Bukkit

Most plugins allow you to have something called a "local chat", which is basically chat limited by a range. The main pitfall to this, however, is that the moment someone is outside your range, you cannot hear them, and the lack of communication can be at best, an inconvenience, and at worst, debilitating. Instead of having an "on/off" extreme, there should be garbled chat instead. Garbled means that letters within a message are randomly chosen to be dropped or misplaced/scrambled.

Everyone within the designated range will hear perfectly fine, but the moment someone is out of the chat range of another person, their chat will be slightly garbled, with some letters misplaced, or dropped. The further away from each other the players are, the more letters get misplaced or dropped. There will come a point where the message does get sent, but it will be utterly incoherent: that will signal the two chatting players that they are too far away and need to move closer. And of course, if players reach a certain distance, they won't hear each other at all; in this case, they should receive a "No one hears you!" message.

Between the "clear chat range" and the "incoherent chat range," letters should mostly be scrambled (some can be dropped), but between the "incoherent chat range" and the "no-one-can-hear-you chat range," letters should mostly be dropped.

This all only applies to channels which have a range imposed upon them. There should be three main configurable features to this:
- The range where you can hear another player fine.
- The range where their chat becomes completely incoherent. The rate (or speed) at which the chat becomes more garbled is determined by the difference between the two aforementioned ranges. For example, if I set the first range to 75, and the second to 85, chat should be semi-incoherent at a distance of 80.
- The range at which you cannot hear another person at all. The "No one hears you!" message should be configurable, in the case of PvP servers.

We wil take a look into this but my initial fears are that players may simply think the player is having typo issues which will cause confusion and when a player does have a typo issue others may think they are too far away.

I do like the idea of a message indicating to players that they cannot be heard and this is a feature I will take forward to discuss with other members of this project.

@callmoo: Go

I find it a bit weird you marked this as "Fixed" rather than "Started". But anyway, thanks for considering this ticket. :)

About the "players may misinterpret the garbled chat" feature, for one, I think it's the admin's responsibility of letting the players know about the feature, and secondly, you could always add some sort of "indicator" that the chat really is garbled, such as every garbled message starting with "§k.§r" (no quotation marks).

If you don't know what "§k.§r" looks like in chat, you should see for yourself because it's a bit hard to describe, but adding the "random" chat effect to periods, commas, exclamation marks, and certain other characters gives a distinct outcome compared to when you use the effect on other characters. The reason the "random" effect works well is because, like the message, it is itself garbled. Plus it's highly noticeable.