The ring mod #1

The following will be a series of entries which will represent a sort of diary I'm writing while developing a mod I thought of for quite some time now. I'm calling it the ring mod. I'm not even sure if I will succeed in creating it but maybe the techniques I'm going to use will help someone else to do better. I'm currently learning object oriented programming so I'm not that kind of "pro" in that.

The mod should be able to create an undetermined number of rings on the screen. To achive this we need to cheat a bit . Here are some basic ideas:

Example #1:


Example #2:


Example #2 consists of two rings laying above each other. Health and mana rings for example.

*update* Example #3:


Example #3 shows two halfrings inside one ring. Just to show some options.

What's pretty much a killer on this is that you are able to do a rotation on the background texture. Meaning that this texture just rotatates around its center all the time giving some sort of randomness to the bars above that will make it live.

The look is created by 3 layers.
- a background layer (cloudish, heavy contrast background works best)
- the ring layer (trick: 70% alpha to make the background shine through, gives them some sort of texture. Even better: use alpha blending to multiply the color with the background)
- a foreground layer (for gloss and such)

The ring mod will use the technique I described in the blog entry called "the ring". Who read it may have noticed that it is not possible to apply texture to the ring itself, because of the slice texture that is needed to create the illusion.

Lets take a look at the layers itself.

Background layer:


Ring layer:


Foreground layer:


The background and the foreground layer can be just one big thing, the ring itself cannot if you want to create the illusuin of filling it radial.

To give you a clue check this small animation I made some time ago:


Thats what the mod should achive under the premission that it needs to look cool and stunning.

So the ring is no real ring? No it can't be since the ring has to be constructed each time the value - which it should display - is going to change. Iriel described a way on how to achieve this. The ring gets divided in 4 segments first and each segment is then looked at seperately. Depending on the value the ring should display, the starting segment, the direction and the number of segments used you can calculate which segments are fully visible, not visible at all or need to be looked at more closely.

This is how the ring gets seperated:


For our example only segment 1 is important to look at. The ring starts at segment 4 and goes counter-clockwise to segment 1. All four segments will be used and the value is 82.

This is segment #1:


Now to get it done we use the ring technique by splitting the segment into 2 ring segments and one slice.


The triable is represented by a texture called slicer. It will be spanned between the coordinates I and O.


If you want to know exactly how this works read my "the ring" blog entry.
http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/zork/362-ring.html

I think that's enough for now you should have gotten the basic idea.

Oh ... have I mentioned my interface already?
Roth UI : WoWInterface Downloads : Graphical Compilations

Just kidding. To conclude this entry lets hear another big one from good old Bob Ross:
Some links:
oUF Orbs : WoWInterface Downloads : oUF: Layouts
rFrameRotater : WoWInterface Downloads : Graphic UI Mods
Disco2 : WoWInterface Downloads : Plug-Ins & Patches