On effect

[Gilrock]

We have an "Off" effect but no "On" effect.  It seems like the program isn't friendly for non-rgb strings.  I just wanted a way to turn on the string and it seemed like I was stuck with using color wash and white color.

It would also be nice if the nutcracker page was aware of the color capability of the string.  I can select an element that has only green lights and it will show me rainbow colors on it.  It really should show me what it will really look like in the yard because in the model I told it that the string was solid green.

I'm gonna try to get the code compiling this weekend and see if I can look into some of these things.

By the way I'm CopperCreekLights on the Auschristmaslighting forum but I usually go by this profile name.

[drlucas]

I like both of those recommendations. I had some minis left over and wrapped a little tree in my yard. Would love to use the whole house model and have it only pick up the matching color elements in my display.

[jnealand]

What you are asking about is a well known limitation of xlights and I understand will require a fairly major rewrite of the base xlights code.   But we can hope it will be someday fixed.  Remember that xlights was originally written to be nothing more than a player / scheduler and that nutcracker was invented to do RGB lights and nothing more.  It's kind of like saying I want my car to work like a helicopter.  Ah, maybe someday, but remember this is an all volunteer effort.  I like what we have and I can live with the limitations, because without what we have today, my show would not exist.

[Gilrock]

Adding an "On" effect is not hard.  The other suggestion may be difficult but I'm planning on being one of the volunteer's...I've been writing software and leading collaborative development teams for 25 years.  As a software developer I don't like living with the limitations.  I've been real close to developing my own software but this program has caught my eye and works so well I think it may be better to contribute to it than create my own.

[sean]

We welcome all the help we can get. We prob will be focusing on xlights 4 in January. It will be a completely new ui. Backend will stay the same for now.

[Gilrock]

Well I added the "On" effect to my local version of xLights.  It took a while to figure out the wxWidgets and wxsmith stuff since I've never used it.  I was wondering if there is an easy way to copy an existing wxPanel and get new IDs but I couldn't figure that out so I manually created a new one for the On effect.  I spent a long time trying to figure out how to reorder the panels in the choicebook and finally I gave up and manually edited the EffectsPanel.wxs file to place the On effect right after the Off effect.

Here's a quick video showing the effect working.  You can use the ColorWash to get about the same thing but I found it more straightforward to just say I want it On and select the color.  I used a fade in and fade out for the effect in 3 different grid cells using 3 different colors in this short video clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUOtiNWugXQ

[Lights On Fifth]

I like that pretty cool

[michaelc]

I was thinking the same thing about the whole house model.  If I do a curtain effect for a single color, it would be nice if nc was smart enough to only sweep the colors in the palette for the non rgb stuff.  You can create a model for incans and pick the color but it doesn't seem to logically map to the effects colors


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[jnealand]

Creation of the whole house model is very fast, but the key part is to have the right elements in the preview.  I'm on my 5th? implementation.  Why you ask?  The first time I put the work in the preview, but since the whole house model is used for sequencing there are elements that should not be on in the preview (ie. not part of my display).  So I took all the static items out even though I had them in the preview previously.  Then I moved things around to make things look more realistic when using moving effects, like waves, spirals, etc so that they lined up better on the actual lights.  They I noticed that the whole house model really played havoc with my DMX single color strings and things were not coordinated at all.  So finally I made a whole house model that is RGB elements only.  That works great.   Now go back and add a single non RGB element to the grid and copy the effects across all rows and modify them for the non rgb column.  Why modify the RGB effects?  One example is I and SWMBO like the use of sparkles on the RGB elements, but putting sparkles on the non RGB stuff begins to turn random stray colors on that detract from the display.  A sparkle is a burst of white which is 3 adjacent channels on, if my channels are 3 single color strings. I get off color strings blinking and it detracts from the overall effect, So I copy the whole house column to the first non RGB column and remove all sparkles.  Nutcracker will pick up the correct color from the effect and only turn on a red non rgb model if red was specified in the effect.  This gives better color coordination across the whole display.  Now go back and add other non rgb elements and copy the column you just modified to the other non rgb columns.  DO NOT USE THE COPY ACROSS ALL ROWS OR YOU WILL CHANGE THE EFFECTS THAT ARE IN THE WHOLE HOUSE COLUMN.  Works great.