The name of that floating-up fading number UI thingy?

I've always known it as floating/floaty text. Not sure if this is an industry-standard term, or if such a standard term even exists, but that nomenclature seems to get the point across well enough :)

Call it whatever you like. Alert may be a good name?

You know the pop up messages you get when someone signs in to messenger or whatever? You know what they called that? Toaster pop up notification ;) They even have a system wide Toast mutex you should try and claim before you pop your own up (so you don't get loads trying to pop up at the same time).

Sometimes, 'damage indicators', but there's no common name, afaik.

[Edit:] No wait, 'damage indicator' is the screen-space red flash to tell you what direction damage came from.

We call them TINs or Target INdicators.

Floating text is the name I'm most familiar with.

Floating combat text is what it's called in World of Warcraft.

If I remember correctly, in the Warcraft III World Editor (which lets you build your own mods to Warcraft III, e.g. DotA), Blizzard's programmers just called it 'Floating Text'. I think the name is general and descriptive enough.

The technical, generic name for rendering that thing is "billboard", which applies not only to text but to almost anything else that is 2D being rendererd in a 3D world, often oriented towards the camera regardless of the angle you're looking from (but not necessarily).

'billboard' is one implementation method that can used to display them in a 3D game, but the interface/design/concept is very common in 2D games too (going back many years).

'billboard' is one implementation method that can used to display them in a 3D game, but the interface/design/concept is very common in 2D games too (going back many years).

Yeah, I was referring to the "technical term" for rendering them in 3D. As an interface/design concept, the term billboard is not accurate. It wasn't clear whether the OP wanted to know how to render it, or how it should be called in a design doc., an in-game tutorial, etc

I guess this would be akin to something like WoW's scrolling combat text; damage and healing numbers popping up on screen located near their point of origin, etc. If I'm not mistaken, most games render those to their HUD, same layer of their general GUI, as two-dimensional entities. You might want to check out some of the modding communities for popular MMOs to see if they have any of their source code open so you can poke around and see how it works.

floating text is what Warcraft 3's world editor called it.