ARES includes the most sophisticated chat modification system ever implemented in Second Life, allowing you (and your owner) to customize what you hear and say in local chat. This is called chat filtering.
To turn chat filters on and off, see the chat filtering... menu. The input chain modifies what the unit receives from others. The output chain modifies what the unit sends to chat. To turn on one of these, choose filter input: off or filter output: off from the chat filtering... menu respectively.
To decide what changes get made to incoming and outgoing chat, you must activate and deactivate individual filters.
ARES comes with the following chat filters installed by default:
| Name | Function | Example | Equivalent in Companion |
|---|---|---|---|
| censor | Splats out certain words | Eat ****, you *****. | — |
| replace | Replaces one word with another | Once upon a space... | vocabulary |
| slang | Randomly inserts phrases | So like, PLEASE HELP ME, haha, I'M TRAPPED IN THIS DEATH CUBE, or whatever. | — |
| nonverbal | Replaces words with a single syllable | Mooooo moo moo, moo? | barnyard |
| translate | Converts text into another language | Ich kann dich nicht verstehen. Bitte sprechen Sie Englisch. | polyglot |
| serpentine | Exaggerates "S" and "Z" sounds | SSScccccienccccccccce. | serpentine |
| stutter | Randomly repeats parts of words | I j-j-just don't know what we-went wrong! | stutter (from 'gaudy' package) |
| lisp | Converts "S" and "Z" sounds to "TH" | Ththienthe. | lisp |
| mumble | Approximates the results of trying to speak with something in your mouth | Wwifh ifh we mumwwe fiwhtew. | — (NS Ballgag) |
| caps | Converts text to upper case | HELLO. | cobol (from 'gaudy' package) |
| rot13 | Encrypts text using a 13-place Caesar cipher (A = N, B = O, etc) | 100% frpher. | rot13 (from 'gaudy' package) |
| slow | Adds extra spaces between words | This is slow. | — (low power mode) |
| bimbo | Substitutes fashionable lookalikes for letters in the Latin alphabet | ℓιкє, тσтαℓℓу. | bimbo (from 'gaudy' package) |
| superscript | Replaces letters with superscripted lookalikes | ᵀʰᵃᵗ'ˢ ᵛᵉʳʸ ⁱⁿˢᵉⁿˢⁱᵗⁱᵛᵉ! | microvox |
| corrupted | Randomly replaces characters with shaded blocks | ▒his text ha░ b▒en corr█pted. | dropout |
| glitch | Adds combining accents to suggest line noise and/or the impeding approach of Zalgo. | This is t̨h̶e glitc̼͋h filter. | glitch |
Filter Management
ARES will always try to apply chat filters in the order that works best. For example, it will perform word replacement prior to translation. There are a few cases, however, where the correct order isn't obvious (mainly because they do mutually exclusive things, like turn your text into two different silly fonts.) When this happens the filters are applied in the order they were activated.
When you activate a filter, ARES will ask you for the settings to use. Each filter works differently, and some require extra setup. For others, you can leave the settings blank. Here's how to set up each filter included by default:
censor: Choose the name of a list of words to censor. By default, ARES only includes one list, called profanity.
replace: Choose the name of a word-replacement dictionary to use. By default, ARES only includes one sample dictionary, called stanley.
slang: Choose the name of a slang preset to use. By default, ARES only includes one list, called airhead.
Creating new data for the censor, replace, and slang filters: Since these filters all deal with long sets of words, they need to be stored in the ARES internal database (Linkset Data) first, using the db command. How to do this is explained in the next tutorial, Command line basics.
nonverbal: Specify three sounds to use as parts of the repeated syllable, separated by spaces. For example, m o o turns all words into mooing, and ny a n turns all words into nyanning. The filter will always include the first and last parts in each word, and repeat the middle part until the result is at least as long as the original word—thus, o i nk will work better than oi n k.
translate: Specify a pair of two-letter ISO-639-1 codes to translate between using the free mymemory.translated.net online service. The values should be separated by a colon. For example, en:fr translates English to French.
serpentine: Specify a number from 0 to 100, where 0 is no effect and 100 is irrefutable proof that you are a Death Eater.
stutter: Specify a number from 0 to 100, where 0 is no effect and 100 is a very high likelihood of repeated stuttering.
lisp: Specify a number from 0 to 100, where 0 is no effect and 100 replaces every possible instance.
mumble, caps, rot13, bimbo, and superscript: These filters have no settings.
corrupted: Specify a number from 0.0 to 1.0, which indicates the rough proportion of characters that should be corrupted. A value of 0.5 will result in a 50% chance for each character to be replaced.
glitch: Specify a number from 0 to 100, where 0 is no noise and 100 is extreme noise.
When you no longer want to apply chat filtering, you can simply turn off the entire filter chain. Choose filter input: on or filter output: on as appropriate from the chat filtering... menu to disable the corresponding chain.
Enabling and Configuring Chat Filters via Commands
Before you activate any chat filters, you must first decide whether you want it to apply to incoming or outgoing speech (i.e. speech you hear or speech you say)
As explained earlier, ARES has two pipeline chains for these, respectively named 'input' and 'output'. Input will apply configured filters to any speech others make that you can hear, and Output will apply configured filters to any speech you say as a unit.
These pipeline chains can be toggled with
@vox chain on|off'chain' is which of the pipelines to apply the filter to, 'input' or 'output'.
'on' will enable the pipeline chain.
'off' will disable the pipeline chain.
To enable a vox filter on a pipeline chain, the standard command structure is as follows:
@vox chain filter add|remove|flags'chain' is which of the pipelines to apply the filter to, 'input' or 'output'.
'filter' is the filter you wish to add/remove/configure
'add' will add the filter to the specified chain
'remove' will remove the filter from the chain
'flags' would be any specific configuration flags needed to configure the filter as desired. (See that filter's respective entry on the Command Reference Guide for more information on their individual configuration flags)
So, as an example, to fully enable the translate filter to translate your outgoing speech to German, you would do the following:
Enable the output chain - @vox output on
Add the translate filter to the output chain - @vox output translate add
Configure the translate filter to translate from English to German - @vox output translate en:de
Then, just talk! Anything you say will be passed through the translation filter and be output in German!
Previous Tutorial: Damage, overheating, and repair
Next Tutorial: Command line basics