Chat Text Bubbles over Player Characters?

[BrachyXIV]

There is a finite limit to the number of entities they can draw on the screen at once, and the total number of all entities, optional or otherwise, needs to be less than this number. This is an actual reason they have cited in the past for not adding features like special indicators on hotbar button corners or item icons.

But they haven't even gotten draw priorities right for mobs and party members yet. I'd hope they spend time fixing that before adding even more drawables over the limit that might be wrongly prioritized over more important drawables.

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

[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.

[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]

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.

How is this any different rom the prisms people already use? that follows them around rendering the oh so memory intensive animated png?