"Soundproofing" script?

Is it possible to have a script that will limit the range of chat to certain parameters? So for example you can have a private room or house and anyone not in the room (say you have a door lock script on the room) can't hear the people in the room chatting?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Not if you want it to apply to people using normal chat i.e. channel 0. You could ask everyone to chat on another channel, and then another script could relay everything said via IM to each person, but it would be clumsy and anyone who worked out your channel would be able to listen in.

Not really, your "soundproofing" would be to make the chats a whisper, and this still can leak. Believe the whisper radius is 10 meters. The only way to assure privacy is by IMs, by either a script that reads in IM on a channel like /101 (but even this can be snooped) or else use the IMs that SL gives you.

Hmmm that's a bummer.

Actually what would be cool is to be able to increase the "density" of a prim so that the denser it becomes the more soundproof it becomes... i.e. chat fades out quicker and outside sounds get softer. If the prim is at 100% density then no sound or chat gets in or out - that is, if you have a room made with all 100% dense prims.

That would be problematic to implement since even the tiniest gap in a walled in room would have to either negate the whole thing...or cause wierd chat leakage..

Though I've never seen the point as I really don't get what someone might overhear that would be a problem anyway...plus if someone really wanted to listen in, your 'soundproof' walls wouldn't mean jack since they could just camera in and drop a listener.

Instead of thinking of chat as sound in a physical simulation (which it isn't), it would be instead technically possible to cast a ray from the speaker to any potential listeners within chat range. If an object carrying a special flag that indicated its opacity to sound were between speaker and listener, and the object were over a certain size of which one would expect sound attenuation to occur, then the chat would be attenuated.

Casting rays like this would be a fairly expensive process in terms of the calculations involved, because every single object between speaker and listener would have to be tested, each time somebody spoke. You could probably get away without testing each individual prim, so long as you recognized that if two people are inside the bounding box for a given object that they'd be able to hear each other anyway.

The results, though, would be difficult to control for the most part, and uneven at best. So while there is a technical means to accomplish it, I doubt if very many people would be happy with the way it would have to work.

Another idea yet again, which might be much simpler to implement, is to give agents the ability to whisper as objects do. This would produce the increased privacy you seem to be after, without putting a serious load on the server or requiring any serious rearchitecting of the existing system.

Oorrrrrrrr...You could just use multi-party IM's.

D'oh.

Yes.

Altho, an option to set the 'volume' of your chat would be handy for many situations. Replace the current "Chat" and "Shout" buttons with a drop-down menu with Chat, Whisper and Shout options that is persistent.

Not particularly helpful towards soundproofing objects, but an interface improvement, perhaps.

centric.com put out a skype headset. Skype can be used for text chat as well as voice. Works really well. It will alert you when someone in chat range has the earpeice. It can be worn invisibly also.