Hey. I quite like looking at numbers, but with the numbers reaching billions it quickly gets confusing to look at. For example, 100 millions is currently displayed 100000000 and thats too many zeros for my ****** eyes. So why isnt it either 100.000.000 or 100BIL instead? Kind of like how ACT is doing it with their latest updates. Makes it so much easier to compare procs and spells instead of having to put your cursor where the dots would be If its abbreviated to 100BIL for example, you could press a button while vieweing the item to see the complete number.
Commas would be nice.. I was thinking it would be another background calculation converting the number programming variable into a 'string' and inserting commas.. But then realized that the flying combat numbers already have commas, so it would be easy enough to utilize those for the chat log numbers. So really no impact at all, the a variable reference (or point) change.
I dunno. If you raid, you probably have all the overhead numbers turned off completely, and use ACT to monitor DPS. And you can pretty precisely control ACT's output.
Even it's an old post, i think it's still valid tbh i haven't played eq2 lots for quite some time but the damage numbers are really to huge to read easy. The damage in the logs and on screen is fine, act really helps understanding those numbers better. But when you examine an old spell and a new spell it get's really hard to read the numbers. I checked for example one of my spells "spell curse VII"@expert and compared it to "Spell Curse VIII" @apprentice .. first the looked nearly similar .. on the second look the VIII does 10times the damage. It would be really nice to see the numbers in the examine window of the spells in a different way. Either with commas every thousand like 100,000,000,000,000 or with as display option to show em as M(illion), B(illion), T(rillion) like 100B or 100,000M I think at some point it happens to many games, that the damage numbers are getting that huge and the ui needs an adjustment to display those numbers in a better way.
Honestly, there's simple RegEx to do the notation. I'm not sure why they couldn't apply formatting this way. Heck, the native code probably has a number formatting module anyway that could be applied (for ex. Ruby on Rails).
They'd have to implement this server side. From what I can see when you mouse over or examine an ability, the server sends a string to your client which is then put onto a billboard texture and then rendered. Without seeing the server source code, I couldn't tell you how to implement it, but since it's likely c or c++, it's not that difficult.
I still think that shortening is more valuable than commas or scientific notation. If something gives 1.497 trillion hit points or damage or anything else - who gives a rodent's hindquarters about anything after the first 4 digits? Less than rounding error.
