Thank you xLights/Nutcracker team!

[Taco]

A very special Thank You to the Nutcracker team.  You have finally made sequencing fun!

I've been around a long time and sequencing the lights to music has always been a grind.  Create a few seconds of patterns across a handful of lighting channels, play it, watch, repeat until it looks right and continue to the next group of channels or few seconds of music.  By the time you're done you never want to hear the music again.  But in reality, you're never really done because you always see places that need tweaking.

Nutcracker makes sequencing fun.  Pick your effects, change the variables and watch the magic across thousands of channels immediately.

What are my favorite Nutcracker features?

Random effect: many times you get 'not-so-good' stuff but often you get the never considered perfect combination and say 'that's amazing!'

Whole House Model:  applying an effect across all the display elements as if they are one giant model is sooooooo cool.  Don't know what to do for a particular part of a tune?  Use a Whole House butterfly and listen for the ohs and ahs.

Pictures:  When playing 'Frosty the Snowman' having snowman related images scroll by adds an entire new element to story telling.

Bottom line:  WOW!

I can't wait for 2015.

[sean]

thanks from the development team

Matt Brown who ported Nutcracker 2 into xLights last feb 2013. Without this port, each effect would take minutes to generate instead of 50ms. Matt's architecture set the foundation for all enhancements we have done in the last two years.

Dave Pitts: Whole House model! Soon, Xlights 4.0!! A coding machine. Dave is also the eprson who thought up the Falcon Pi Player on a raspberry pi 18 months ago.

Dan Kulp. There would be no MAC ports without Dan. Dan, also has fixed numerous bugs and has created new enhancements

Frankr. This is the person who created the "Create Random Effects" button. Frank also created the circles effect.

Don Julien. Don gave us the Papagayo tab and the Piano effect. He has enhanced many effects

Capt Murdoch and MaterDaddy have worked on the Linux ports, fixed some bugs.


Our latest add, Gil Jones, added the Off command


So from all of us
Merry Christmas and a Happy new Year.