Time for action – fading pieces

1. Add a new class to the Flood Control project called FadingPiece.

2. Add the following line to indicate that FadingPiece also inherits from GamePiece:

   Inherits GamePiece

3. Add the following declarations to the FadingPiece class:

   Public AlphaLevel As Single = 1.0
   Public Shared AlphaChangeRate As Single = 0.02

4. Add a constructor for the FadingPiece class as follows:

   Public Sub New(type As String, suffix As String)
       MyBase.New(type, suffix)
   End Sub

5. Add a method to update the piece:

   Public Sub UpdatePiece()
       AlphaLevel = MathHelper.Max(0, AlphaLevel - AlphaChangeRate)
   End Sub

What just happened?

The simplest of our animated pieces, the FadingPiece only requires an alpha value (which always starts at 1.0f, or fully opaque) and a rate of change. The FadingPiece constructor simply passes the parameters along to the base constructor.

When a FadingPiece is updated, alphaLevel is reduced by alphaChangeRate, making the piece more transparent.

Managing animated pieces

Now that we can...