small number suggestion

[Guest]

what i have been thinking about for long time now is the possibility to enter your production numbers in a scientific way.


for example : you wanna produce 10,000,000 power. now you need to count 0 to check wether it is correct

it would be much easier if you could just enter : 10E6 . this would really be handy if you produce with high numbers


grtz
demon

[Guest]

what i have been thinking about for long time now is the possibility to enter your production numbers in a scientific way.


for example : you wanna produce 10,000,000 power. now you need to count 0 to check wether it is correct

it would be much easier if you could just enter : 10E6 . this would really be handy if you produce with high numbers


grtz
demon

Excellent plan! Or support M,m,k,K suffixes

[Guest]

i like the idea...

but to what extend should people be able to type the amount they want to produce as a math-problem? I think this might be hard to aply to the game, because of the vast amount math-problems you can type in.

[Guest]

it may work for you but what about the other people that dont know how to use that "e", it would be nice if we could use "," commas that way we can separate the zeros

thats my say

[Guest]

Yeah don't hold your breath on that, in any form. You want to change a number field to a text field that parses itself for expected non-numerical characters while simultaneously excluding all other non-numerical characters, then converts the numbers inherent in the string based on the characters that are appended. Just so you don't have to count how many times you hit the zero key.

No.

it would be nice if we could use "," commas that way we can separate the zeros

Come on man, even if you had no idea before playing Kapilands, you must have observed by now that Europe (and other places) use periods where we use commas and vice-versa. I can't even imagine how disastrous it would be if the system started mixing those up.

Sorry folks, I generally try to stay encouraging on any suggestion but this one's pretty out there.

[Guest]

Sorry folks, I generally try to stay encouraging on any suggestion but this one's pretty out there.

Yeah, i have noticed that about you Knolls. Are you sure you live in Jersey? i thought they would kick someone out for being too positive

[Guest]

Yeah Knolls. Your a bad person and really mean...

I think you're right though .

Have you been watching too many cit coms?

[Guest]

Actually, if the software is written in .NET, then setting up regionalization (the ability to appropriately assign commas and periods) is fairly simple.

[Guest]

it would be nice if we could use "," commas that way we can separate the zeros

Come on man, even if you had no idea before playing Kapilands, you must have observed by now that Europe (and other places) use periods where we use commas and vice-versa. I can't even imagine how disastrous it would be if the system started mixing those up.

well i know that the Germans use periods i just forget to use them some time, you try going 16 years of your life of using commas, and then in the latest 6 months of your life you use periods for a game, when in the math class your taking is using commas

like i said i have a lot of things on my mind so i sometimes forget to change in some of my posts i will use commas and the next i will use periods, then sometimes i will use them in the same post

[Guest]

I've been using commas & periods for 38 years now. I think it's kind nice to change once in a while.

[Guest]

Yeah don't hold your breath on that, in any form. You want to change a number field to a text field that parses itself for expected non-numerical characters while simultaneously excluding all other non-numerical characters, then converts the numbers inherent in the string based on the characters that are appended. Just so you don't have to count how many times you hit the zero key.

No.

i play more online games than just kapilands. and i have witnessed that in both other games they changed it.

in the first one : they started using the "e" thingie
and the other they implimented the "k" thingie.

so dont say its almost impossible to do.

[Guest]

you cant count to 6 or 7?

[Guest]

I can count to 6 or 7. But when you are in a rush you can make mistakes. I bought 9 million water on the market the other day and thought I was buying 900k

[Guest]

so dont say its almost impossible to do.

It's not impossible, but everything has pros/cons tradeoffs, and they stack up pretty unfavorably here.

It does depend on the tools used, and also on the application. You have to consider not just the difficult in writing (which is not insignificant but always achievable) but the affect on resources. String parsing combined with standard data validation would make that computationally significant. And if there were programmer time and CPU cycles to spare, I could think of things that would be higher priority.

I mean sure, we all make mistakes. But you'd also get mistakes with any modified system, and that has to be taken into account.

With "e" notation, you need to handle:
10e6
1e6
5.37e6
10e6.37
5e6e2
10 e 6
10e-6
-10e6

and many other variations. And since you're programming the computer, you have to predict every situation and pre-emptively stop it. As opposed to a current system of just taking the integer value and dropping everything else.

And then with commas / periods, as I said not everyone expects to see the same thing and you could really mess someone up if they tried to put a decimal point and it was treated as a comma. (A much more significant and less understandable error than hitting an extra zero.) Also, you're not necessarily saving anything as it's not too difficult to type in 100,00,000 and not notice that you didn't hit a hundred million like you meant to.

Now I think whenever numbers are output they should be formatted appropriately so it's easy to read. That's just good practice. But I believe that's already the case.

Actually, if the software is written in .NET, then setting up regionalization (the ability to appropriately assign commas and periods) is fairly simple.

I haven't used .NET much, and I don't believe they use it here either. Does that account for inputs or just outputs?

My concern there is 3-fold: Coder time, process time, and potential for user confusion. Considering how many people never really look at the options for a given piece, I'd say it's pretty much a given that some users will be using the incorrect regionalization. Which is not a big deal when you're only talking about outputs...

like i said i have a lot of things on my mind so i sometimes forget to change in some of my posts i will use commas and the next i will use periods, then sometimes i will use them in the same post

I sometimes switch them in the same post too, Farmboy. And that's not a problem as long as you're dealing with other humans who can figure out what you meant, or just shrug their shoulders if it's too confusing. But we're talking about getting the computer to know what you meant, every time. And as you said, it's only natural to forget. So in that case the computer would be making a mistake for you when you were otherwise correct. And I don't think that's good.

[Guest]

Pattern matching, or as .NETrs know it Regular Expressions (RegEx), allows for complex data parsing of input. While the data validation here would certainly require a complex pattern it is certainly very doable. There are entire books on Pattern matching, so I will not go into a lot of detail. For example, here is the pattern to match a seven digit (US style) phone number

^\d{3}-\d{4}$

This one validates TCP/IP IP addresses

((2[0-4]\d|25[0-5]|[01]?\d\d?)\.){3}(2[0-4]\d|25[0-5]|[01]?\d\d?)

( -- are we having fun yet -- )

Any google search on regular expressions will turn up tons of information. This link provides an excellent tutorial I have used as a reference for my VB.Net classes.

http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/RegexTutorial.asp

Be careful if searching for books on Pattern matching, as many of the them are NOT light reads; meaning that you should have a strong background in computer science and algorithms before undertaking them, or the ability to spend time researching some concepts. My recommendation would be to go to your local Borders or B&N and examine the titles first so you can find a title at your comfort level, unless you need a strong cure for insomnia .

---

With regards to Regionalization, it works on both input and output. There is a setting on the client computer that determines the correct setting for that machine. If the application does not detect/configure the setting itself, it defaults to the Windows (under Control Panel - regional and language settings) setup. Thus, you and I can be sitting right next to each other and one of us can use commas and the others periods for decimal places. The applications developer simply must write software to use the Windows standard rather than hard-coding all the formats him/herself.