Fade-Out, Fade-In

Since January, I have actually been a bit busy; I just haven’t been posting as much.

I had previously gotten a solid animations (TransientVisualizations) implemented and tested for Magic Missile. I hadn’t, at that time, done much with the Disabled/Dying/Recovery sequence of conditions (which became apparent when I Magic Missiled my target dummy to negative health points). It turns out to be a bit convoluted, but I managed to re-do some stuff and make it all work.

During that core-rules sweep, I started getting a bit wrapped up with fatigue and exhaustion (the game conditions, not me personally), and noticed that sleep wasn’t required or forced by game-mechanics (*sigh*) not entirely sure on what that will mean going forward. Certainly sleep is needed for spell-casters, but non-casters could theoretically stay awake for-ever without any game-mechanic penalty. I’ve read some ideas, but I think I’ll defer for now.

Anyway, after that I planned to work on action aiming, which would require some substantial client-UI work and view-models. I had been planning on adding multi-character capabilities in the “test client” for some-time, and it seemed like I should do that before adding the aiming UI. I also wanted a more-flexible UI and decided (eventually) to use AvalonDock, as it would allow dockable and floatable windows.

I started working with AvalonDock on the host application, and had enough success and knowledge gain to begin the same with the client. The main challenges have been converting the control-routed-event model I originally used years ago, and converting it to a more MVVM-ish model. I had already moved a good part of the client to MVVM, but now saw that I had much more to do (commands in the model!)

After I get the UI re-factor done (and add multi-character login support), I’ll include some screenshots here.