Chat Text Bubbles over Player Characters?

[BrachyXIV]

They already addressed this and said it was a no go iirc.

But I mean if your eyesight is not good and your peripheral vision cannot pick up text scroll so you know to look at your chat box, which is the only way I can process the chat box being in the corner as being an issue, one solution to this would be to create that 4th chat box we can use, set it to just show say yell tell etc. adjust the font size and color to how you want it, turn background transparency to 100% then just place it somewhere more central on your screen so you can see everything in real time without having to move your eyes. The ways in which we can change and adjust the UI in this game are almost endless.

And if it's hard to see 1 msg or name amongst what has to be a crazy amount of players and spam bots on your server compared to mine if it takes you more than a few seconds, much less 10 minutes to find 1 name in the mix, floating text is not going to help that, esp in super crowded areas where those spam bots are just going to create even more clutter even if you have distance turned on, esp considering how long their msgs can be. I mean if you are near anyone advertising their fc or an rmt pushing their wares, even on the smallest text setting their msg is going to take up a significant portion of your screen's real estate. Also considering how fast they would have to disappear to prevent your game from coming to a standstill in crowded areas, it would be difficult to read anything but a brief "hello how are you" anyway.

I have a separate box just for chat so I don't miss anything and it works beautifully. Although it keep it in the corner anyway since I can rely on my peripheral vision to see when a msg pops up and its easy to glance down to read. But if your eyesight is bad, this may help.

I have found NOTHING about developers addressing Chat/Text bubbles would you mind directing me to this?

Yes, it's hard to read names following messages especially when a lot of people are talking and you have to double check to see the name attached to the rest of the message. I would love for this Roleplaying game to have character stalking, not a Text Log.

[BrachyXIV]

I find that using different colours for different chats helps a lot.
Purple for FC.
Blue for party.
Red for yelling.
Yellow for Alliance.
White for /say.

Etc etc etc.

That is the case by default, but Having a conversation where everything is the same color doesn't help to differentiate who is talking unless you actively go back in the sentence and hope no one talks again so you don't mix up names. And the problem still stands, you are looking at a Text Log, not at a group of characters interacting

[Rongway]

I want to see where they say this. Where is this limited number you speak of and how is it any different from an NPC speech bubble regarding what can be "drawn" if it is already in the game but for NPCs

I'm still looking for the specific instance I mentioned where they talked about icons and a finite limit to the number of things that the UI can handle at once, but here's a fairly recent answer from PLL LX regarding a question with similar technical demands:

Q: I’d like a feature that displays job icons on the side of characters’ nameplates. I think it’d be really helpful in large groups of players, like FATEs and alliance raids!

A: I definitely understand what you mean! While I’d like to do something about it, at the moment we can only use two icons on nameplates.

One is reserved for indicating your online status, and the other is used for signs (player markers). In order to make this work, we would have to override one of these icons, or make it possible to display another one.

Adding another icon, however, would increase graphical-related resource strain and would be quite difficult. (Job icons are displayed in the Feast by overriding the online status, which was given an exception since it was limited to certain content.)

Yoshida: When we were future-proofing the UI on our in-house game engine during A Realm Reborn, nameplates were the number one cause of strain on resources. Nameplates are a 2D interface element displayed based on a character’s 3D coordinates, which is more resource-intensive than it may seem. If we were to make this happen, I think we would consider seeking another alternative other than increasing the number of icons.

[BrachyXIV]

I'm still looking for the specific instance I mentioned where they talked about icons and a finite limit to the number of things that the UI can handle at once, but here's a fairly recent answer from PLL LX regarding a question with similar technical demands:

I don't think that would be connected with a temporary popping chat bubble though, this answer seems to imply the permanent interface linked to character models. I'm no expert so I'm talking out of my butt. But I've seen that Chat Bubbles are possible in the game due to outside sources so it doesn't make sense for the developers themselves to be able to do it.

[Rongway]

I don't think that would be connected with a temporary popping chat bubble though, this answer seems to imply the permanent interface linked to character models. I'm no expert so I'm talking out of my butt. But I've seen that Chat Bubbles are possible in the game due to outside sources so it doesn't make sense for the developers themselves to be able to do it.

The NPCs that have speech bubbles don't congregate in large groups and spam a bajillion chat messages per minute per person, though. This might sound like an absurd scenario, but sometimes players do absurd things, and any system that would handle speech bubbles would need to be prepared to handle this scenario, probably by limiting chat bubbles to the nearest X people, or to the most recent Y chat messages. Both of those options have costs though.

