Fullscreen Glow For Debuffs - Need Help

[PerfectH]

So I'm considering writing my first AddOn and I have an idea of what I want it to do.

Pretty simple; if I have a poison debuff, disease debuff, or a hostile magic effect, I want the screen to tint a certain color accordingly.

Normal view of the UI:


Poison effect:


Disease effect:


Magic effect:


Of course these are really poorly drawn out examples, but I do want it to look something like that. If you remember playing Diablo 2 and if you got a chill effect or a poison effect, your screen would tint accordingly. I want this to happen for WoW. Eventually, I will incorporate configurations for the AddOn such as minimal duration (Ignore debuffs that are less than X seconds). But first, I need to get this AddOn off the ground...

...I just don't know how. I did the tutorial that Blizzard provides and it does have me get a small understanding on how AddOns work, but I need to know where to get references for this kind of thing. I have no idea where to start, what to write, or any of that. If any of you AddOn authors could generously help me start my first AddOn, I will donate a small amount of US Dollars to you via PayPal.

Thank you.

[Xrystal]

You might want to see if you can utilise SetBackdropColor function on UIParent to color the screen that way.

http://www.wowwiki.com/API_Frame_SetBackdropColor

I've not tried it myself but I assume UIParent is based on Frame of some sort and should be able to use this function.

[kraftman]

hook the UNIT_AURA event and check for the debufftype

something like

local DebuffColor = {"none"	= { r = 0.80, g = 0, b = 0 },
					"Magic"	= { r = 0.20, g = 0.60, b = 1.00 },
					"Curse"	= { r = 0.60, g = 0.00, b = 1.00 },
					"Disease"	= { r = 0.60, g = 0.40, b = 0 },
					"Poison"	= { r = 0.00, g = 0.60, b = 0 },
					""	= DebuffTypeColor["none"] }

local frame = CreateFrame("Frame")
local function ScanDebuffs(self, event, unit, ...)
	if unit == "player" then
	local found
		for i = 1, DEBUFF_MAX_DISPLAY do
			debufftype = select(5, UnitAura("player", i, "HARMFUL"))
			if debufftype then
				found = true
				local c = DebuffColor[debufftype]
				--change the color of whatever to c.r, c.g, c.b
			end
		end
		if not found then
			--no debuffs so reset the colour to normal
		end
	end
end

might work. However if you had mutliple debuffs, the colour would be changed to the last debuff found every time.

I guess you'll have to decide how you would like it to handle multiple debuff types.

[Exawatt]

Continuing from kraftman; you could use four individual frames to achieve multiple colors, then control whether they're hidden or not with the checks (instead of changing colors on a single frame).

(But red+green won't look so hot. D2 knew that. One color at a time.)