This page is to track some of my thoughts on customization.
Right now MHF is rather tied to doing things a certain way, and some items aren't flexible.
My thinking is to allow the ability to customize the whole of a panel from the ground up.
I expect there will be many layers to building the panel:
Base panel - this is the size of the panel, everything sits on top of this
Borders - these are fills that stack on top of each other, if they're active they hide the layer below (but can also be inside the previous layer creating multi-coloured borders) Currently fixed as things like aggro, and absorbs, but why can't I have these somewhere else, or in fact have a border that is actually health?
Bars - these are the current horizontal bars, but why horizontal, why fill the whole width/height? why only health, mana and power right now, what about absorb, distance to other players, or any other scalable item (eg what if something else needs tracking on a player?) need to allow colour choices
Icons - Used to display buff/debuff status, ready check and player role
Overlays - used to display text, eg name, out of range,
clickable mask - this is the transparent icing on everything which converts a mouse click into calling the macro
event animation - want something to indicate something nasty happened? someone lost >20% of health in a hit, make me notice sorta things?
To achieve some of this a reworking of a number of internals is needed, so that:
the routing of events isn't hard coded
bars and borders are more flexible
the core event engine can be detached from the display logic
configuration ui is generated that isn't crazily complex