The illusion of depth looks terrible when throttled. Imagine how text labels jump between sizes, but for the whole nameplate. I tried with 1/10th second and 1/20th second intervals, and they both looked pretty bad.

_VirtualPlates only uses one OnUpdate handler to update scales. If you mean the SetScript wrapper for OnUpdate, it's used to swap the "self" parameter with _VirtualPlates' replacement frame, and the mod wouldn't function properly in all cases without it. However, that wrapper only gets called if a different nameplate mod sets OnUpdate handlers for individual plates. If your nameplate mod doesn't have OnUpdate handlers for each plate, neither will _VirtualPlates.

I've optimized it as much as I can, but there's no way to avoid so much processing. Comparing its CPU time relative to other mods isn't very useful though, since regular nameplate mods perform different things. A better metric would be milliseconds used per second, or something similar.

Even with better metrics though, the best way to judge this addon's performance is to try it out and see how badly it affects your gameplay. People with high-end machines probably won't notice any FPS drop except in the biggest mob packs. People with older computers might still be willing to trade off some FPS for the added positional awareness.


As for changing the nameplate hitbox in combat, that's a restriction placed by Blizzard that no mod can get around. In my experience though, the game seems to select the nameplate under my cursor with reasonable accuracy, even with a few overlapping plates. Even when it doesn't, a second click in the same spot usually cycles to the next closest plate.

Make sure to update _VirtualPlates to version 3.3.0.1. Nameplates got changed slightly in the 3.3 patch and broke the older version.

I haven't seen a crash yet (with the default configuration), but I'll try a few heroics with it on just to be sure. Thanks for helping me look into this.