name above head?

is there any way to edit the name above your head with Bukkit?
player.setDisplayName() seems to only change your name in chat.

 

The name above the head cannot be changed mid-session. The name is only sent to the other clients when a client connects.

To change the name above a player's head, you have to despawn the player from the world (and effectively despawn the player from all other clients) and then respawn him with a new name.

I'm not entirely sure on how to easily broadcast the necessary despawn and spawn packet to all other clients, but you'll want to do that after you set the target player's display name.

 

Couldn't you do it pre-spawn, when the player sends the connection package-thing to the server?

 

no, I need it to be changeable after login unfortunately.

 

After looking through the Bukkit Docs, it seems that there is currently no documented way to send the despawn and spawn packets at the moment.
--- merged: Jan 31, 2011 8:38 PM ---
Unless you want to obtain the actual socket stream for every client that has the target player loaded, and manually build and send the de-spawn and spawn packets through them.

You can find documentation on these packetes here:

http://wiki.vg/Protocol#Destroy_Entity_.280x1D.29
http://wiki.vg/Protocol#Named_Entity_Spawn_.280x14.29

However, please make sure not to send any of these packets to a client if the target player isn't currently loaded for that client. Players are only spawned in clients when the come into sight--not when they spawn. The length and width of the square region of loaded chunks for each client at any given time is 22x22 chunks iirc. So only send these packets to another client if the client is within 11 chunks (176 blocks) of the player.

 

Ahhh thank you so much (for the link)! I thought I was going to have to go packet sniffing myself. I knew somebody must have already done work on this kind of development though.

Time to get to work on my from scratch server , and to think I was just going to make a plugin... .

 

I was writing an SMP server in C# a few months ago. Then Notch added server-side Inventory and, in combination with other side-projects, I became discouraged from working further.

If you write a custom SMP server, keep in mind that it is unrealistic to assume that you will be able to properly emulate the various mobs, minecarts, and redstone without dedicating a huge amount of time to the project. It even took me a good week to get lighting down, and I didn't even get the chance to begin water/lava physics.

 

Thanks, but trust me, I know what I am getting into.