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

Nampower Integration

When Nampower is detected, MSBT automatically switches from string-based combat log parsing to structured event handling for significantly better performance in heavy combat scenarios (raids, AoE, battlegrounds).

What Changes

• Nampower: Registers for structured events (SPELL_DAMAGE_EVENT_SELF, AUTO_ATTACK_SELF, SPELL_HEAL_ON_SELF, etc.) that provide pre-parsed combat data. Redundant CHAT_MSG_* events are unregistered to avoid duplicates. Enables NP_EnableAutoAttackEvents, NP_EnableSpellHealEvents, and NP_EnableSpellEnergizeEvents CVars.

Deprecated: SuperWoW / UnitXP SP3

SuperWoW and UnitXP SP3 integration is being removed in favor of ClassicAPI (for spell/item lookups) and Nampower (for structured combat events). The detection paths (SuperWoW: O(1) UnitExists(name) lookups and SpellInfo icon resolution; UnitXP SP3: GUID-based unit resolution) still exist for now but should not be relied on and will be deleted.

Fallback

When none of these mods are present, the addon falls back to the original string-parsing pipeline with no changes in behavior.

Verification

-- Check detection status in-game:
/run MikSBT.Print("NP="..tostring(MikCEH.hasNampower).." SW="..tostring(MikCEH.hasSuperWoW).." UXP="..tostring(MikCEH.hasUnitXP))

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: When spellIds are available (via Nampower/SuperWoW), icons are resolved directly and 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 Nampower structured events)
  -> MikCEH.OnEvent() / MikCEH.OnNampowerEvent()
  -> ParseCombatEvents() dispatch table (or Nampower 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.