Nutcracker changes not taking effect

[Gilrock]

I keep running into where I change the effect on a row in nutcracker, save the file, and then when I play it in Preview the new effect doesn't show up.  I then have gone back and tried to change the effect to off and it still plays something else.  The sequence it happened to me on last night I only had one row of data for several display elements.  I'll go back and double check to make sure I don't have any overlapping of channel assignments in the models cause that's the only way I think it could be happening if its not a bug in the code.

[drlucas]

I find after you make the change in nutcracker tab you need to save and then open in preview the sequence file again to view the entire display. You can however just view the single model in the left side of the nutcracker tab no problem. Just make sure you update grid after making a change so you don't lose the change you make.

[Gilrock]

Yeah I've already tried reopening the file in the Preview tab.  The strange thing about this issue is if I play the sequence in the Nutcracker window I see a different effect than what I get in the Preview window.  I really suspect something is going wrong with the save and it's not correctly updating the xseq file because I believe that is what the Preview window operates off of and the Nutcracker window is operating off of what you have in the grid.  Somehow I've twice had sequences get into a mode where it won't save the grid properly.

[dkulp]

Are you sure you are hitting the "Update Grid" button after settling on the effect changes that you want?    If you go back to the grid after seeing the preview and clicking on the cell, does it have the new effect?

This keeps being my problem.   I keep adjusting stuff expecting it to be "live updates" to the grid, but they aren't.   

[Gilrock]

Yeah I'm not making that rookie mistake.  I've participated in the last couple online tutorials and I'm fairly proficient with the program.

[Gilrock]

Just to clarify I wasn't intending to insult anyone that makes that mistake.  I've done it quite a bit myself.  I just was remembering last nights tutorial when Sean forgot to hit the update button and he called it a rookie mistake.

[dkulp]

One more thing to try:  turn off the threaded saves (Settings menu) and see if it still happens.   If it happens with threaded and not with non-threaded, please let me know how to reproduce.   Likely send the files and such.

xLights was NOT designed with multiple threads in mind.  A lot of the rendering used global variables, global render buffers, accessed controls on the gui pages directly, etc... Retrofitting it for the threaded stuff has been a non-trivial exercise and I could have easily missed some usage of global states.

[Gilrock]

Ok I'll try it tonight and report back.

Now your talking my language...I love multi-threading.  I wrote the RTOS we use on a product at work and I've done a few Windows GUI's with multiple threads.  One of my home side projects is developing software for a local astronomy shop and they want me to port one of the programs over the the MAC so I was interested in looking at how you guys were doing the cross-platform development.  I'm sure some of the stuff I usually do in windows is probably specific to that platform.  Like most of my indicators on the GUI I never update directly.  I create a class object and when the member variables are modified they fire notification events using INotifyPropertyChanged so the GUI pages just bind to the appropriate datasource and get updated automagically.  I'm sure I'd need to do it completely different on the MAC.

[sean]

you can download our source code from
https://github.com/smeighan/xLights

always welcome to another developer.

[Gilrock]

Yeah I talked about helping on the Auschristmas forum several days ago.  I just wasn't sure if it was worthwhile to dig into it now or wait until version 4 was made available.

[sean]

I keep running into where I change the effect on a row in nutcracker, save the file, and then when I play it in Preview the new effect doesn't show up.  I then have gone back and tried to change the effect to off and it still plays something else.  The sequence it happened to me on last night I only had one row of data for several display elements.  I'll go back and double check to make sure I don't have any overlapping of channel assignments in the models cause that's the only way I think it could be happening if its not a bug in the code.

can u film what you are doing (phone video is fine, or try screencastomatic)

i dont see this and hundreds of people are using xlights, it has not been reported. I wonder what condition you have that makes this happen.

So you
1) Change an effect while a cell is highlighted
2) Press F5 to update
3) PRess save
4) Go to preview, open the file
5) Press play and the update doesnt show up?

please send your xlights_networks.xml, xlights_rgbeffects.xml and the sequence.xml file to sean@meighan.net
please include your name and the link to this thread.

thanks

[Gilrock]

Ok I figured this out and it was my mistake.  I created a video to show you the issue and then when typing it up what steps I took the problem became apparent to me.  The problem is actually something that's been bothering me in that you gotta do math in your head when switching betweent he Preview and the Nutcracker screen and in some cases I was forgetting to do the math.  I was updating at 120.0 seconds and then trying to view my changes at 1:20.  As I was typing up what I did in my video the light bulb went off and I realized my changes were at the 2:00 mark....sorry about the confusion.  I actually was thinking the other days I'd like a field beside the time that shows it in total seconds so you can drag the slider to match the number on the other tab.  Or if we implement my other idea where you can switch back and forth between those tabs and be at the same point in the song.

[dkulp]

You don't know how close I've been to adding a popup menu to the top of the time column to allow flipping back and forth between "SS.000" format and "M:SS.000" format.   This math in the head thing was driving me nuts as well.  I also want to do some things to keep positions in sync between the two pages.  However, I'm not really tackling any of that if there are big plans to revamp the UI in January.

[Dave Nibeck]

It would be helpful to have them consistent.

[drlucas]

I've downloaded the latest beta of xcode. Depending on how many tasks I am handed this afternoon I may see if I can pull down the source and compile my own version. I'm not going to invest a ton of work into this as v4 is around the corner I assume but want to see just how crazy complex this is to get going. That and with the new watch kit...I want a big Green button on my watch to sync with fpp and start my show from the iwatcth. After that I'm going to see if I can make a xltap type app and using the watch to make timing marks for a song. Not sure how practical it will be but....hey gotta start somewhere