NPC's and party members disappear in Eureka

[Claviusnex]

Due to the number of people in NM trains NPC's and party members disappear due to the number of items on screen. I could live with this but instead of picking a character I have no interaction with it always goes for my target. Needless to say the results of this is less the desirable. If there is no way to stop the disappearing entirely then the game should not lose my current target nor party members.

[Ariellendera]

Hello Claviusnex, Thank you for posting on the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums

Does this happen at a specific place or time and how often? Have you tried anything to rectify this?

Hope to be of assistance.

[Claviusnex]

It happens only in Eureka when there are many players at the same location and are pulling mobs or we are on the NM and mobs are running in. It is related to the number of characters (player and NCP). Too many and the game stops displaying some of them. Typically it will be my current target and random players in my party. Their names go dull in the party list as if they are out of range yet they are standing next to me. The result is I cannot target them to raise or mana shift. If I move around enough I can regain a visual on my original target but have to reselect it. I have also had cases where a mob NCP is invisible yet will still one shot me. I'm not the only one seeing this. Just about everybody in a Fate train will run into it when the Eureka instance is very full and concentrated in the same location.

As far as setting I've turned off all battle effects for party and other players. While this helped being able to see what is going on better and reduced graphics lag it does nothing in regards to congested area character vanishing.

[Riko_Futatabi]

Hello Claviusnex, Thank you for posting on the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums

Does this happen at a specific place or time and how often? Have you tried anything to rectify this?

Hope to be of assistance.

This has been a problem since 2.0, when many players would gather together for Odin and King Behemoth FATEs back then. It's just that now, in Eureka, it's more apparent since we are in a zone full of NMs that many, many players gather together to fight. We need some sort of setting or filter. We need the ability to prioritize our own party members from not disappearing during the fight. The same needs to be applied to NMs, because when a NM isn't targetable, you also do not see the Area of Effect attacks they do.

It's actually a very poor playing experience in Eureka when this is the case. There are times I cannot select members of my party to heal or raise, even though they are within range. I will have to run around and turn my camera to try and get them to be displayed on screen and not grayed out(as if out of range) on the party list. This also leads me to being distracted and dying more often on healer.

[MStowastiqVahlshdeh]

First time I ever experienced this in game was during Ixion fates. I also have this happen at every NM in Eureka and as a healer, my only resolution is to run around frantically to hopefully find my party members who are in range but unclickable. What I started doing as a temp fix during Ixion battles is to place a waymark and let party members know to go to the waymark if their HP is low or "Heals at A and B". While this is hardly a solution, it is the only sonar type method I can think of besides running around trying to locate people who are actually there.
My object count settings are set to max btw.

[Xeon]

Although, I agree that party members, friends, and NPCs should take priority or be exempt from the disappearing, it is done at random.

This was a feature placed in 2.0 to alleviate performance issues that were caused by too many characters on the screen (mainly FPS). There is no other way around it, and to stop it would either crash the game or at the very least, make your game unplayable. The only perma way that SE could remedy this and keep everything on screen is to rewrite the code and effectively cut the graphics quality of the game way down. They should make certain characters priority, however.

But even the above solution would only offer minimal benefits as the 'character on screen' issue is more of a CPU bottleneck. Even on a modern quad core I5, which most are below this spec.

[Cerebrum]

So basically this has been around since 2.0 and then SE had the bright idea to make a whole zone that would do this and add to that "punishment" for dying half of the time you cannot see it due to the aforementioned bug ? Wow..just wow.

[HaelseMikiro]

I'm fairly certain that back in the 2.0 days, SE claimed that all platforms would begin culling players when the density got to be around 200 in an 8 yalm radius or something like that. Chocobos contributed heavily to the problem, and bosses would usually be among the first things to vanish from the screen. SE eventually added priority culling so that the large scale fate bosses and your party members would always remain on screen. Now we're in Eureka with a limit of 144 players per instance, and we've gone backwards 3 steps with culling at lower numbers of sprites, bosses and party members vanishing. I'm unsure if spell effects go into the sprite count or not, but that might be a setting that can help?

[Xeon]

Probably has to do with the massive amounts of mobs in eurika.

[Claviusnex]

Probably has to do with the massive amounts of mobs in eurika.

It is. If you get a full instance, add in the spawning mobs and dragged mobs it is easy to end up with a high object count.

I understand the need to limit this to a degree. The problem is a player's current target should never be removed. Likewise if a player is in a party the party members should never be removed. The same should go for the boss even if not targeted. I would also say any NPC's within striking distance of the player should remain visible or when hidden unable to strike the player. The real priority should be to hide any environmental objects/non-dangerous NPC's that use graphics resources, players outside of a party and last NPC's outside of target range. In all likelihood just hiding other players would resolve this problem as it isn't an issue when groups are distributed across an instance or the instance is under capacity.