Darq

Some Breathing Room

Added 2024-01-15 02:33:44 +0000 UTC

No matter which UI size you are using, certain displays are getting a bit cramped as our characters level past 125 in the Ballads of Zimara expansion. Now that we are well into the billions on some stats and an additional order of magnitude on others, areas like the XP stat bar and the Stat Monitor have needed some adjustments.

The XP bar was relatively easy, extending the 30 stat cells to accommodate the longest values (one point shy of a trillion) with the widest possible font (which turns out to be the new Cadman font.)

The Stat Monitor posed a somewhat more complex puzzle -- how to display large stat values without disrupting your UI layout. The choice was either to make the fonts smaller or to make the display areas wider, or a combination of both. Reducing font point size dynamically, only when values reach a certain size, is a tax on framerate. And who wants smaller fonts anyway? We've spent the past three years making them larger!

Check out the animation at the top of this post for the solution: a "wide tiles" display choice that you can select for characters that need the extra space. (Values shown are preposterously large for now... but we said the same thing about 10 million hit points just a few short years ago.)

The setting increases tile width by about 20% for all three UI sizes, which should be enough for now. But when stat values go up again, which they will inevitably do, we'll be ready: the new monitor code was designed to grow wider as needed without re-coding in the future. Nice!