Help wanted setting basic scene with randomized overlays in xschedule/xlights

[pngaudioguy]

Hello,

I'm fairly new to the world of Pixels and xlights, etc, but I come from the world of pro audio and lighting where I'm quite familiar with DMX, light shows, power distribution, etc. I'm comfortable with Linux (Debian stable is my flavor of choice), and PC systems. I can use a Mac if you make me, but I'm not a fan of their "do it our way or don't do it at all" mentality.

My display for this first year with pixels is fairly limited in scope for a variety of reasons, but mostly I'm not wanting to invest a lot of time programming specific stuff for this house because I know I'm moving before next Christmas.

I have 4 3D printed snowflakes in the upstairs windows, and pixels lining the grapevines the landlord has arranged on the front of the home. I have setup a basic scene in xlights (snowflakes appearing to glimmer, colors walking slowly along the vines) that I would like to randomly overlay one or more of the snowflakes switching into a falling snow type effect, and/or the vines switching into a faster/possibly more colorful effect.

Currently, I have also added a second PSEQ scene with a second different look, and I have 3 of each in my xschedule playlist set to shuffle. It's ok, but it's not quite what I was looking for.

I tried creating a PSEQ with my desired "background look" for lack of a better term, then creating a variety of ESEQ's for the various models that could be called to overlay interest on the somewhat static backdrop. I could see that the ESEQ overlay being called was doing something, but I haven't found any description of the blend mode settings anywhere online, and I think I'm setting those or the priority settings wrong maybe?

My default sequences are all 1 minute long just for convenience, but I'd like to be able to trigger another randomized ESEQ before the first ESEQ overlay has finished to provide an interesting collection of things I've programmed that I like the look of happening on my display without having to write a really long PSEQ in xlights with every step pre-scripted.

If any of this doesn't make sense, please don't hesitate to ask for clarification. I've spent most of the day searching, and finally decided to actually register for the forum and see if asking would bring out any experts to shed light on it. Thanks in advance,
Caleb

[keithsw1111]

Background overwrites anything you might be playing.

You may want to look at using event playlists for your overrides.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[pngaudioguy]

I had watched a video on YouTube about how the background playlist layers after the others, but as best I can tell it would only give me one effect at a time randomly selected from that list. Unless there's a way of calling two of the sequences simultaneously that I'm missing.

I guess I could just program the overlays as PSEQ files that are channel limited so they don't mess with everything else and do a variety of shorter interest pieces that way. I'll have to look into whether the channel limits can be comma separated, as my snowflakes are on sequential channels, and if I only want to do an effect on the 1st and 3rd flake while leaving the 2nd on the basic look, for instance, a channel block would wipe it out.

Thanks for the hint, I'll play with that a bit. Might be just the ticket.