[crossfire] Shortening experience bar for GTK2 client

[Mark Wedel]

On 09/15/12 12:56 PM, Kevin Zheng wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> The GTK2 client has an experience bar at the bottom left corner in the default
> layout, right underneath the HP, Mana, Grace, and Food bars. As your character
> levels up, your experience increases (duh) as well as the experience needed
> for the next level. Both these numbers are shown next to the experience bar.
>
> I level up, the experience bar becomes wider as the experience numbers
> increase. At some point it is wider than everything else and starts eating up
> unnecessary space. This isn't a problem on a big screen beacuse there's lots
> of space, but it's annoying on a 1024x768 screen. I don't want to switch
> client layouts, either, so here are some of my ideas:
>
> 1) Show exp with suffixes. For example, show 10K instead of 10,000, 10M
> instead of 10,000,000, and so on. Drawback: can't see small exp increments
>
> 2) Show remaining exp instead of total exp. Drawback: counts backwards
>
> 3) Show difference between current exp and next exp level. When level up,
> start counter at zero and end at next exp stage. Drawback: confusing.
>
> Any ideas?

  A couple thoughts I have:  Show as a percentage how close/far you are to next 
level - that sort of duplicates the bar itself, but probably gives a higher 
level of refinement than try to guess where you to next level.

  Changing the layout for the exp might help - instead of the experience numbers 
being to the left (or right) of the bar, which results in the formatting 
problems, add another row and put them below the exp bar.  However, if you are 
really tight for space, that extra row for that may not work out either.

  Or possible do approach number 1 (exp with suffixes), and add a tooltip to the 
exp bar that gets updated which shows actual values, so if you really want to 
see the exp total, you could.

  The core stats window also shows experience, so one can always see how much 
one is gaining on that, even in small increments.  But I could certainly see 
that folks may have the protections tab selected instead to see when spell 
effects andthe like run out.