Please make Target Ring and AOE visible on transparent texture...

[KingXRay]

Unfortunate if you are expecting this to be something patched quickly, I wouldn't get your hopes up[1]. As mentioned in the implementation of Fish Tanks, the FFXIV engine does not have translucent materials, so holes in the grate are actual holes in the model. That means that with a UV mapped overlay texture like the ground AoE marker, there are no vertices to map the texture on to. Fixing that would take an enormous engine addition which could take months if not the better part of years to complete, not to mention introduce all sorts of potential pitfalls/bugs in the rendering engine. Translucent materials prohibit a number of rendering optimizations that most MMOs (presumably FFXIV included) take advantage of to allow them to draw more tris on screen at a time.

[1]http://xkcd.com/1425/ Tasks

i dont see you know 3D modelling...
the fish tank is half transparent not 100% transparent thats why normally mmo engine dont support it
if all those holes are actual models which means it will need more polygons and will stress the gpu more, obvious less fps
the alex floor holes are not actual models but a flat plank, they are just texture that with 100% visible and 100% transparent, which called alpha map texture, it used on many things like grass, leafs etc...

[Hulan]

i dont see you know 3D modelling...
the fish tank is half transparent not 100% transparent thats why normally mmo engine dont support it
if all those holes are actual models which means it will need more polygons and will stress the gpu more, obvious less fps
the alex floor holes are not actual models but a flat plank, they are just texture that with 100% visible and 100% transparent, which called alpha map texture, it used on many things like grass, leafs etc...

Strictly speaking I do actually dabble, but that's the best I can say for myself. You are likely correct that the polycount on modeled holes would be too high in that case, I had not considered that (once again, only dabble in 3D modeling in my free time), but in my defense, I can almost guarantee that the Fish Tanks are actually still 100% transparent. They use an optical illusion by making the backgrounds of the Fish Tanks look like they are lighter shades based on the environment. I can't say for sure without seeing their engine, but that is a much more performant way of getting the same result. It produces the same effect of a semi-permissive material without the overhead of an actual semi-permissive material. Refresh my memory however, my recollection is that a caveat of alpha textures is that they suffer from render order problems with textures over the same location since DirectX does back-to-front rendering to the buffer. I am working with some pretty old memories of some pretty outdated information though, so feel free to correct me.