Nameless - Hide Your Character's Nameplate

Did you forget what you named your character? No? Tired of having a constant reminder of your character's name trying to burn itself into the middle of your screen?

Nameless is a Windower 4 addon that causes your floating nameplate to disappear as if you were invisible, while keeping your character visible as normal. It's available on Github.



No exciting commands to worry about here outside of load/unload as this addon only has one job. Load it to remove your nameplate. Reload it to force fix if there's an issue. Unloading it returns nameplate visibility to normal.

To load/unload it in-game:
//lua l nameless
//lua u nameless

0.1.4 - Overhaul of event triggers, removing most and replacing them with a per-tick status check. Tested for prism powders, invisibility casts, and spectral jigging. Spectral Jig is still annoying, but functional, as it sometimes flashes the nameplate twice instead of just once. Seems the animation itself is trying to apply the invisibility visual to the client, so sometimes this triggers two ticks' worth of nameplate resets.
0.1.3 - Fixed Prism Powder interaction, making the character opaque when performing an action that should drop invis, and stopped the blip that was happening for every buff that wore off.
0.1.2 - Added an additional check for when the Invisible buff is dropped/expires to try and stop having the visual effect stick even when the buff is gone. Also added a check for when Sneak is applied to force a reset if the player is not also invisible. Noticing some unexpected behavior when a different player applies sneak.
0.1.1 - Fixed a few issues from initial testing: mainly interactions with the Invisible spell/buff.

Your name will occasionally be visible during some situations:

• Interactions with most points and NPCs

• Very briefly after losing the Invisibility buff

• Briefly after zoning

• Very briefly when initially loading the addon

Thanks to the authors of revisible who did all the real work here. I just boiled this down into doing the opposite of its intention, allowing me to finally deal with a 20-year-old annoyance.

As usual, use this sort of junk at your own risk, but please let me know if you find any odd interactions for character opaqueness. I'm sure there's probably some sort of quests or something that will muck with it.

Added a few additional event checks.

In the event anyone's using this and noticed any consistent patterns of odd behavior (generally your character being visible when you're supposed to be invisible, or vice versa) let me know. Seems to be some unexpected interactions with Sneak, which I've attempted to address, but it may not be totally covered yet.

But /names does the same thing and it's been part of the game for 20 years. '-')

that removes all names

Yeah... But removing just your name seems a bit silly if everyone else's is still showing.

In theory you know your own name so you don't need it displayed.

You still need it for everyone else.

(just play in first person 4head)

I know my name, I don't know everyone else running around.

Edit: Will add if you know /names does something different why say it does the same thing?

Haven't seen that happen myself, yet. Related in proximity, though, most of the strange behavior I had seen previously took place in Sortie. Will try and do a few runs again to see if the last round of changes helped.

It's good for avoiding burn-in, as stated above, especially on OLED monitors which are rapidly becoming more available. Also, /names removes the names of NPCs/enemies as well, which may or may not be what you want -- it makes the game feel significantly different.

The need to cursor/tab to everything in order to know its name (PCs, NPCs, and enemies alike) makes playing that way untenable. Didn't know OLEDs also had burn-in issues in general, I was more joking about the ancient monitors I used to use when playing this game.

If the nameplate did something else functional (like a health bar, or icons for your current debuff statuses like FFXII) that'd be one thing, but the only real information you're getting out of it in XI is a constant reminder of your name and the color of whatever you have for Linkshell 1 (unless you get a post-zone hiccup and it shows you LS2 instead).

I think of /names off as a kind of hardcore mode for the game--it is certainly an experience and surprising how hard it makes doing things in even lower level areas.

Early OLEDs, including the first couple generations of OLED computer displays and most existing OLED TVs, do have general burn-in issues similar to the very early TN LCD displays. The newer generation of QD-OLED displays are much less susceptible to burn-in, but not as resistant as modern IPS LCDs, so it's still a consideration.

Thanks for this addon, I will definitely be trying it.

