Now that my show is over for the year, been playing around with some of the new (well, maybe not new anymore) effects in xlights. One of the things I think will be very useful for people with AC Channels (for single color incandescent or LED lights) is the State Effect.
One of the problems with the single color channels, was that either white or the color of the string would turn the lights on. So if you wanted to turn on White only, you had to put the effect only on the white strings. If you put it on everything in a group, all the lights would turn on. Through the use of groups, this wasn't terribly difficult to do, but now it is even easier with the state model.
If you define the states in the layout as the color of the string and define just the nodes for that string, you can then turn on only that color when using the state effect.
I've attached a sample showing how I have done this. Note that I use a "dummy" model for this rather than defining the states for all my AC tree strings. This is just one way of doing it. I am sure there are many more, and more efficient ways to do it. But figured I would pass this along for those who are using AC strings still.
