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There are several ways that the Chat Bar can be used. One is to have the Conversations floater open to view local chat history as well as IMs. The other is to close the floater and then use either chat toasts or bubble chat to display the inworld chat. The settings to control this are on the General and Chat / Notifications tabs in Preferences.
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This behaviour along with other aspects of the Chat Bar can be configured through new options within Preferences.
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“Starts Local Chat” is an existing option which determines whether a keystroke allows W A S D movement or invokes a chat entry floater. There is also the “Arrow keys always move me” setting within Move & View where you can choose whether the arrows move your avatar or provide movement within the chat entry field.
If you have “Pressing letter keys : Starts local chat” enabled on the General tab starting to type whilst the focus is within the world view will open a chat input window. The option “Open Chat Bar instead of Conversations” decides which floater is preferred.
If neither are open the one selected by “Open Chat Bar instead of Conversations” will be opened.
If one or the other are open, the open one will get the input focus.
If both are open the selected one is again governed by the “Open Chat Bar instead of Conversations” choice.
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“Conversations:Nearby Chat/Chat Bar release keyboard focus after sending a line of chat” is another existing option that wasn’t presented in the UI. The actual setting is misleadingly named ‘CloseChatOnReturn’ which described earlier behaviour however its current behaviour is better described by the text in the Preferences floater - this setting decides whether keyboard focus stays in the current chat entry floater or returns to the world view after each line.
‘Close the Chat Bar after sending a line of chat’ is a new setting which applies to the Chat Bar only, not to the Conversations floater. When this is turned on the Chat Bar will be closed after sending each line of chat. This can be combined with the “Pressing letter keys:Starts Local Chat” and “Open Chat Bar instead of Conversations” to create a mode where starting to type opens the Chat Bar which then closes again after sending the line of chat.
‘Always open the Chat Bar at login’ can be used to make sure the Chat Bar begins open/visible even if it was closed when the previous session logged out.
Bubble Chat can also be enabled on this panel along with the new option to duplicate the chat as a toast notification instead of only showing it as a chat bubble.
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The Notifications options are unchanged however they are important here since they allow for fine-tuning of the ways in which different kinds of chat (eg avatars, objects, IM, groups) are handled. Note that if the Conversations floater is fully visible and showing chat history this will suspend generation of chat toasts. The concept here is that if the Conversations floater is closed toasts will be generated if ‘Pop up the message’ is selected. However if the Conversations floater is open and chat history is visible this will suspend the generation of chat toasts.
The pictures below show the three general modes of operation, in each case a line of text has just been entered through the Chat Bar
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