I never want to hide my name. #instagram

I've seen the weird invisible behavior in Sortie even without this addon tbh

anyway i like this, helps add some immersion. thanks for making it

Odd event, that. I'm not sure if those CS are replayable, but I can head down and see if it impacts me after a few rounds.

There's definitely some issue with the speed at which the invisible buff is added/removed. I've found that if I quickly use sneak oil and then prism powder, the character stays visually visible in spite of the buffs.

It may be important to clarify that this is all client side. The game still treats you as invisible or not correctly, it's just the client visual that's getting impacted.

Thanks for this addon, it really helps reduce some of the visual clutter without sacrificing usability like using the /names command.

I am experiencing some of the glitches regarding the invisible status, though. So far from my limited testing, it seems like whenever I self-cast the invisible spell, everything works as expected. However, *every time* consistently I used a prism powder, my character did not turn invisible. Oddly enough, a few times when I manually removed the invisible status effect (to interact with objects, etc.) while not appearing invisible, my character *then* turned invisible (and returned to normal status after interacting with an object).

I first noticed this behavior in Sortie, but I tried testing it while standing around in town, and the behavior is pretty repeatable. Casting invisible works, but prism powders don't. Also, the inconsistently turning invisible only *after* removing the invisible status glitch persists outside of Sortie as well.

Hopefully there's some way to fix this glitch. Additionally, would it be possible to add the ability to hide Trust names as well? Thanks again for your efforts.

Yeah I've found the consistent Prism Powder issue. Going to see if I can find something to catch that.

I've been finding a lot of very brief blips of the name coming back whenever something that involves some sort of fade-out for the character model. Reisenjima water at #9, for example. Also when the camera moves behind a background wall (like the Reisenjima trees) and various animation points with spell effects. It's not horribly distracting, but it's odd.

I will sometimes notice those brief blips when status effects wear off. It hasn't bothered me much, but that might help track down the cause.

Updated: 0.1.3 - Fixed Prism Powder interaction, making the character opaque when performing an action that should drop invis, and stopped the blip that was happening for every buff that wore off.

I had some issues in Sortie tonight with 0.1.3, nothing awful, just occasional bouts of invisibility when I shouldn't have been. I couldn't pin down the exact cause, but it only happened after I had actually been invisible. I was using the Invisible spell, not Prism Powders (or JAs).

Edit: also just discovered that using Spectral Jig results in turning invisible even if it has no effect. Once in that state, seems that you remain invisible until becoming actually invisible and then dropping it.

Edit 2: it appears that even gaining and then losing invisible is somewhat inconsistent at restoring visibility once in that state.

Forgot all about DNC. Probably something to do with both sneak and invis getting applied at the same time. Also hadn't thought to test for instances of the buff where it "has no effect," though I struggle to think of others. I assume Invisible cares about duration from the caster to determine if it can be overridden, but it might be one of those buffs that just deflects additional casts received while active. Guess I'll find out.

Some constructive criticism, you probably shouldn't be using 2 different systems(buffs and entity flags) to decide whether the character is invisible or not. You could just pull the entirety of the entity flags once per frame, and set them such that the character's visibility status always represents what it should be.

Depending how the flags are sent, you may be able to just alter the name bit in the packet that sends them and avoid unnecessary polling. Otherwise, it's also possible to edit the code that draws your own name to begin with, so you don't have to constantly check anything or alter the entity flags.

There are only two other no effect scenarios I can think of:
1) Being already invisible, and having someone other than yourself cast Invisible on you
2) Using Hide or Camouflage while within aggro range of the enemy.

Thanks for the work on this, btw. Despite the quirks it's a really nice improvement to the client.

Edit:

Forgot to address this specifically. It's a little bit weird. Invisible, like Sneak, cannot be overwritten once active. However, the act of casting a spell causes it to wear off before it's reapplied by the spell cast, which is why you can overwrite it on yourself, but others cannot overwrite it on you.

What the ***? Ive been playing since 2005 and didnt know this. Why must i be so slow