International System of Units

Pure Wrath shared this feedback ago

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I think the game should be in accordance with the "General Conference on Weights and Measures". Let's say I have 1.4K of Ice in my inventory, in-game: Mass = 1,400.00 kg; Volume = 518.00 L.

"The 22nd General Conference on Weights and Measures declared in 2003 that "the symbol for the decimal marker shall be either the point on the line or the comma on the line". It further reaffirmed that "numbers may be divided in groups of three in order to facilitate reading; neither dots nor commas are ever inserted in the spaces between groups"[22] (e.g. 1000000000). This usage has therefore been recommended by technical organizations, such as the United States' National Institute of Standards and Technology.[23]

ISO-8601 also stipulates normative notation based on SI conventions, adding that the comma is preferred over the full stop."

So, the "correct" form should be: 1.4K of Ice; Mass = 1 400,00 kg or 1.400,00 kg; Volume = 518,00 L.

LINKS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_31-0#Numbers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units - "Lexicographic convenctions" section; "General rules" sub-section.

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Replies (3)

andersenman ●

Very yes. At least separate the thousands.

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Attila Tamas Deak ●

And dont forget: weight is dependent on gravity, so what is 1400kg on eartlike it should be like ~300 kg on moon. And yet, as i saw till now its always presented as it would be on 1G.

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andersenman ●

But the mass of stuff doesn't change, and mass is given in kg. Weight, technically, is a force, but is handled and traded in kg(1 g) for convenience.

Of course, question is, which one is more useful to have displayed in the various places in the game GUI.

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Dark Wolf ●

Kg is mass, so it doesn't change regardless of Gravity. What does change is weight, as you know, which is Newtons or whatever other unit of weight you'd like to use. Weight isn't used in SE, so the game is correct in keeping the mass constant.

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Nunya Business ●

Whereas I'm more concerned with why the same volume of ice and stone and iron and uranium all seem to have the same mass

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Marco Leise ●

The comma vs. dot issue has bugged me for a while. Especially since both comma and dot (i.e. the English number format) are used and it is highly confusing to read localized texts with comma and dot swapped. To give an example, the French and German inventory tooltip reads "Masse: 993,399.00 kg" and I confused it for "about 1 metric ton" until I mentally switched to English and realized it's actually 1000 tons.

There are two ways to fix this:

OP's suggestion of adopting what the scientific community is doing, by dropping the thousands separator in favor of a space and allowing either dot or comma (in case of SE, the dot) as decimal separator.
Use the native locale for each of the 26 localizations. This locale would be loaded together with the localized texts, so it can be switched in the game options.

Currently CultureInfo.InvariantCulture is used, which is - as the name implies - a never changing "culture" that is intended to be a standard understood by computers while being human readable, based off of an English locale.

The tooltip example can simply have a different locale (ISO 30-1 or language based) passed in explicitly, while the grid info page require more attention: ConcatFormat("{0}", ...) is implicitly invoked there by .NET with a null number format falling back to InvariantCulture.

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