Text Chat

Text chat between the web and in event experience

Due for Simplification, please see Docs.

31/10/2024: Long term goal is for MSquared to provide an example of text Chat that does not use PubNub or Community Sift. If customers wish to continue using these services, they need to speak to the Solutions Engineering team for guidance on how to implement this within their project outside of what MSquared provides off the shelf.

When MSquared drops support for PubNub, we will no longer support Web-to-Unreal text chat. Chat will be limited to Unreal Worlds within MSquared.

Work is being done to decouple our chat widget from the Legacy UI elements we are deprecating. Following this the plan is to replace the functionality under the hood to us Unreal for text chat.

Until MSquared completely drops support of PubNub and Community sift they will remain functional. When the new simplified chat lands, the old chat widget will remain within the platform for customer use.

MSquared will not be addressing non-critical and cosmetic issues relating to Text Chat during this process of simplification. Please reach out to your Support Engineers with concerns.

Beta Quality - Customers are encouraged to test and use Beta features in their experiences, but may still require some support

Overview

The ability to chat on web and in game, including:

Chat from Web to Unreal and back
Works on Desktop and Mobile*
Text appears in game above the head
Ability to hide and show the widget, and custom sizing
User name and profile image appending to the message

The in-and-out-experience chat is backed by PubNub. For battle-tested, in-experience only chat, see Experience Only Chat.

* Mobile is currently only supported via the old chat UI (Cloud Chat). See Adding Mobile support to continue use of this version of the text chat for desktop

Integration

Make sure you have a safe internal launch context id set up for your editor users.
Configure the variable Social.Chat.Editor.LaunchContextId in deployment.json with this value (see below)

How to enable

Enable TextChat.UseCloudChat in game.json.
Make sure your in-game HUD is set up to use the new chat system

The following settings in game.json influence the Text Chat feature:

How to enable Text chat in Editor

Create a deployment.override.json in your project live config directory (Config/LiveConfig/Overrides) and add the following, replacing the LaunchContextId with a launch context in your project. This should ideally be a persistent launch context so it will always be available

This uses a Launch Context id, not a World Id. This will likely be updated in the near future.

{ 
    "Social": { 
        "Chat": { 
            "Editor": { 
                "LaunchContextSource": "LiveConfigChatLaunchContext", 
                "LaunchContextId": [REPLACE WITH LAUNCH CONTEXT ID] 
            }
        }
    }
}

The following deployment.json influence the Text Chat feature:

Adding Chat to your HUD

Add WBP_M2_TextChat to your HUD and ensure it is stretched across the whole screen.

Adding Mobile Support

WBP_M2_TextChat does not yet support mobile platforms. If your HUD is or derives from WBP_TH_HUD then your good to go. Otherwise follow the below steps:

Use a widget switcher to switch between WBP_M2_TextChat and WBP_TextChatWindow_Mobile with the following code to allow it to automatically revert to the old UI for mobile devices.

On Bootflow finished, add a handle to get live config updates.

Create a function called Update Live Config and add the following:

Full Live Config Setting List

Settings marked (LEGACY) may be removed in a future update

PreviousChat NextModeration

Last updated 20 days ago