A persona or personality is a short script that reconfigures your ARES unit to perform a specific job. They are intended to enhance storytelling by encouraging you (the human behind the keyboard) to roleplay in a certain way.

To load a persona, use the personalities... menu. To return to normal behavior, choose default from the personalities... menu.

Personas always:

  • Change the sound your unit makes when chatting.
  • Change the preset messages available when your mind is disabled.
  • Load a preset #RLV folder, located at #RLV/~ARES/persona/<name>, where <name> is the name of the persona. (The ".p" part isn't included.)

Personas cannot:

  • Roleplay for you.
  • Alter your chat text (without help from chat filters, which must be set up in advance.)
  • Run AIX or OS/2 guest applications.

What exactly are the limits of personas? Since a persona is a shell script, it is possible for it to do almost anything you can tell ARES to do yourself, but the official personas from Nanite Systems are designed to be straightforward, and do not contain many surprises.

Can I make my own personas? Creating new personas is a more advanced topic covered in Operating ARES: Personas. You should finish the tutorials first, however, especially Command line basics.

Overriding the speech marker

In a previous tutorial, we discussed how to override the speech marker, but only for the default persona. Once you activate a different persona, you will hear a different sound based on your voice gender settings and the persona file itself.

Of course, if you happen not to like the sounds included with a standard persona, it can be quite annoying to suddenly find yourself hearing them whenever you switch. You could make your own version of the persona that has alternative sounds (more on that in Operating ARES: Personas), but there is another option if you simply never want to have your speech markers ever get changed by a persona.

To stop your markers from being changed by personas, send the command @db persona.block ["marker"] in local chat. (You must be an Owner of yourself to use this command.) This will freeze your current speech marker sounds and prevent them from being changed.

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