Bugged mob shows that mob HP is no more 32 bit integer

[Nevcairiel]

My dear, cmovl is a branching instruction.

Maybe you should look up what cmov actually does, and how it works, it does not branch, which is why its so efficient to use them when appropriate.
It avoids the entire headache of mis-predicted branches entirely.

PS:
You keep coming back to "high level language" excuse, but if you write something like a WoW Server, its likely it favors efficiency over high-level C++ constructs. But at the end of the day we all can just speculate how their servers are written.

[rda]

It avoids the entire headache of mis-predicted branches entirely.

No.

But let's leave this for another day.

[Kuntantee]

Maybe you should look up what cmov actually does, and how it works, it does not branch, which is why its so efficient to use them when appropriate.
It avoids the entire headache of mis-predicted branches entirely.

PS:
You keep coming back to "high level language" excuse, but if you write something like a WoW Server, its likely it favors efficiency over high-level C++ constructs. But at the end of the day we all can just speculate how their servers are written.

He used cmovl, which is a branching instruction. Writing direct assembly code is often going to make your code slower. There is only handful of assembly coders left in this world capable of producing piece of code faster than what is produced by compilers. I am quite positive their server code is overwhelmingly non-assembly code. Writing assembly code, when you can write it in C or C++ is almost an anti-pattern these days.

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Neg sets AF, CF, OF, PF, SF, ZF, cmovl uses SF and OF (IIRC). He'd need different instructions for floating-point, but the idea is clear.

Anyway, we are boring everyone, let's let the thread continue.

Okay, after checking, You seem to be correct. I thought neg is XORing the register and moving on. His code might work, but I am not willing to trace it.

I was, perhaps, a bit too aggressive on my claims (on assembly part, I still stand against my claims regarding C++). Neg example has been a reality check for me. So for that, I apologize from @Cracked.

[Deleted]

For people saying big numbers aren't relatable. If you are a potato then that is essentially correct.

Damage values in billions and trillions are fine, as long as the stat values on gear don't become too big.

Diablo 3 is good on that regard, readable numbers on gear and big damage numbers in combat.

[Nevcairiel]

Writing direct assembly code is often going to make your code slower. There is only handful of assembly coders left in this world capable of producing piece of code faster than what is produced by compilers. I am quite positive their server code is overwhelmingly non-assembly code. Writing assembly code, when you can write it in C or C++ is almost an anti-pattern these days.

That depends what kind of code you are writing. Compilers are inherently terrible at using SIMD instruction sets like SSE2/3/4, AVX1/2 etc, so if you have data that lends itself to using those instructions, you can get quite significant speed ups out of some handcrafted assembly (ie. you wouldn't have fast video encoders or decoders without such hand-crafted assembly) - although other than that case it is true that writing "simple" x86 assembly is largely not very useful except in small corner case, and the amount of hand-written assembly in WoW is probably very low (if any at all), it does however help to know what your compiler does when you use certain code, especially if you work in something relatively low-level like C (and C++ to some degree)

[Deleted]

ITT: 32 bit integer breaks role playing. It reached the epitome of nerdiness.

[Myta]

Yes, that suggests double-precision floating-point, the problems "going above" he mentions are loss of data - that's tolerable if you are careful, so it's not a hard ceiling at all.

They are using floating-point values instead of 64-bit integers because the extra digits provided by 64-bit integers would just immediately be lost the moment they start doing combat computations as those integers would be converted to the same floating-point values with a 53-bit mantissa.

It's good, squishes are stupid.

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It's for those reasons exactly that squishes should not be done. Hitting for 250,000 damage one day then suddenly hitting for 2,500 damage tomorrow is stupid, it breaks continuity.

I can't wait for 8.0 and getting kicked for only doing a billion DPS.

[Kuntantee]

That depends what kind of code you are writing. Compilers are inherently terrible at using SIMD instruction sets like SSE2/3/4, AVX1/2 etc, so if you have data that lends itself to using those instructions, you can get quite significant speed ups out of some handcrafted assembly (ie. you wouldn't have fast video encoders or decoders without such hand-crafted assembly) - although other than that case it is true that writing "simple" x86 assembly is largely not very useful except in small corner case, and the amount of hand-written assembly in WoW is probably very low (if any at all), it does however help to know what your compiler does when you use certain code, especially if you work in something relatively low-level like C (and C++ to some degree)

I was talking about mainstream (at least for PCs, anyway) x86 architecture, which some compilers optimize quite well.

[Deleted]

About time they did this. I don't know why they even went thorugh this stat squish, which made everything up to i463 (level 90) completely unbalanced. Including leveling which got ridiculously easy post-squish. It was pretty damn easy before but now, hot damn.

No more stat squishes for a good while I guess.

Big numbers aren't really a problem. That's why SI affixes were invented, to help present large numbers in an easily readable fashion.

I don't really see any difference between having 300 health and 300k health. Or doing 13,2k and 13,2M dps. Evergrowing numbers just make old content farmable and eventually oneshottable (as is, one shotting bosses).

[huth]

Except that those numbers just look stupid.
Soooo, that's a reason.

Not a technical reason, though. Nor a good one to base decisions on.

[apeiron1234]

oh nice dood thats cool... or maybe we could just squish it back down to BC or something and not let it get out of control? i saw in 110 pvp people have around 2-3 million hp. numbers this big is fucking stupid.

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Not a technical reason, though. Nor a good one to base decisions on.

pumping out massive numbers is stupid. the only people who care about it are the monkeys that worry about DPS meters.

