BETA version
LIVE version
Healing Range Alpha is an addon that adjusts unit frames' alpha (and color in beta) to reflect its range from you.
I designed this mod to solve the whole 2-D user-interface problem. I was watching several bars outside of the 3D environment, and I was having increasing difficulty healing with encounters that required people to spread far out. My solution was to change the alpha values of the unit frames based on spell range. I love this mod <3
Special thanks to Gello for inspiring me by setting a high standard in UI design with his ItemRack, as well as for the cheap and dirty spell hooking method.
Live version:
Spell detection for 40 yards is limited to using Spell Hooking and Auto-Targeting. Both have their own problems in operation, which is why I added an option to disable their use.
Spelling Hook -
Spell hooking will hook on to the actual spell casting function and UNHOOK your healing spell's target. This causes auto-ranking mods to fail because its not seeing any targets. However, by unhooking the target, I can successful scan the entire raid using a very fast function. So, assuming you have no autoranking mod, this method will update your raid's range every time you cast a healing time (which is great). This method gets nuked in Wow 2.0
Auto-Targeting -
This was my original method, which will target raid members at every interval and check the hotbar to see if the healing spell is within range. The advantage to this method is their is no spell cast, so its handled automatically. The large disadvantage is that targetting sends data to the server and sending a large number of target changes with greatly effect your frame rate (and the server probably won't like you either). Thus there is an available interval box to adjust the frequency this method will call on raid members to check their range. This method also gets nuked in WoW 2.0
Beta version:
Even with the absence of the two old methods, WoW 2.0 comes through on keeping range alive <3
IsSpellInRange -
There is a wonderful new function called "IsSpellInRange" which accepts both spell and unitID. Basically, you can update range values whenever you want without performance hits.
Secure Templates -
While secure templates appear to remove capabilities of mods, it does provide an unique advantage over the old buttons. All unit frames must use the template to have click abilities! Moreover, you scan ever frame and detect frames that use this template because they have "unit" attributes! Bingo-- Now I can write a mod that changes unit frames for ANY mod without knowing what mod it is =)
Color -
I recently added a color option to ranges. This adjusts the "textures" "normal button textures", and "status bar textures" of the button and all of its children. I'll need to test this on several more mods to make sure I'm capturing all the color options I want, because as of now, I'm only using one unit frame mod (aUF). If you have unit frame mods you want me to try out, please post them.
- Crepusculu
zomg priest