New In-Experience Text Chat System Public Release!

[PeZsmistic]

While I suspect a large amount of users actually use whisper chat for roleplay between two people, for larger groups you can sometimes find users in servers using the roleplay channel for their roleplay business. I think you’ll have a hard time finding that needle in a haystack in my game because it’s relatively small and I’m still working on roleplay capabilities, but it does happen from time to time and I do foresee it increasing as I improve the state of affairs. Be an Alien: Renewal - Roblox

A better solution for my needs would be a tidy way to let players have shared whisper chats, but as it stands the new chat doesn’t really make it possible to have a cohesive interface for all this (can’t even switch channels within the chat window…), so it would be a downgrade.

I don’t remember if this chat supports whisper yet either?

[be_nj (benjj)]

This chat supports whisper chat. It should be pretty identical to before. Would a group whisper chat feature be something that would solve some of your needs out of the box?

We’re also interested in opening up some basic hooks into the default UI to help facilitate more complicated use cases.

[PeZsmistic]

A group whisper would mostly eliminate my need for roleplay chat. It would make it harder for people to join roleplays on the fly but I think players can work it out. Not sure the details of how it would work with respect to joining/leaving/managing a group chat though.

UI hooks would be amazing. I would like to add an expand button if there is no resize functionality so players can make the chat larger vertically up to some limit. Channel tabs are also sorely missed, especially if there will be group chats. Switching would be a pain if you needed to use an external button or command all the time.

[JustAGameDeveloper1 (d5v)]

Dannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng, this chat UI looks amazing. Finally, they did something good for ONCE.

[GladlyAshley]

Looks great! I am wondering how you would send a “system” message though?

StarterGui:SetCore(
    "ChatMakeSystemMessage",           
    {Text = "MESSAGE"}
)

Works for the legacy chat system, but not the new text system (doesn’t send anything, nor does it error).

[be_nj (benjj)]

To send a system message, you can use TextChannel:DisplaySystemMessage(message) instead.
If youre using the default text channels, you can reuse the RBXSystem channel for this:

local systemChannel = TextChatService:FindFirstChild("RBXSystem", true)
if systemChannel then
    systemChannel:DisplaySystemMessage("MESSAGE")
end

but in reality, any TextChannel – even one you created manually – should work as long as there are TextSources listening to it.

[ardrous]

How did you add the “Owner” tag? I am looking through the documentation, but I am not sure how it works.

[Azutreo (Azu)]

If you don’t want to do it yourself, then I made a public model that you can use here (TextChatService+).

The method to do so is using RichText and changing the values of the PrefixText and Text properties under the TextChatMessageProperties instance. You do this when a message is sent by intercepting the OnIncomingMessage callback that is a part of the new TextChatService.

Here is a VERY VERY VERY scrappy method that is not good to use for production but will help relate what I mean…

local TextChatService = game:GetService("TextChatService")

local function OnIncomingMessage(message: TextChatMessage): TextChatMessageProperties
	local properties = Instance.new("TextChatMessageProperties")

	properties.PrefixText = string.format(
		"<font color='#ff0000'><b>[Test Prefix]</b></font> %s",
		message.PrefixText
	)

	return properties
end

TextChatService.OnIncomingMessage = OnIncomingMessage

Running that script above will produce this

[RTX40Series (Pro)]

This update looks good.

@SubtleShuttle

Default UI

General Kenobi

[TheRealANDRO (ANDRO)]

Instead of it being on top of the chat, how about a sidebar UI? It would have more space and I think it would be easier to go through all of the channels if they’re parented under a ScrollingFrame.

I’ve made something like this for the current chat UI:

[OneEDM (EDM)]

If anyone wants to test the new chat out in game, feel free to use my test place. New Chat Example Place - Roblox

[xander5610 (Master_xander5610)]

Awesome. I don’t script normally but I’ll know I’ll have fun messing around with this in explorer. The gui looks amazing and the features look better!

[ValiantWind (Val)]

How can I adding multiple chat tags at once for a person?

I want the players in my game to both have a Chat Tag if they have a VIP Gamepass and if they have Roblox Premium.

[JayZo_Official (PapaEthan)]

The new UI appears to be much simpler and more modern. I especially like the corner on the UI, and it seems to to be simple to customize. Well done, Roblox.

[SubtleShuttle]

Also check out the documentation for TextSource which says “Remove TextSources by calling TextSource.Destroy.” Someone commented about this not straightforward enough so we plan on adding documentation note to :AddUser to reference this.

[SubtleShuttle]

Can you elaborate what you mean by “weird”?

[SubtleShuttle]

Hi, just wanted to follow up on this thread for visibility, to sum up the issue it seems that CreateDefaultTextChannels was set to false by the developer, hence running into these issues since default channels were not being created. Anyone more interested in this problem should read this separate thread, but the conclusion is that you should set CreateDefaultTextChannels to true if you are using our default UI and features. We will clarify the documentation to make this more clear.

[SubtleShuttle]

I would also highly recommend you check out our beta announcement page, which has some additional code snippets and usage samples. We have a more tutorial-like documentation coming soon that more or less covers materials described on that page.

[SubtleShuttle]

Please check out our beta announcement page, which has additional information about using the API (including chat tags).

[BitLang]

Amazing job, and great GUI! How long until it gets out of beta and becomes default, though? I’d like to keep my game up-to-date with the current chat system, especially considering I’m editing some of the chat modules to achieve certain effects in some of my experiences (and this might take a while to change to the new system).