XL 4 Status

smeighan

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Xlights 4 status. Not all sequencers believe in giving status before a product is completed. If you mention something and it doesn't come out in the final product, people are disappointed. If you slip target date, people are disappointed. Our team feels sharing status helps you plan.


Provisos:
Our target dates may shift, we all have day jobs.
Features we describe may be different in the final release or not there at all.


Xlights 4 is now probably 50% done. It is looking nice!


What it has so far.
Waveform is shown, zoom able, clickable. Think display like audacity
Grid is now graphical, timeline is horizontal
Grid starts with multiple timing tracks. Beats, bars, drum, manual. U can have an unlimited number. Timing tracks have radio buttons. Click one and the timing marks go down the grid and mark all models below.
Individual timing marks on a model can be moved. Click and drag of timing marks is great.
new frame to have the effect pull down
effect frame is now sizable.
color choices are now in their own frame
new toolbar ribbon at top. you will have selections like "new sequence", "open sequence" .etc. directly from top of screen.
drag a rectangle and select multiple objects in the grid now works.
there is a new xml file. your xlights 3.x will need to be converted. new xml contains more info, things like views (think models under models)
It has been ported to both MAC and Linux so we did not break our cross platform architecture.




what is yet to be done
--------------------------


no previews are working yet
save is not working
export is not working
other frame timing besides 50ms.
intially we will offer 100ms, 50ms, 25ms frame timing.


what is not changing in xl 4?
SETUP tab is identical
MODEL setup is identical
all Effects sliders and controls are the same
exports are the same


xl4a.png



And one more picture. Here i moved some windows around making left effects frame too small to show all its sliders. Notice an automatic scroll bar showed up. I used a ctrl scroll wheel and zoomed in the time line. i also clicked on the second timing track (RED marks). We next make it so you drag and drop effects onto models. Start and End times will be set by the timing marks in effect. i clicked one effect on one model (right hand arrow). What next will happen is the preview window will start playing the effect . This is the old F3 functionality. It may be obvious but there is no longer a need for "None,None". Now you just have nothing on the timeline.


xl4b.png





Here i click on the Effects Panel and start to move it around my screen
xl4c.png



When I release it, it automatically fits itself to the new desktop. We will save the final layout and next time you come in, your custom xLights 4 layout will come back.
You can make the whole house preview large or small, make the model preview (you can have two at the same time) large or small.
xl4d.png
 
Thank you for the update. I don't think anyone will have a problem with a delay or what features make it in or not. As long as people know it is being worked on and given updates every now and then that will be great.
Thank you and all who have worked on this so hard on this project. I feel the new update will be a major game changer for many of us.
John
 
Looking real good, can't wait to see the final product.


Let me know if you need a Beta Tester. I am more than happy to help.
I have all kinds of hardware, software and Networking experience.


I also have a lot of different Physical hardware


-blu
 
Looks great Sean and whoever else is developing it.
Whilst I know it is still in development there's something that HLS has that I reckon would be nice to have in XL4. There's the ability to pick what part of the spectrum the waveform is showing so that you can see the drum beats for instance. The bad news is that I can't find where I saw it on a HLS demo and HLS confused me so I gave up on giving it a serious go.
 
Thanks Sean for the update. Looks great. Xlights has been the easiest for me to use so far, so looking forward to this. I ran the scheduler on W2K8 R2, whilst creating the effects on a Win7 and win8 boxes, saving them on a network share, and it ran flawlessly.
 
Like you my two mega trees are now mounted on my ceiling so i can monitor changes. Loved working with xLights and happy again to run it through its paces.
To the team - Congratulations on the progress so far.
 
AAH said:
Looks great Sean and whoever else is developing it.
Whilst I know it is still in development there's something that HLS has that I reckon would be nice to have in XL4. There's the ability to pick what part of the spectrum the waveform is showing so that you can see the drum beats for instance. The bad news is that I can't find where I saw it on a HLS demo and HLS confused me so I gave up on giving it a serious go.


+1 on seeing that someday, have been thinking the same thing, would be nice to be even able to set a portion of the spectrum like 20-80 hz to effect lights in this way, 3000-5000 in another way etc. don't know what type of analysis is available.
 
we wilol add bandpass, notch,lowpass and hi pass filters. will prompt you for frequency range sliders. this will be a summer project.


first we want to get XL 4 nailed down. There are thousands and thousands of lines of code being written. The good news we now have dave pitts, Gil Jone, Dan Kulp and myself working the code. soon Don Juklien will be there. More hands to code will make this easier.


anyone a C++ programmer who wants to join the project, ping me at sean@meighan.net. We have way more work than we can complete this year.


I wanted t implement 3D effects. Put a 3D cube. I would like to place lights on 25cm spacing, make the cube a few meters in size. all of that will have to wait, but it is a maybe display element for me next christmas
 
I was just trying to associate my real name with the profile name since many here probably already have seen posts from me. I used to go by CopperCreekLights here but I switched it to Gilrock since that's what I use on several other forums. Some forums won't let me fix my name though.
 
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