Insane Difficulty: Alternatives to 5 digit damage display - Insane Difficulty

Hey guys, just thought I'd open up a brainstorming thread for the best way to represent 10,000+ in the game while we wait for v9. As most of you know, every time damage or healing is done, up to 4 objects appear for a brief time. Unfortunately, this does not translate well to a number with 5 digits.

The current implementation fudges support for up to 31,999 by making every single object in that memory space correspond to a different number... meaning a green zero is equal to 16, a blue 7 is equal to 27, and an M is equal to 10. While this is definitely functional and provides the maximum amount of information, it is sometimes hard to read and unintuitive, needing to be explained to nearly everyone before they understand it.

As such, I'm hoping we can brainstorm a better way to represent 5 digit numbers in 4 objects. Note that increasing the number of objects to 5 is NOT an option because it would have a major VRAM memory cost, reducing the maximum number of targettable enemies at a time. Here are the rules:

• Each object can be different, but must fit in an 8x8 space
  
• No more than 32 unique objects may be used
  
  • 4 of the objects must be M, I, S, and the cursor
    
  • 20 of the objects must be 0~9 for both damage and healing
  
  
• Damage must support 0~30,000
  
• Healing must support 0~9999 and 30,000
  
• The result must be easy to read in the span of 1 second
  
• The result must be easy to understand without special explanation
  
• The result must not lose critical information

There are also other considerations, such as how much additional ROM memory is required to do it and how visually appealing it is, but these can be weighed against other options. For now, let's just come up with potential solutions, then figure out how to implement them later.

keep 0 to 9999 as it is
and 10+ could get rewritten as
100h (h meaning hecto, 100, like k is for 1000)
or 10.0k if you can spare 10 display variations for .0 to .9

so 28533 damage would be diplayed in 4 objects as
2 8 .5 k

Praetarius5018, on 27 January 2017 - 09:07 AM, said:

Unfortunately, there's only 8 "free" slots for different variations. A rather inconvenient number, I know.

As for the rest of your idea, I had a similar one, but with k instead of h. I've even made a picture showing what it would look like:



Using "h" definitely gives an extra digit of information compared to "k", but I'm worried that "h" isn't as universally understood to mean "100" as "k" is to mean "1000". So the question is whether the information lost by that digit is more important than the familiarity gained by using "k".

Of course, there might be other ways to do this as well. Can anyone think of a compact symbol that very clearly indicates "x100"?

I had to lookup h myself, but h = hundred shoudn't be that hard to guess.

If there's not enough numbers, how about just "cheating" a bit with the rounding?
Let's see, you have 8 slots. One for K, and 7 for:
.1 .2 .3 .5 .6 .8 .9
so it would come down to .4K damage you'd display .3K (in case of .0 just don't display it at all)
not entirely accurate, but we already lose 2 digits at the end.

It's actually two for K... the damage K and the heal K (they're different colors). Still, cheating here isn't a bad idea (we have to cheat in some fashion regardless).

How about these eight symbols?
White: .0 .2 .4 .6 .8 K
Green: .0 K

It's evenly spaced, so the max "information" lost is 199, or less than 2% in the worst case. It also covers 30k for healing (this is something bosses do). While the .0 is technically unneeded, it has two major benefits: it adds clarity to someone who would otherwise be unsure of how accurate "10K" is, and it means we don't need a special case to display it differently. The latter, of course, saves ROM usage.

or you could actually modify the damage to round down in that manner making the info loss 0% /joke

why would 2 versions of K be needed but only one for each of the .x numbers?
just saw healing is either <10K or a full 30K

For reference, here's what it might look like with a precision of 200, displayed in thousands:

i would say just pop up another display showing the missing digits

for example
mario inflicts 157908 damage to one enemy (i know thats impossible but just for example purposes of course)

the first damage pop up would show the 157

then the next would show the 908

could be done as follows

enemy

157
908

just my idea

for ten thousands..

