let people chat to each other across any distance, even over adjoining sims!
In Second Life, when you "chat", you can only be heard 20m away. If your venue wider than this, visitors at one end will not be able to hear what those at the other are saying. And if you want to make an announcement, or are a DJ wishing to talk to your audience, even shouting will only be heard 100m away - no use if people are spread across a very large space, or if some are in platforms and sky boxes way up in the clouds. Or perhaps you wish to hear conversation in your shop while you are in your sky office far above it (though of course SL Terms of Service require that you let visitors know if you are doing this).
Put a Bright Chat Relay in each part of your venue - perhaps one on the ground, one in your sky shop, one on your public dancefloor - and each can transmit what it hears to be repeated by the others. The result is that anything said in any of these places can then be heard in the others.
The system can even link places in adjoining regions. Simply place a relays on either side of the border and set them to "bridge" mode. You can then place further relays anywhere in either region, and they will behave as if they were all in the same region. You can link any number of contiguous regions in this way.
You can also configure your relay boxes to use different "bands", from A to F. Boxes on band A will ignore boxes on band B, and vice versa. In this way, you can create different groups of linked relays in the same region.
The Bright Chat Relay system can help you hear what is going on at a remote location, or send announcements, or simply let people in different parts of your large venue talk to each other as if they were standing next to each other: the bigger the party, the more fun!
To unpack the system, find the "Bright Chat Relay boxed" object in your inventory, and drag it onto the ground to rez it. Right-click to open the context menu, click "Open" to display the contents window, and click "Copy To Inventory" to create a new folder in your inventory.
In this "Bright Chat Relay boxed" folder, you will find the "Bright Chat Relay" object itself, and a notecard with these instructions.
Rez a relay anywhere people might be saying things you wish to relay, and anywhere you may wish them to be heard.
When a message heard by one relay is transmitted through another, the name of the source relay will be reported, so that you can tell where the speaker is. For instance, if you have relays connecting the "Menswear" and "Womenswear" sections of your clothes shop, you might hear a message like this:
[10:17] Philip Linden
This tells you who is speaking, and where they are. For this reason, it is a good idea to rename each relay to indicate its location - in the example above, the relay which picked up uncle Philip's voice was called "Menswear". To rename your relay, right-click it, click "Edit" on the context menu, and change the content of the "Name" box.
Finally, simply click each relay to configure it. You will see the following menu and buttons:
Mode: Transmit & Receive, Band A
Volume: Chat, Text: ON, Timestamp: ON
[Transmit] [Receive] [Bridge]
[Volume] [Text] [Timestamp]
[Band A] [Band B] [Band C]
[Band D] [Band E] [Band F]
The buttons do the following:
Transmit: switches "transmit" on and off. If "transmit" is on, the relay will send anything it hears in local chat to any relay which has "receive" on.
Receive: switches "receive" on and off. If "receive" is on, the relay will repeat in local chat anything heard by any relay which has "transmit" on.
Bridge: used to allow relays to work across neighbouring regions - see below.
Volume: controls how far away anything received by the relay can be heard in local chat. "Chat" volume can be heard 20m away, "Whisper" only 10m, and "Shout" 100m.
Text: switches the floating text above the relay on and off.
Timestamp: switches "timestamping" on and off. Normally, transmission is nearly instantaneous - so you will hear relayed chat almost immediately after it has been spoken. But Second Life performance is never absolutely predictable, and pockets of lag can affect relays as much as they affect ordinary chat. If you enable timestamps, messages will be sent with a number indicating how many seconds ago they was heard: for instance "-2s" means that it was heard two seconds ago.
Band A-F: selects the "band" on which the relay works. There are six bands, and each operates a little like a radio frequency. Relays will only transmit chat to, and receive chat from, other relays on the same band. So you might have (for instance) relays at each end of your dance floor to relay chat between dancers on band A, and separate relays between your office and the centre of the dance floor to allow you to make announcements on band B.
NOTES:
1. The only local chat which a relay will *not* transmit or receive is the chat from another relay - this is to prevent "feedback loops", where two relays placed close together repeat the same text back and forth endlessly. If you have two relays, both set to receive and transmit, and they are close together, you may hear *both* repeat something said within range of them both - but they won't then repeat each other.
2. Second Life chat messages are limited to 1024 characters. The system adds a little more information (such as the name of the speaker and the time) when they are relayed, so if a message is very close to the limit, the last few characters may be lost. Howewever, *very* few chat messages are anywhere near this length.
If all your relays are in the same region, you can ignore this section.
But if you wish to relay chat between two (or more) neighbouring regions, you need to place a pair of relays either side of each region border, creating a "bridge" for the signal.
Click the "Bridge" button on the settings menu (see above) to set these relays to "bridge" mode. Note that this automatically disables "transmit" and "receive" - these relays will neither listen out for local chat, or repeat it publically. In bridge mode, they will simply send messages transmitted by relays in their own region to the bridge relay on the other side of the border, which will then pass them on to receiving relays in the other region.
The relays need to be reasonably close together - for simplicity, it is best to put them right next to each other on either side of the border. But if you own parcels in both regions, and these don't happen to be on the edge, the bridge relays can be further apart. If you set their "volume" to "Whisper", they can be 10m apart, if "Chat", 20m, and if "Shout", they can be up to 100m apart.
You need one pair of bridge relays for each band: so if you wish band A relays in both regions to talk to each other, and band B relays in both regions to talk to each other, you need to rez a band A *and* a band B relay on each side of the border - making four bridge relays in all.
In principle, you can connect as many regions as you wish. If you owned ten regions laid out in an east-west row, then nine pairs of bridge relays would effectively connect them all together, allowing something transmitted by a relay in the eastmost region to be received by another in the westmost - or in any region in between. This will usually happen *very* fast. Naturally, though, it takes time for each message to cross each bridge - and so if the number of borders is very great, the relays are more vulnerable to lag in any of the intervening regions.
If you put a pair of bridge relays between region X and region Y, and another pair between region X and region Z, make sure the two bridge relays in region X are *not* within range of each other, or you may hear duplicated messages. It's an unusual situation, but might arise if Y was east of X, and Z was north, and you put both pairs near the north west corner of X. All you need to do in this case is make sure that if (for instance) the relays on the X side of the border are set to "whisper", they are at least 10m apart from each other.
* Use "receive only" relays to listen to remote chat without being overhead at the remote location when *you* speak.
* Use "transmit only" relays to broadcast local chat without hearing chat from anywhere else.
* Use "transmit and receive" relays to allow people to speak to each other: either across a large space, or in entirely different locations.
* Mix it up! Use "transmit and receive" relays to let a large group talk together, but rez another "receive only" relay to listen to the talk without taking part.
* Plan the placement of your relays carefully. Use the different volume settings to control how large a radius a receiving relay can be heard over. Bear in mind that because chat can be heard within a certain radius, the area which can be covered by each relay is circular, so it is impossible to arrange multiple relays so that they cover all the ground without overlapping. If you have a large area, you may decide to focus on particular parts of it, or just to tolerate occassional repeated relays picked up by two transmitters.
* Don't forget that you can use the Second Life "About Land" settings to prevent chat being heard outside your parcel if you wish. For instance, you can set up a receiver which "shouts" over a 100m range to cover your whole 64m x 64m parcel, and then use the "About Land" privacy setting to prevent the chat spamming anyone outside the parcel.
* Remember that it is a breach of Second Life "Terms of Service" to listen to chat without the knowledge of the people speaking. If you are using relays within a private group, make sure everyone knows they are there. If it is a public place, post signs.
Shan Bright
Chief Executive Officer