Mik's Scrolling Battle Text (Vanilla)

A World of Warcraft 1.12 (Vanilla) addon that displays scrolling combat text around the player's character model. Originally by Mik, maintained by Athene.

Interface: 11200 | Version: 4.43

Requirements

• ClassicAPI — a client-side DLL that backports modern WoW API calls to the 1.12 client (no companion addon required). MSBT relies on it for C_Spell.GetSpellName, C_Item.GetItemName/GetItemIcon, ItemLocation, and CreateColor/GetRGB — used for spell-name lookups, item-icon resolution, and damage-type text coloring. These are not optional fast paths; the addon expects them to be present.

Features

• Scrolling combat text across three display areas: Incoming (right), Outgoing (left), and Notification (center)
• Damage, heals, DoTs, HoTs, misses, dodges, parries, blocks, resists, absorbs, reflects, and more
• Buff/debuff gain and fade notifications
• Power gains and losses (mana, rage, energy)
• Combo points, honor, reputation, skill, and experience gains
• Killing blow notifications (PC and NPC)
• Environmental damage (drowning, falling, fire, lava, fatigue, slime)
• Spell icons displayed alongside scrolling text
• Class-colored unit names
• Configurable profiles with 100+ event settings
• Customizable animation styles (Straight, Left Parabola, Right Parabola) and scroll directions (Up, Down)
• Sticky text for crits and important events
• Event merging to reduce clutter in heavy combat
• Event suppression via configurable search patterns
• Health/mana threshold triggers with per-class filtering
• Search pattern triggers for custom event matching
• Four locales: English, French, German, Russian

Addon Packages

MikScrollingBattleText (Core)

The main addon. Parses combat log events, formats text, and animates scrolling messages.

MikScrollingBattleTextOptions (Options UI)

Load-on-demand options panel. Only loaded when the user opens settings via /msbt.

Installation

Copy both MikScrollingBattleText/ and MikScrollingBattleTextOptions/ into your Interface/AddOns/ directory.

Interface/
  AddOns/
    MikScrollingBattleText/
    MikScrollingBattleTextOptions/

Slash Commands

/msbt — Open the options UI

Command	Description
/msbt reset	Reset the current profile to defaults
/msbt disable	Disable the addon
/msbt enable	Enable the addon
/msbt version	Show the current version
/msbt stats	Report table recycling statistics
/msbt search <filter>	Set a filter for searching event types
/msbt debug	Toggle debug mode
/msbt help	Show command usage

ClassicAPI Combat Log Integration

MSBT reads structured combat data from ClassicAPI's COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTERED instead of relying on string-based combat log parsing alone, for significantly better performance in heavy combat scenarios (raids, AoE, battlegrounds).

What Changes

• ClassicAPI combat log: Registers for the unfiltered combat log (SPELL_DAMAGE, SWING_DAMAGE, SPELL_HEAL, SPELL_ENERGIZE, SPELL_MISSED, SPELL_AURA_APPLIED, ENVIRONMENTAL_DAMAGE, PARTY_KILL, etc.) which carries pre-parsed amounts, GUIDs, crit flags, miss types and spell info. Redundant CHAT_MSG_* events are unregistered to avoid duplicates. No opt-in CVars are needed.
• SpellId icons: SpellIds from combat log events resolve icons directly through ClassicAPI's GetSpellInfo, bypassing Babble-Spell dictionary lookups and tooltip scanning.

Removed: SuperWoW / UnitXP SP3 / Nampower

SuperWoW, UnitXP SP3 and Nampower integration has been removed in favor of ClassicAPI (for spell/item lookups, GUIDs and structured combat events). ClassicAPI is a hard dependency (see the .toc).

Fallback

CHAT_MSG_* parsing stays registered for everything with no combat log equivalent (honor, reputation, skill, XP, item enchantments, some power gains/losses) and as a fallback until each combat log event actually fires.

Performance Optimizations

• Upvalue caching: Frequently called standard library functions (string.find, string.gsub, table.insert, table.getn, GetTime, etc.) are cached as local variables
• Dispatch table: Combat event routing uses O(1) table lookup instead of an if/elseif chain
• SpellId icon cache: SpellIds from combat log events resolve icons directly through ClassicAPI and are cached, bypassing Babble-Spell dictionary lookups and tooltip scanning
• Event throttling: UNIT_HEALTH and UNIT_MANA trigger checks are throttled to 150ms intervals
• Table recycling: MikTRO (Table Recycler Object) pools and reuses table allocations to reduce garbage collection pressure

Architecture

Global Namespaces

Namespace	Purpose
MikSBT	Main addon: display, animation, profiles, event routing, slash commands
MikCEH	Combat Event Helper: parses combat events into structured data
MikTRO	Table Recycler Object: memory pool for table reuse

Event Processing Pipeline

WoW CHAT_MSG_* events (or ClassicAPI COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTERED)
  -> MikCEH.OnEvent() / MikCEH.OnCombatLogEvent()
  -> ParseCombatEvents() dispatch table (or combat log handler)
  -> Creates CombatEventData tables
  -> MikSBT.CombatEventsHandler()
  -> Formats text with templates (%a=amount, %n=name, %s=spell, %t=type)
  -> Queues animation event
  -> MikSBT.OnUpdateAnimationFrame() renders scrolling text

Bundled Libraries

• AceLibrary — Addon framework skeleton
• AceLocale-2.2 — Localization management
• Babble-Spell-2.2 — Spell name database for icon lookups (~10K lines)

Saved Variables

MikSBT_Save — Stores named profiles containing event settings, triggers, suppressions, display positions, and font settings. Profiles support versioning and migration between addon versions.

Development

• No build step — files are loaded directly by the WoW client via TOC manifests
• No test framework — testing is done manually in the WoW client
• The Lua environment is WoW's embedded Lua 5.0/5.1 (not standard Lua 5.4)
• IDE warnings about "undefined globals" (CreateFrame, GetLocale, DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME, arg1, event, etc.) are false positives — these are provided by the WoW runtime
• The wow-api-type-definitions/ submodule provides WoW API type stubs for IDE autocompletion (sumneko.lua language server)

Optional Dependency

• SW_FixLogStrings — Fixes combat log string formatting issues on some server implementations

License

This addon is distributed for use with World of Warcraft 1.12 private servers. Original work by Mik, community maintained.