enemy

79
971

or if u just wanna move each number over one at a time then it would look like this

enemy


7997
1

enemy

1579
08

whichever works better i suppse
im pretty sure that'll be hard to confuse
so long as u can read left to right top to bottom

this would allow us to get into the millions in damage if possible..given that will open up 8 digits four per row

this is presuming of course its possible to add another row of displays for damage

might possibly need to make the numbers for damage smaller when using the second display though

or just add a display right next to the already existant display that gets used if an enemy takes more then 9999 damage side by side instead of top to bottom
display.....display
....1.............2
..9999.......9999

using spacebar didn't seperate the numbers well..

hense the dots

gamerX459, on 31 January 2017 - 06:20 PM, said:

It's not an issue of location. We can't have more than 4 objects due to memory limitations.

Doomsday, on 31 January 2017 - 07:13 PM, said:

dang that sucks
at first i thought it was location cause u couldn't fit all the numbers in there..but if its memory..
different story then
i thought u could use extra memory for it from doing it the way i suggested but i suppose that may not help as much
now that i think about it
something tells me we might need to break the memory limitations at some point somehow

I' like to throw the third option here; isn't there a way to appropiately balance the game's growths without resorting to 5 digits? Just to brainstorm. I don't know how the game's formulas work, but you might be messing with critical things like information display, when the elegant solution would be to rebalance the game with 4 digits.

But I don't know anything about the game. Just trying to be useful.

Hart-Hunt, on 03 February 2017 - 06:10 AM, said:

You're completely right about this, but this hack has been doing 5 digit damage for multiple major versions. Also, people seem to like bigger numbers:

http://www.insanedif...sion-of-smrpga/

Doomsday, on 03 February 2017 - 09:57 AM, said:

I kinda thought the way it was already was good enough already. Could there be a thread just explaining what the symbols and letters mean so ppl who aren't familiar will know, or at the very least get an idea of how much damage they're doing rather than trying to fix something that was stable to begin with? Games already packed with other awesome things though my only issue with it was the feeling of always having to use peach cuz her ultima did the most damage and was as consistent as a regular melee attack.

Darkcelestrian, on 03 February 2017 - 11:00 AM, said:

Just to avoid confusion, this has already been added at this point. There could always be a better idea, though...

Doomsday, on 03 February 2017 - 11:06 AM, said:

if the numbers are over 9999 then why not make it 3 numbers with the letter k? Like if a boss heals for 1 life and a life is 30k hp if I'm correct. Would it be easy to just make it 030k or do letters play a special part in the code cuz I'm not knowledgeable on all that stuff. I only suggest that cuz if you're regularly doing over 9999 damage then the hundreds and below numbers tend to not matter as much anymore.

Darkcelestrian, on 03 February 2017 - 01:50 PM, said:

You might want to read the thread. We're way past that and instead are showing 3 actual digits

It'll look something like this:

Doomsday, on 03 February 2017 - 02:37 PM, said:

Ah, well my bad lol. That pic is exactly what I meant.

Well, simple answer, represent anything above 9999 in terms of thousands like 10,000 = 10xx ... then 20,000 = 20xx ... then 21,000 = 21xx. Very Simple and Easy to understand. You can't report the full value so its all relative in terms of the thousand figure about 9999. Woah, forget that I said that, since, someone said something better. How about this, display all damage in one area of the screen, for both your allies and the enemies, maybe rewrite the number's formula, all of which I know nothing about. All goodness, I'll wait for the beta, also I'll keep the previous one 8.5 or something, since it has an easy and hard mod, and I have them both on my original xbox.

Sorry if i'm giving a bad idea, but is the infinite symbol possible to show?

I mean this symbol ∞
So maybe you can show the last digit into that symbol to give the sensation of a double zero

Like, for example: 25,456 damage would be 254∞ xD i dont know if that symbol could help or even be shown xD but thats what i thought xD

Altho it seems like a very similar idea to the 30.8k picture... i really belive that picture is self explanatory and an awesome solution to the problem