Chat range and hearing

"Distance is a courtesy. Do not mistake it for a wall." — Comms Officer Ilun Rask

Verified

Chat fades with distance, so a far-off conversation is faint and a nearby one is clear.

Whispers are not private, and neither is anything else. The server sends every chat line to every connected player. Fading happens afterwards, on each player's own machine. Anyone who changes their own settings can read your whisper from the other side of the map.

What it does

The server does not check who is close enough to hear you. It broadcasts your line to everyone, along with your client number. Each player's game then measures how far away you are and decides how faint to draw the line.

Distance is a display effect and nothing more. 2 things follow, and both matter:

the full text of every say, whisper, shout and delivered comlink line is written to every player's console, at full strength, whatever the distance
on default settings no line is ever hidden, because a message past its maximum distance is still drawn at 10% strength rather than dropped

For anything that genuinely must not be read by a third party, there is no in-game answer. Use a channel outside the game.

How far each channel carries

Distances are in game units. A standing character is 64 units tall, which is a useful yardstick.

Channel	Clear up to	Faint by
whisper	60	110
say	370	900
dice and card results	370	900
companion speech	518	1,665
shout	1,000	1,900

The companion figures are computed, not separate settings. Companion speech uses the say distances multiplied by the hearing level 5 factors from the table below, 370 × 1.40 and 900 × 1.85. That gives everybody the best-case range, so those 2 numbers are the same for every listener.

Some channels ignore distance completely and always arrive at full strength. Those are out-of-character lines, team chat, comlink broadcasts, a comlink message addressed to you, and director notes. Your own lines never fade either.

What hearing does

Every character has a hearing stat from 1 to 5, and it scales the 2 distances above. The default is 3, which leaves the numbers exactly as printed.

Hearing	Label	Clear range	Faint range
1	Bad	×0.50	×0.55
2	Poor	×0.70	×0.80
3	Normal	×1.00	×1.00
4	Good	×1.20	×1.35
5	Excellent	×1.40	×1.85

Hearing 5 reads an ordinary say clearly to 518 units and faintly out to 1,665. Hearing 1 loses the same line to 185 and 495. Your hearing scales what you hear, never what other people hear from you. It does not touch companion speech, which is fixed at the range above for everybody.

Diplomacy widens the faint distance at which you hear other people's whispers, before your hearing is applied: rank 2 doubles it from 110 to 220, and rank 3 triples it to 330. The clear distance stays at 60, and your own whisper carries no further. The same bonus covers the far half of a comlink call, which is scored at whisper range for the same reason.

Using it

2 separate things control what you see. Your character's hearing is part of the character and is stored on the server. The fade mode is your own display preference and lives on your machine.

Commands

Setting your character's hearing

The game refuses anything outside 1 to 5 with ^8+++^7 Hearing must be 1-5 (1=Bad 2=Poor 3=Normal 4=Good 5=Excellent)^8.^7.

Settings

Client-side. 0 turns fading off, 1 fades, 2 fades and hides anything past the faint distance, 3 hides anything past the clear distance. Defaults to 1. Client-side. The lowest strength a faded line is drawn at, as a percentage. Defaults to 10.

Things to note

Things that catch people out:

Fading is cosmetic. Treat every channel as public, whatever the distance.
The console keeps a full, unfaded copy of everything. It is one key away.
Anyone can set sf_chatdistance to 0. That shows them every line at full strength, and nothing stops them doing it.
The sf_char_hearing setting shown in the menus is display only. The game never reads it back, so changing it locally does nothing. Only /character set hearing changes what you hear.
Companion speech carries further than a player's voice. Its distances are the say distances multiplied by 1.40 and 1.85, and your own hearing does not change them. Companion whispers, shouts and actions take the ordinary channels, so those do scale.
A director's notes and team chat never fade. Standing far away does not hide them.
Distance is measured in a straight line to the speaker. A wall between you changes nothing.

Comlink: reach one character anywhere on the map when distance beats a shout
Languages: what a listener sees when your line arrives but is not understood
myNPC companions: the speech channel with the longest clear range on this page