The first, and probably the biggest one ever landed on QLC+, is about fixture definitions.
The need for this big change is motivated by the necessity of having an accurate preview.
Accurate preview means you saving time (and probably money) when creating a light show because you already know, with a degree of accuracy, what to expect from the real equipment.
While the 2D view is quite limited for so many aspects, the 3D preview is not, and therefore, the more details QLC+ knows about a fixture, the better.
So far QLC+ has attempted to guess the meaning of a channel/capability from its name. However, if you created your custom fixture in German, QLC+ would have miserably failed.
So, we needed a way to represent in a non-mistakable way the exact meaning of channels and capabilites.
Therefore the concept of "Presets" have been introduced, both for channels AND capabilites.
Please note that these changes support "old" fixtures, while fixtures created with 4.12.0 and later will not work on previous QLC+ versions.
Unfortunately that's the price to pay for a greater good.
The change affects both QLC+ 4 and QLC+ 5, but QLC+ 5 will use much more information than QLC+ 4. (see: limited 2D preview)
Along the way, many other aspects and missing features have been addressed, so the major changes are:
- improved channel editing
- channel presets
- channel default value
- capability presets
- aliases
- global physical information
This is the updated documentation for the fixture definition editor.
If you want to know all the techy details, here's a document that explains the decisions taken.
Improved channel editing
Alright, I've spent so much time in reviewing user fixture definitions and I have to say: it was uncomfortable.
So I decided to review a bit the way capabilities can be edited, adopting a spreadsheet-like approach.
Basically now you can start from DMX value 0 to 255 without ever leaving your hands from the keyboard. No million clicks needed anymore.
This is how the channel editor looks like now:
This is most likely a big shortcut when creating a definition. Think for example of those LED bars with 32 RGBW channels.
To pass the fixture validator you had to set the channel name, the channel group, add a capability and give it a description.
With presets, you just select an item from a combo box and the whole channel is set automatically with all the correct information.
Screenshot:
- the channel is a speed channel
- it affects Pan and Tilt
- it goes from fast to slow
All with just one click !
When detecting such preset, QLC+ will know exactly what to do in the preview ! You can see this feature in the 3D demo video I posted some time ago.
I migrated all the 900+ fixtures in the library, and this change alone saved something like 20% of space occupied by definitions.
Channel default value
I think the name says it all. On power up, pan/tilt channels, but also gobo rotation channels are set to a value that is not 0. (usually 127)
For example, many moving heads point the head vertically when powered up. We missed this, so there you can set a default DMX value to be considered at startup.
Capability presets
This is probably the most interesting part of the whole rework. And it really leaves space to future improvements.
Something primitive was there for color and gobo capabilities. You could set a color or a picture, and QLC+ knew what to do.
However, more complex channels like shutter, usually have several capabilities with totally different meanings.
So, capabilities now have a list of presets to exactly specify the meaning of a capability.
Some presets are specific to a channel type (e.g. shutter), but some other have been left generic.
For example, a "rotation" presets in combination with the channel type (e.g. gobo), tells QLC+ exactly what to do (e.g. a gobo picture should start rotating)
Screenshots:
And this is the most wanted feature ever asked: interdependent channels !
This covers the need of channels changing their meaning depending on other channel values.
Therefore a capability preset called "Alias" has been introduced to address this need.
Once an alias has been set, it is possible to define which channel has to be replaced and in which mode.
Please refer to the updated documentation to understand how this works. There's a practical example too.
Screenshot:
Visually, you can achieve things like this:
Another boring part of fixture definitions was the fact that each mode had to define physical information.
In 99% of the cases, physical info don't change across modes.
Therefore now you can define it once (in the global Physical tab) and then each mode will be set to "Use global settings".
If you are writing a definition for similar, but several products, you can still override the global info per-mode.
The global Physical tab has been placed right after the General tab, to indicate that the fixture definition creation workflow should be:
- define the fixture generalities
- define the fixture physical information
- define all the possible channels and capabilities for every mode
- define all the modes indicated in the product manual
- define aliases, if needed
