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

[Lorianus]

IIRC, that's the biggest issue w/ last squish, many people on the forums complained about suddenly feeling weaker and it sucked. It's not a cool thing from RP pov.

I can only talk for me but after about 2-3 days of wierdness in the WoD prepatch everything went back to normal for my "brain" numbers wise.

[rda]

I can only talk for me but after about 2-3 days of wierdness in the WoD prepatch everything went back to normal for my "brain" numbers wise.

10 million people feeling weird for 2-3 days is big. If they can avoid it, they should.

That's assuming nobody feels weird or bad about the squish after 2-3 days, which is not the case at all.

[ls-]

I can only talk for me but after about 2-3 days of wierdness in the WoD prepatch everything went back to normal for my "brain" numbers wise.

I'm a guy, who doesn't really care about numbers he sees on the screen. Squish itself didn't bother me, however, running legacy raids is a bit annoying

[Jessicka]

I can only talk for me but after about 2-3 days of wierdness in the WoD prepatch everything went back to normal for my "brain" numbers wise.

It didn't even take days, it took minutes because the sense of how fast you killed things didn't change at all. Unless you're reading off every tick of every spell every time damage is dealt, it's pretty much irrelevant visual noise that has no impact on gameplay.

There's also a small matter of server and client performance when you start making a lot of very big calculations.

[Kuntantee]

Zorbrix has confirmed this, and the details he gave suggests its stored as a double precision floating point number (by the characteristic 2^53 limit, which isn't an actual limit, just when numbers get too high to be stored precise, which could result in problems)

However, this does not entirely exclude another squish going forward. Outrageous numbers on gear and whatnot still seem rather silly to many of us. At least for Legion though they don't need to resort to silly phase mechanics to make mobs have sufficient HP to kill.

Floating points will have comparison problems because they aren't precise. I actually haven't worked exclusively with double precisions, but for 32-bit floating points, it is a comparison nightmare. You have to implement a fixed-point comparison procedure which will slow things down extensively.

[rda]

There's also a small matter of server and client performance when you start making a lot of very big calculations.

The effect from doing computations with bigger numbers is negligible.

[Dhrizzle]

If you don't know what 'continuity' means, look it up in the dictionary.

It doesn't make sense for a hero to wake up and suddenly start hitting / healing / whatever for less than yesterday, there's no reason for that. It does make sense for him to start hitting for more when he gets a new weapon from defeating a harder boss. Yes, ever growing numbers create other problems, but "solving" these problems by scaling everything down is way worse than just leaving them be - and there are ways to help tackle them in the UI ("megadamage" is one, displaying scaled percentages is another).

As far as "a hero" is concerned the squish never happened, the numbers we see are for a gameplay perspective and nothing to do with RP. All that really matters is how many hits it takes to kill a monster.

[rda]

Floating points will have comparison problems because they aren't precise. I actually haven't worked exclusively with double precisions, but for 32-bit floating points, it is a comparison nightmare. You have to implement a fixed-point comparison procedure which will slow things down extensively.

No problems if you stay within 53-bit mantissa.

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As far as "a hero" is concerned the squish never happened, the numbers we see are for a gameplay perspective and nothing to do with RP. All that really matters is how many hits it takes to kill a monster.

Fine, change "a hero" to "a player".

[Nevcairiel]

Floating points will have comparison problems because they aren't precise. I actually haven't worked exclusively with double precisions, but for 32-bit floating points, it is a comparison nightmare. You have to implement a fixed-point comparison procedure which will slow things down extensively.

Anyone working with floating points should be well aware that doing flat out equality checks is just not very wise. This process is well documented and any seasoned programmer will know how to handle floating point values, both single and double precision.

[Jessicka]

The effect from doing computations with bigger numbers is negligible.

Per calculation maybe, but 20 people in a raid, each hitting the target several times a second (including dots, pets etc.), multiplied by the hundreds, if not thousands of raids occurring on the server at the same time; that negligible effect is increased by orders of magnitude very quickly.

[rda]

Per calculation maybe, but 20 people in a raid, each hitting the target several times a second (including dots, pets etc.), multiplied by the hundreds, if not thousands of raids occurring on the server at the same time; that negligible effect is increased by orders of magnitude very quickly.

It stays negligible. (I am a dev.)

[huth]

No problems if you stay within 53-bit mantissa.

Though that kind of makes using doubles useless. Fractional health isn't something that comes up much.

[Pull My Finger]

If you don't know what 'continuity' means, look it up in the dictionary.

Blah. I know what continuity means. It's you tossing around terms hoping it will serve as a point you're not able to illustrate otherwise.

