Intercepting and changing chat messages by-player

[rippasmom (chiaotzu)]

I’m trying to create a language system for my game that does these things:

1: Intercepts chat message and translates it before sending.
2: Only shows translated message to those who speak the language.

I’ve managed to complete the language translating part, but I don’t know how to intercept the chat and change it or change it for each player. Any ideas on how I can do this would be appreciated.

[xChris_vC (Chris)]

For chat translation specifically, the easiest option is to toggle ChatTranslationEnabled on, then Roblox will handle translations, show UI to toggle translations per-message and allow players to turn off translations globally in settings.

If for any reason you need to intercept and modify messages yourself, icy_oasis explains best:

@icy_oasis

In the light of the still fairly new TextChatService, I suggest taking a look at the flowchart displayed on this page: In-Experience Text Chat System | Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub .

As you can see, there are two signals to consider:

1. SendingMessage,
2. OnIncomingMessage.

The latter can intercept the message before it is displayed on the recipients’ side, while the first one enables us to handle the text during the sending process and right before the placeholder message is replaced by whatever was sent to all other clients.

• TextChatMessage | Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub
• TextChatMessageProperties | Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub

Example in the ‘general’ chat.

local TextChatService = game:GetService("TextChatService")
local rbxGeneralChannel = TextChatService:WaitForChild("TextChannels"):WaitForChild("RBXGeneral")

rbxGeneralChannel.OnIncomingMessage = function(textChatMessage)
	local textChatMsgProperties = Instance.new("TextChatMessageProperties")
	
	if #textChatMessage.Text > 0 then
		textChatMsgProperties.Text = textChatMessage.Text .." [added]"
	end
	return textChatMsgProperties
end

Additional SendingMessage - probably more noticable during high ping times.

local TextChatService = game:GetService("TextChatService")
local rbxGeneralChannel = TextChatService:WaitForChild("TextChannels"):WaitForChild("RBXGeneral")

TextChatService.SendingMessage:Connect(function(textChatMessage)
	local textChatMsgProperties = Instance.new("TextChatMessageProperties")
	print(textChatMessage.TextChannel)
	
	if textChatMessage.TextChannel == rbxGeneralChannel and #textChatMessage.Text > 0 then
		textChatMsgProperties.Text = textChatMessage.Text .." [added]"
	end
	return textChatMsgProperties
end)

Keep in mind that these are client scripts, so chat tags and edits are done locally, as opposed to what we used to do with the legacy chat modules.

I believe this should be enough to add a check for certain words combinations or phrases as well.