If you limit it to the nearest X people, you have to figure out who the nearest X people are. Say there are 47 people and you want to display chat bubbles over the nearest 10. There are 5,178,066,751 possible ways to select 10 people from a group of 47. If there are 71 people and you want to select the nearest 10, there are 461,738,052,776 possible combinations. You could probably optimize this by keeping a list of the nearest 10 people and their distances, and whenever someone new talks, you check to see if they're closer than any of the people on the list and bump the 10th person if they are, but then you have to store that list in memory, and the devs have historically been averse to making even small additions to the memory structure.

If you limit it to the most recent Y speech bubbles, then you could spend a lot of time processing speech bubbles that never even get seen because they're immediately overwritten by something more recent.

And then there's the memory that needs to be spent on the actual speech bubbles. Each speech bubble needs to know its 3D coordinates, its 2D projected coordinates, its message, and one of (its start time, its expiration time, its visible duration, or its remaining duration). And if the speech bubble is not directly a part of the character's display complex, the position needs to be updated whenever the character moves. The need for speechbubble-to-character tracking could be eliminated if the speech bubble were a part of the character display, but we know how the devs feel about increasing the number of things that can be displayed over characters.

There are a lot of things to consider. It's not as clear cut as it may sound.

[MicahZerrshia]

I have found NOTHING about developers addressing Chat/Text bubbles would you mind directing me to this?

Yes, it's hard to read names following messages especially when a lot of people are talking and you have to double check to see the name attached to the rest of the message. I would love for this Roleplaying game to have character stalking, not a Text Log.

I'm not digging for it either. Yoshida does so many interviews with so many different media outlets every year that it is hard to find very specific answers about topics that are not really something the community at large wants or the game needs and therefore are only addressed offhandedly if that interviewer happens to ask about it directly for whatever reason.

[BrachyXIV]

The NPCs that have speech bubbles don't congregate in large groups and spam a bajillion chat messages per minute per person, though. This might sound like an absurd scenario, but sometimes players do absurd things, and any system that would handle speech bubbles would need to be prepared to handle this scenario, probably by limiting chat bubbles to the nearest X people, or to the most recent Y chat messages. Both of those options have costs though.

If you limit it to the nearest X people, you have to figure out who the nearest X people are. Say there are 47 people and you want to display chat bubbles over the nearest 10. There are 5,178,066,751 possible ways to select 10 people from a group of 47. If there are 71 people and you want to select the nearest 10, there are 461,738,052,776 possible combinations. You could probably optimize this by keeping a list of the nearest 10 people and their distances, and whenever someone new talks, you check to see if they're closer than any of the people on the list and bump the 10th person if they are, but then you have to store that list in memory, and the devs have historically been averse to making even small additions to the memory structure.

If you limit it to the most recent Y speech bubbles, then you could spend a lot of time processing speech bubbles that never even get seen because they're immediately overwritten by something more recent.

You mean how the game already limits names showing up by the nearest people? So they have drawn priority figured out already?
Also, how is it that something like WoW has this figured out but this doesn't?

[BrachyXIV]

I'm not digging for it either. Yoshida does so many interviews with so many different media outlets every year that it is hard to find very specific answers about topics that are not really something the community at large wants or the game needs and therefore are only addressed offhandedly if that interviewer happens to ask about it directly for whatever reason.

Well that doesn't help to this argument. The closest to a quote I could find was someone saying they addressed it during the BETA, you know.. 1.0 when rendering the game at all was an achievement.

[Iscah]

I'm not digging for it either. Yoshida does so many interviews with so many different media outlets every year that it is hard to find very specific answers about topics that are not really something the community at large wants or the game needs and therefore are only addressed offhandedly if that interviewer happens to ask about it directly for whatever reason.

Well that doesn't help to this argument. The closest to a quote I could find was someone saying they addressed it during the BETA, you know.. 1.0 when rendering the game at all was an achievement.

Scroll up. Rongway already posted the relevant interview (from October 2020) hours before you had this conversation about how you don't know where to find the interview.

[BrachyXIV]

Scroll up. Rongway already posted the relevant interview (from October 2020) hours before you had this conversation about how you don't know where to find the interview.

You mean the one I also replied to? where they talk about more icons for your permanently placed name tag and what can be drawn on it? Which has nothing to do with Chat Bubbles popping as that is already a thing happening on NPCs?