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oh wow i just died.

what did u get hit for?

lets see i got shot for 1,723,910 damage.

[Aleksej89]

There is no sense in using huge numbers for visual purposes...
Our human minds are not made to interact with 250000000 of anything - such huge numbers are unrelatable, feel meaningless and inflated, and are hard to read swiftly.

During fast combat it is hard to notice the difference between a 25000000 and 250000000 and 2500000000 during the split second it is displayed.
I got no clue did that number have 6 or 7 or 8 zeroes in that split second it was shown during fast paced combat.
Only way for me to see for sure is to check damage log after combat, which is just not doable during intense fighting.

Also it becomes utterly senseless to just keep adding zeroes to things like spell damage...
Does my spell deal 4 billion damage or 3 trillion damage or 9 septillion damage... who cares, those numbers stopped being relateable about 6 zeroes ago.

Honestly i am in favor of an even greater stat squish.
Huge numbers feel idiotic and pointless, so much that i actually turn off damage-text display because it is just a garbled mess of huge numbers.

[Kryos]

There is no sense in using huge numbers for visual purposes...
Our human minds are not made to interact with 250000000 of anything - such huge numbers are unrelatable, feel meaningless and inflated, and are hard to read swiftly.

Just use a different format to show them.

During fast combat it is hard to notice the difference between a 25000000 and 250000000 and 2500000000 during the split second it is displayed.

25000000 = 25,000,000 = 25m
250000000 = 250,000,000 = 250m
2500000000 = 2,500,000,000 = 2,500m or 2.5b

Now we have the difference between 25m 250m and 2.5b - that's very easy.
So it's no problem to have numbers of thousands of billions without a visual problem at all.
The only problem I see is the way numbers are displayed all over the globe especially in asian countrys. Blizzard needs to force the us system on all people or many countrys with unique number formats could run into visual trouble. For example. Big numbers in China are displayed very different.

shí = ten
yì = hundred million
shí yì = billion

bǎi = hundred
wàn = ten thousand
bǎi wàn = million

A number like 1,101,110,000 would be written out as 十一亿一百一十一万 (shí-yī yì yībǎi yīshí-yī wàn).

So you need to do additions in your head to get big numbers or remember all the symbols for the combinations like 百万 for million.

[huth]

During fast combat it is hard to notice the difference between a 25000000 and 250000000 and 2500000000 during the split second it is displayed.

And you know what? 99.9% of the time, it's a) completely irrelevant that you can't read them in combat and b) can be inferred from how fast the enemy dies. You might not be able to read the difference, but you will notice doing ten times as much damage.

The only reason those numbers give you trouble is because you're trying to deal with them in a way that doesn't make any sense in the first place. Not because there's anything wrong with the numbers.

[ls-]

25000000 = 25,000,000 = 25m
250000000 = 250,000,000 = 250m
2500000000 = 2,500,000,000 = 2,500m or 2.5b

Now we have the difference between 25m 250m and 2.5b - that's very easy.
So it's no problem to have numbers of thousands of billions without a visual problem at all.
The only problem I see is the way numbers are displayed all over the globe especially in asian countrys. Blizzard needs to force the us system on all people or many countrys with unique number formats could run into visual trouble. For example. Big numbers in China are displayed very different.

shí = ten
yì = hundred million
shí yì = billion

bǎi = hundred
wàn = ten thousand
bǎi wàn = million

A number like 1,101,110,000 would be written out as 十一亿一百一十一万 (shí-yī yì yībǎi yīshí-yī wàn).

So you need to do additions in your head to get big numbers or remember all the symbols for the combinations like 百万 for million.

That's not how numbers are displayed in Chinese.

Chinese dun use thousands and millions for number abbreviation, they use 10k and 100m, other Chinese based languages (Japanese and Korean) use same system.

100,000 is 10万, 1,000,000,000 is 10亿. And that's not an issue for Asian gamers T_T Even abbreviation w/ decimals isn't a problem, so 11.1万 is totally fine and easy to understand.

People rarely (almost never) use traditional digits (〇一二三**六*八*) and number 10 (十) in gaming or anything computer related. In everyday life traditional digits are often used to write years, cuz they are pronounced as separate digits and it looks quite cool, e.g. 二〇〇六年 (you literally say two zero zero six year, er ling ling liu nian) is a year of 2006.

P.S. MMOC can't handle Chinese digits 4, 5, 7 and 9 T_T

[Schizoide]

About time they did this. I don't know why they even went thorugh this stat squish, which made everything up to i463 (level 90) completely unbalanced. Including leveling which got ridiculously easy post-squish. It was pretty damn easy before but now, hot damn.

It was a technical limitation; fixing the health cap was obviously a fair amount of work. But now it's done, so no more stat squishes ever again.

[Chickat]

Does that mob have 40 million health, 40 billion, or 40 trillion? Idk the M makes it confusing to me. Id rather they just show the whole number so i can work it out on my own. I still think they should squish though.

[Schizoide]

The mob has 40 trillion HP. What's confusing about the M? It just replaces 6 non-interesting numbers.

You really find 40,384,004M more confusing than 40,384,004,771,993?

If they're going make mobs with trillions of health, they need to add B for billions. 40,384B would be much easier to grasp. But it sounds like that was just a bug.

[ls-]

Yeah, they should add trillions (兆) for Chinese and Koreans and billions (G - gigas, B - billions, mlrd - milliards) for others. Well, addons will take care of it.

[tritus]

It was a technical limitation; fixing the health cap was obviously a fair amount of work. But now it's done, so no more stat squishes ever again.

I wouldn't count on this.