Essentials: Ability to change player name above head

[Jadiction]

Currently, Essentials provides the ability to change your display name and with that name change, you can have it show in chat and even in the tab list (scoreboard) as well as the prefix, which is great.

The last step to fully modifying a player's identity (and always showing their prefix aka rank) is to add the ability to add the prefix to their nametag above their head (and even show their nickname instead).

I'm aware other plugins can do this, but usually they become abandoned and provide all of the features above when Essentials does 2 / 3 features and it'd make sense to not require another plugin to modify 1 last name feature (and it seems simple enough to implement as well). The fewer plugins, the better and I plan to keep Essentials, so this would be great.

Would be much appreciated, thanks for reading!

[pop4959]

Not aware of this being possible. Can you give examples of these "other plugins" you're describing?

[Jadiction]

https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/tab-1-5-x-1-14-x-reborn.57806/
Example:

https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/nametagedit.3836/
Example:

[Jadiction]

For more information, there's an option to:

1. Add the role prefix to chat via Essentials
2. Add the role prefix to tab list via Essentials

My suggestion is to add a prefix for nametags to fully complete using Essentials to customize someone's name.

[pop4959]

Thanks, for now I'll mark this as "open to PR". As long as it can be cleanly implemented, I think this is a very reasonable addition. Definitely makes sense given the other options available for displaying the user's name.

[mdcfe]

This used to be possible with the original Essentials several years ago, but from what I recall it was removed for some vague issue to do with the tab list (or the API might have just changed).

[pop4959]

I feel like I recall it as well, but maybe it is like the recipe issue. I think it's worth keeping this open though until someone confirms that this does work or not.

One easy thing to look into would be: are the suggested plugins above compatible with Essentials? If open source, do they use the Bukkit API or NMS? I can't look into it right now but if anyone checks into that it would be helpful to know.

[Jadiction]

@pop4959 The above plugins are compatible with Essentials, I've used both. Haven't looked at their source code though.

[pop4959]

Sweet, good to know. Next step will be to take a deeper look. Essentials is not a plugin that tends to break significantly from version to version (1.13 aside, as it pretty much broke any plugin that dealt with blocks -- which is most of them). This is due to low usage of NMS code. I think this has a pretty good likelihood of being (re?)added if it only uses API. We'll see though, I don't personally have the time to look into this further for now. It is open to PR though, so anyone can come along and check it out.

[zanedb]

Considering writing a PR, would really like this for my server. New-ish to plugin dev & haven't worked with Essentials codebase before tho, any advice?

[pop4959]

Considering writing a PR, would really like this for my server. New-ish to plugin dev & haven't worked with Essentials codebase before tho, any advice?

Do some research first, such as:

• Is this possible in the Bukkit API? Perhaps investigate into the example plugins given above, if they are open source.
• Does the API support versions 1.8.8-1.16.1?
• Any potential history or leftover code from when Essentials (might) have had this feature in the past.
• How feasible is the addition? What is the scope of the change?

Once you have some answers for that (and anything else I may have missed that was mentioned above), then you can suggest something and we can give you some advice. :)

[zanedb]

Thank you for that wonderful response! I'll take a look and get back to this soon.