Endorsed!

 

I want these too! Especially if they have a toggle option they would make for a great QoL improvement.

Agreed

7+ years now and Bioware still hasn't delivered on their promise to fix/re-introduce chat bubbles. And they are still avoiding to talk about the issue like a pest. Rumor and innuendo is that since they promised they'd announce chat bubbles at a Cantina, they cancelled Cantinas so they'd never have to do so!

Happy thread Anniversary!

7+ years now and Bioware still hasn't delivered on their promise to fix/re-introduce chat bubbles. And they are still avoiding to talk about the issue like a pest. Rumor and innuendo is that since they promised they'd announce chat bubbles at a Cantina, they cancelled Cantinas so they'd never have to do so!

 

Happy thread Anniversary!

My personal opinion is that while a nice RP.thing to add, probably not a huge priority for them. I don't think they have forgotten but they probably don't see a big enough ROI for the game especially if the issue they were trying to fix would involve more and cost more then what they would need to put in.

While some kind of update would be nice, don't see this happening, if ever.

My personal opinion is that while a nice RP.thing to add, probably not a huge priority for them. I don't think they have forgotten but they probably don't see a big enough ROI for the game especially if the issue they were trying to fix would involve more and cost more then what they would need to put in.

 

While some kind of update would be nice, don't see this happening, if ever.

Not ever giving it any priority over 7+ years is just inexcusable. But I guess if they can't sell it on the Cartel store it's just not high priority for this game nowadays.

Please no. Trolls can already make open world RP impossible to do by spamming built-in emotes to scroll the chat window endlessly upwards (since /ignore doesn't block those messages in chat). It would be even worse if they could cover the whole screen with chat bubbles at the same time.

You could just toggle them off if you don't want.

You could just toggle them off if you don't want.

Except that the main "push" for even having them is from the RP crowd, who are the indicated trollees...

You could just toggle them off if you don't want.

Rather, off by default, and toggle on if you want it.

Not everyone is interested in RP (sorta grown-up version of playing with dolls).

Ooo, dev post.

... 2012

Since I haven't played in a while and got a friend referral I was hoping by now there ought to be at least a basic toggle option to enable chat bubbles available. Alas, it still isn't the case. I was going to subscribe, but since this feature still isn't in, I'll let my free friend referral time run out instead.

Come on, "Bioware" or rather EAw, it can't be that hard, can it? But I guess you don't even want to try as it's more important for you to waste development time on the cartel market and ripping players off than adding useful and long-promised features to the game!

Thing is, they probably wouldn't even need to fix it. The problem (as the GUI dev at a time has stated) was that chat bubbles were unoptimized and ate up 400MB of video memory. This was a problem back when standard video cards had 128MB-256MB Video RAM. Nowadays even the lowest end video cards have at least 2GB of Video RAM, so they could easily just add the old code without any fixes and it would work fine for most people (and the rest could just toggle them off). Plus, they said they actually knew how to fix the memory footprint issue (although I doubt any of the so-called "devs" of today still know how to), since they did the same to nameplates before launch just weren't able to apply it to chat bubbles in time for launch.

 

Not ever giving it any priority over 7+ years is just inexcusable. But I guess if they can't sell it on the Cartel store it's just not high priority for this game nowadays.

It's been 10 long years... Really what would possibly be the issue with implementing this in 2022? Fingers crossed for the anniversary celebration timeline to contain or result in this feature being added.

With the 64-bit client in the works, hopefully it will allow the developers to finally implement the option to enable speech bubbles for /say, /yell and /emote chat without any excuses.

1 hour ago, Glzmo said:

With the 64-bit client in the works, hopefully it will allow the developers to finally implement the option to enable speech bubbles for /say, /yell and /emote chat without any excuses.

Why do you think the bitness of the client will make the slightest difference to the server performance issues they cited as the reason for dropping chat bubbles?

I don't want 64-bit chat bubbles any more than I wanted 32-bit chat bubbles. 😂

On 3/3/2023 at 12:53 AM, SteveTheCynic said:

Why do you think the bitness of the client will make the slightest difference to the server performance issues they cited as the reason for dropping chat bubbles?

Server performance issues weren't the problem. According to Mr. Kolek who actually worked on them back in the day, the issue was that they were eating up too much video memory on the client ("up to 400MB" unoptimized, which was a huge deal in the day of 64-512MB cards being the norm, but is miniscule now that 4-24GB cards are common, which together with the common amount of system memory on today's PCs the 32 bit client can't fully address by the way) and thus tanking performance. A 64 bit client can address more memory than a 32 bit client could. You can read about it in the first post of this very topic. Thus it may be an opportune time to add them back in.

1 hour ago, Glzmo said:

the 32 bit client can't fully address by the way

Duh.  I've been a professional developer for 34 years, so please try to avoid lecturing me on basic stuff like that.

In any event, the problem that you cite has been (mostly)(1) solved by graphics cards having more memory has *exactly* nothing to do with the bitness of the SWTOR client.

(1)  My two other machines that still have their original GT430s (one each) from when I bought them in 2011 *still* only have 1GB of video memory.  They can, but mostly don't, run SWTOR.

On 3/5/2023 at 3:54 PM, SteveTheCynic said:

Duh.  I've been a professional developer for 34 years, so please try to avoid lecturing me on basic stuff like that.

Sorry, I didn't know you were such a revered pro! It doesn't hurt to post it anyway, since other people that may stumble upon the post may not be as experienced as you are.

On 3/5/2023 at 3:54 PM, SteveTheCynic said:

In any event, the problem that you cite has been (mostly)(1) solved by graphics cards having more memory has *exactly* nothing to do with the bitness of the SWTOR client.

Of course the 64 bit client wouldn't be required to solve the issue as current graphics cards would just brute force the problem due to higher amounts of video memory typical these days, but it was meant more as an incentive/motivation/remove an excuse to tackle the issue again as there is potentially more memory to use now in general, so the Biowarians may not be as reserved to put it back on the agenda as they would have been before.

On 3/5/2023 at 3:54 PM, SteveTheCynic said:

(1)  My two other machines that still have their original GT430s (one each) from when I bought them in 2011 *still* only have 1GB of video memory.  They can, but mostly don't, run SWTOR.

Nice to see that even such slow non-gaming cards have had plenty of memory to use chat bubbles many years ago, although the GPU itself may be the bottleneck there that prevents the game to be run well.
I still have an old system with two 3dfx Voodoo 2 12MB cards in SLI in them which sadly doesn't run the game.

3 hours ago, Glzmo said:

Nice to see that even such slow non-gaming cards have had plenty of memory to use chat bubbles many years ago, although the GPU itself may be the bottleneck there that prevents the game to be run well.
I still have an old system with two 3dfx Voodoo 2 12MB cards in SLI in them which sadly doesn't run the game.

Those GT430s are absolutely the bottleneck.  For a while(1), one of them had the GTX1080 that used to be in my main machine, and with that in there, it could get north of 150fps standing on Fleet driving a 1920x1080 screen at Ultra, instead of 20-25 fps at Medium with shadows forced off.

(1) Until the screen died of being dead, and the only spare screen I had was one that only had a VGA connector, which is the only connector type the 1080 *doesn't* have.