It doesn't make sense for a hero to wake up and suddenly start hitting / healing / whatever for less than yesterday, there's no reason for that.

It also doesn't make sense to make literally a single step and transition from a dry climate into a snowy landscape. It doesn't make sense to progress through several levels, do stuff and hear about some guy who used to be around, but is dead now, and then transition to a zone where everyone acts as if the guy was still alive. It doesn't make sense to die and just get right back up. It doesn't make sense to kill the baddest of the baddies and save the world on a weekly basis. Screw continuity, it's the most nonsensical and uninteresting thing ever to think of in an MMO.

and there are ways to help tackle them in the UI ("megadamage" is one, displaying scaled percentages is another).

No, because they both suck. Megadamage is unrelatable, percentages are unrelatable. Apart from the fact that the whole idea of something called "megadamage" is silly as fuck ... Anything that you have to "think around" doesn't connect in a visceral way. Percentages my ass. The cool thing was when you were hitting for 2400 and then you finally got your Arcanite Reaper and then it was boom, 3200. THAT's something you can tell right away, that's the stuff you feel good about. You can process the numbers while playing, casually, all the time, without paying attention even. That's a case with the game systems successfully communicating things to the player. In today's game, I couldn't even tell for sure how many digits we're at right now, that's how "whatever" the numbers have become.

[Nevcairiel]

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.

Perhaps, and I might agree if the numbers would not be so outrageous at some point. I rather have a break of continuity every couple years then have to deal with items that have a hundred thousand secondary stats and whatnot.

[rda]

Though that kind of makes using doubles useless. Fractional health isn't something that comes up much.

It gives you 21 extra bits over 32. That's going to last a long time, if they pay some attention (and after that, they can start losing accuracy after 53rd bit which nobody would feel - again, if they pay attention).

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No, because they both suck. Megadamage is unrelatable, percentages are unrelatable.

How are percentages unrelatable when your entire argument in favor of squish would be that the percentages stayed the same and so it felt alright?

[huth]

It gives you 21 extra bits over 32. That's going to last a long time, if they pay some attention (and after that, they can start losing accuracy after 53rd bit which nobody would feel - again, if they pay attention).

Sure, but they could have gotten 32 bits for the same cost. Seems strange to do it this way.

Especially since the engine was clearly using integers beforehand.

[rda]

Sure, but they could have gotten 32 bits for the same cost. Seems strange to do it this way.

As I said, the extra bits would have been fake precision in that they would have been lost the moment they go into combat computations.

[Kuntantee]

No problems if you stay within 53-bit mantissa.

Incorrect. No matter the length of mantissa, the representation is not precise after a certain degree. This is implied by the design of the integral type and you can find the details in IEEE standards. You need to incorporate some sort of epsilon and do not compare equality, but almost-equality.

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Anyone working with floating points should be well aware that doing flat out equality checks is just not very wise. This process is well documented and any seasoned programmer will know how to handle floating point values, both single and double precision.

The problem is not ability to achieve a comparison. You do not need to be seasoned for that. The problem is all "precise" comparison methods of floating point numbers in C++ are really slow.

[Pull My Finger]

How are percentages unrelatable when your entire argument in favor of squish would be that the percentages stayed the same and so it felt alright?

Well first off, I never said that, that's not "my entire argument". That's just a given fact.

But anyways, It doesn't really matter if an enemy life bar says 365.000 or 85%, but it matters for your own damage numbers and the stat numbers on your gear. The smaller and more tangible the numbers are, the better players are able to connect to the game's systems.

[rda]

Incorrect. No matter the length of mantissa, the representation is not precise after a certain degree. This is implied by the design of the integral type and you can find the details in IEEE standards. You need to incorporate some sort of epsilon and do not compare equality, but almost-equality.

No. If your numbers fit into 53-bits with the shared base (ie, we are talking about 53-bit integers), the comparisons are precise. It's when you start adding / multiplying / taking logarithms and whatnot that you can no longer assume that the results would be equal to the value computed with infinite precision.

That's a non-factor, frankly, there's rarely a need to compare numbers for equality in combat / in other areas in WoW, you mostly compare for which is greater and do operations.

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Well first off, I never said that, that's not "my entire argument". That's just a given fact.

But anyways, It doesn't really matter if an enemy life bar says 365.000 or 85%, but it matters for your own damage numbers and the stat numbers on your gear. The smaller and more tangible the numbers are, the better players are able to connect to the game's systems.

You just said in your first phrase that the percentages are relatable and so displaying "30%" on a hit would work and give you your small values which you care about so much. Just make that an option, done.