How to make addons start walking

For some reason the animation fogs (RedRadiationFog.m2) stopped working with patch 3.2, which had a major impact on my UI since the glow stopped working. So I had to develop a different solution.

I had already tried some stuff with rotating textures before, so my first thought was: "Lets try to overlay 1-3 cloudish textures with blendmode and let them rotate on the orb".

No sooner said than done, I started a new testmod called rGalaxy. My idea was to have 1-3 galaxies rotate on the orb background instead of the glow.

The question in place was: "What technique shall I use to make that thing rotate?"

I remembered myself of the animation system that Blizzard released in 3.1.0 and that is bugged like hell. (Hello animation:Stop() crashing WoW!)

I google'd a bit and found "Blackbox".
WoW AddOns - BlackBox - CurseForge.com

A neat developer addon with a small black box that can be pushed around with the mouse. His code helped me alot to create rGalaxy which should just create some textures that should rotate constantly.

So this is it.

Code:
trunk - rothui - Project Hosting on Google Code

Final product:
rGalaxy : WoWInterface Downloads : Graphic UI Mods

Video: Roth UI new galaxy animation

Now why have you done this again? To make my orbs look like this:

See those swirlies? That are galaxies, three of them at different size and rotation speed.

Latest version:


This is only step one. To make it even more random you can add translations (move the animation around), scale it and change the alpha.

Hmm...does Blizzard even use it? Yes they do, for the glyph window:
Blizzard_GlyphUI.xml
Blizzard_GlyphUI.lua

Blizzard WoW animation API
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> 3.1.0 API Changes - Animation System

So if you need some more inspiration you can look at Blizzards code aswell.