Making single color lights respond irrespective of color or to average of RGB?

[n8huntsman]

Because I sequence 5 houses and my neighbors have not migrated there yard displays to RGB (and I still have a few as well) I was hoping that I could make the single channel, single color, models light up to an average intensity or something similar?  The way I did it in the past was to assign them all the same color and group them.  Then if my main effect was a green, blue, and white spiral for example, I would copy that effect, make it a red spiral, and place that effect on the single color group.

It's a major pain and I ended up with twice as many groups adding clutter.  It would be great if there were a way to get them to just light up, irrespective of the color of the effect.

[deplanche]

White will turn on any single color channels.

[n8huntsman]

Right, but that still means that I need to have white in my effect.  If my effect doesnt include white, the single color channels don't do anything.  Im trying to avoid separating them out from the RGB's.

[JonB256]

Try selecting No color (no boxes selected)

[keithsw1111]

No colour = white.

[Gilrock]

Single color channels should respond to other colors in proportion to how strong each color component is in the effect.  So if you dropped a yellow effect you should expect single color channels defined as red or green to activate at 100%.  If you drop a purple effect you should get single color red channels to be 50% and blue will be 100% while green channels will not be active.  But if you define a single color channel as white then our code will only activate that channel when R=G=B so it has to be a grayscale color like 255,255,255 or 100,100,100, etc.

[Ebuechner]

I had my AC channels mixed with RGB but I never could get it to look right when I dropped an effect on the group. (So I separated them ). Now if I drop a whole house effect on it doesn't include the AC single color channels. Now I can take the same effect and drop it onto the AC stuff and adjust the colors till I get the desired look.

[n8huntsman]

Currently I have them all set as red so they should come on quite frequently.  I'm afraid they will come on too dimly because of the RGB proportion.  We'll see! 
Sounds like we need a feature request.  What would be the best solution?
Another option I was thinking, instead of averaging the three RGB intensities.... what if in the color pallete there was an additional tick box for each color that would force single color lights to respond to whatever color you ticked for that effect?  That way the color could be chosen dynamically. 

[Gilrock]

This would actually need to be a new string type.  We can't alter how the current string types handle the data and the effects do not have access to the type of string they are rendering on.  We write a color out to the channel and then later we figure out how to apply that color to that string type.

[Gilrock]

Problem is there are 140 feature requests in the list already so you never know if anyone will actually feel like implementing it.

[deplanche]

If you use the State definitions to define the color for all the different AC strings, you can then use the State effect to control the strings that will come on.  You'll need a timing track with words to define which colors you want to come on, but it's pretty easy to do.  If you want to do ramps, fades, etc, just layer the state effect with another effect. 

I posted an example of how to do this a while back...
http://nutcracker123.com/forum/index.php?topic=4077.msg25407#msg25407

[baf05]

are you talking about the old style "BigW" lights?

[n8huntsman]

For anyone looking, this feature has been added in 2017.38.  Change "string type" from "Single Color" to "Single Color Intensity."