Serenity

Tired of guessing what emote that lalafell NPC may be performing somewhere deep in the crowd of 50+ scantily clad roegadyns with namazu heads and their trusty flying whale companions covering 90% of your screen? Wouldn't it be nice if you could just hide them for a few minutes?

Serenity (now!) allows toggling whether to cull other player characters; including visuals, sound effects, performance and targetability; along with any mounts, minions or pets/summons belonging to them. Optionally characters being in your party, alliance or on your friend list can remain visible and interactible as normal while culling others.

There are three different ways to toggle player character display:

• []The application provides a systray icon. Whether to cull characters or not can be set by clicking on it and selecting the aptly named "Hide characters" / "Show characters" options from its context menu.

  []You can register a pair of hotkeys (key combinations) for hiding / showing characters.

  This can be used while in-game in fullscreen mode without having to tab out.

• The application can be executed with the commandline arguments -hide or -show.

  If you have a keyboard that has macro keys, you can set these up to call Serenity thusly for example, or you can come up with some other scripting approach or what-have-you.

  Compatibility

  Serenity has been written in a way that should facilitate being somewhat resistant to moderate changes to the game. That said there can of course be no guarantees that future patches / expansions won't break it. The current version has been verified to work with version 5. 58 of the standalone version of the game, running under Windows 10 (v19042. 1348).

  Assuming it will still work with Endwalker, it will probably work with the Steam version as well, but again, there can be no guarantees.

  Stability

  Serenity is provided as-is. It should be stable but as I'm a lone developer who has been working on this on and off in my free time there could well be issues that I haven't found that occur under special situations or when using particular hardware / driver configurations.

  If you decide to give this a try, be prepared that it could cause the game to crash. So it may be unwise to try it after a 3k+ person log-in queue for example.

  Requirements

  As mentioned above, Serenity has been developed on a machine running Windows 10 19042. 1348. It will most likely work with other versions of Windows 10 as well, and possibly 7/8/11 as well, but that is untested.

  Likewise I have only been able to test it with the standalone version of the game, though the Steam version will most likely work as well.

  Depending on your UAC settings, administrative privileges may be needed in order to