2016.48 Tools|Check Sequence

[bob_moodytx]

I'm not sure this is technically a "bug". It may be just the way it is but I thought I would ask anyway since it set off my OCD alarm....

I have a pinwheel with 12 incandescent candy canes alternating red and green.
To develop the model I created 1 model with the 6 red and another model with the 6 green canes. These are assigned to a Minleon AC DMX controller.

To accommodate the alternating colors, I used the "Indiv Start Chans" options in both and referenced the channel numbers from the end of the previous model

So the red is mapped as:
>North Pole 8:1, >North Pole 8:3, >North Pole 8:5, >North Pole 8:7, >North Pole 8:9, >North Pole 8:11

The green is mapped as:
>North Pole 8:2, >North Pole 8:4, >North Pole 8:6, >North Pole 8:8, >North Pole 8:10, >North Pole 8:12

This translates to Xligthts channel 89 thru 100 (DMX = Univ 1 25 thru 36)

When the Check Sequence function is run, a warning occurs referencing these models.
"WARN: Probable model overlap 'CC Spinner Green' (90-100) and 'CC Spinner Red' (89-99)."

There are actually 3 other warnings for the same issue, different models but I think the results are all the same.

I imagine that the new function is looking at the start and end channels in the model.
So with the red starting at >North Pole 8:1 and ending at channel 99 and the green starting at >North Pole 8:2 and ending at channel 100 its seeing a possible overlap between channels 89 thru 99 and triggering the warning not seeing the holes in the channel numbers (no collisions) between the models.

While this may be entirely intended or expected .. I thought I would ask ..

Thanks for the tools and the great program ...

Bob

[keithsw1111]

That's why I called it probable. I did consider checking each and every channel but decided in the end to deal with it the same way the layout panel does. It generates some false positives but for the vast majority of use cases it is accurate.

[bob_moodytx]

I appreciate the reply. Thank you.

And thanks again for all the work.

Bob

[jnealand]

I also tried it on a sequence of a friend and I got pages of warning.   Wondering how much of that is really valid.  A lot of it seems to come from having things defined more than once like arches for a group of 5 and then each individual arch as a model - arch1, arch2.....  If I had created the layout I would probably have used groups for some of those rather than models, but these sequences are from last year and updated for this year.  Some of the grouping functionality has been changed now and I realize there are better ways to do stuff, but that requires a lot of time going back thru sequences that were created last year.  Live and learn.

[Gilrock]

Some people create models that overlap on purpose.  There's no way for us to know if you intend for the overlap or not so we display it as a warning and you can ignore it.  Heck you can just ignore the sequence checker all together if you don't like its output.  But I came up with this idea after getting tired of having the look at the exact same problems all the time so this tool does a lot of the checks that I do manually when someone posts one of those "What am I missing?" posts.

[gerry]

I found it quite useful ! I found some models and groups lurking around (when I must have accidentally used my live directory for the manual documentation).
And was also able to verify that the duplicate models and overlaps were deliberate ie from when the newer model types (poly line , spinner , window) were not there.

I think the error messages for picture images not found is also very useful.

I think , unfortunately , the folks most likely to benefit from this function probably wont even know to run it first

[Gilrock]

Yeah but when people have issues we can ask them to run it and show us the output.