Texts Rewrite

So, I (Infus) mentioned that I wanted to work on Texts as a the next major feature. With texts, I'm referring to the texts on progress bars and icons and not the text region.

I've actually started on that last week, as I had some extra time due to taking a few days off from work. I'm very excited about that development, though explaining why will take a few paragraphs.

One of the problems in the current implementation of texts is that it is duplicated between progress bars and icons and they have a slightly different implementation. That's annoying when we wanted to add extra features, since those needed to be duplicated between progress bars and icons. And that's why we never added texts to progress textures, as doing so would have made that problem even worse.

So, what's the solution?

Rewrite that part from scratch and implement it in a way that will enable tons of new features not only for texts but also for other ideas.

I'm working on introducing a "sub region" concept into WeakAuras. A sub region is a region type that can be added to any region. The first usage of that would be a text sub region. 

Instead of each region implementing its own text handling, there will be just one text sub region. I believe that with that code these features should be possible:

• Infinite amount of texts, instead of a hard coded number
• Hiding/showing texts via conditions
• Text replacements from all triggers
• X/Y offsets for text
• Text shadow options
• Middle text for progress bars
• Text on the progress point for progress textures and progress bars

It's not that doing any of them is impossible with our current code, but it will be easier with the code I'm developing.

Now, developing that and replacing all the existing text handling code will take time. My hope is that I'll find enough time in the next weeks to slowly push it forward, so that I can implement the rest in my winter vacation, but I'm usually too optimistic about how much work a feature is.

What makes this feature very exciting, is that the "sub region" concept, will enable lots of features. There are lots of ideas on how to evolve our current regions with that concept. 

For example, we could extract the cooldown swipe implementation to its own sub region, which would enable multiple cooldown swipes on one aura and enable cooldown swipes on textures.

Now, before you get too excited, it'll probably be quite a while before those additional features appear. I'm sure that reimplementing our current text auras and adding all those extra features will be a very big project already and will keep me busy for a long time.