xl/nc: New major release 3.5.0, Auto creation of Whole House Model

[smeighan]

xl/nc: New major release 3.5.0, Auto creation of Whole House Model

Dave Pitts has created a wonderful new feature in xlights, Automatic Whole House model creation.
Now anyone can have a whole house model (think butterfly effect working on everything in your display) WITHOUT needing to go into the custom model screen or using a spreadsheet.
Everyone can at least try it out and you could have a whole house effect today.

How does it work?
You lay out your preview, scale objects, move them around. When you are satisfied, you press "Build Whole House Model" from the PREVIEW screen.
A model will be created (currently 400x400 resolution) , that you can add as a column to your Nutcracker grid. Thats it!  This takes about 30-45 seconds on my 24K channel display.
What if you need to change your display? Just edit the preview screen, add objects, scale then, delete them. When finished , press the "Build Whole House Model" to update the model.

Does it work on non-RGB? We think mostly yes. Since the Whole house model is being built with 3 channel rgb nodes, it will group your ac stuff as 3 channel each. Dave is looking into making this work exactly as you would expect it.
Soon you could do a wash left to right of all ac elements and see it produce a chase, fades .etc. For now enjoy the RGB previews.

Kudos to Dave, a real Renaissance man!

Also, in this 3.5.0 release, Dan Kulp has fixed an issue that would crash xlights on launch. This only happened to people who had star models. Others would work fine.

And Finally, pick the version you are comfortable with, stay on 3.4.23 if u want. We try to test and make these releases stable, there is always some risk. I will run with the latest code because I like adventure...

Dave Pitts, Dan Kulp, Don Julien, Sean


XLIGHTS/NUTCRACKER RELEASE NOTES:
=================================
3.5.0   Oct 29, 2014
   -enh (dpitts) New button added to the preview screen. This will create a Whole House Model for you automatically.
      There is now a new type of model "Whole House". You no longer need to use spreadsheets and the custom model.
      Procedure: Layout your preview. When everything is correct, press "Create Whole House Model". Give it a name.
      This new whole house model should NOT have "Part of my Display" checked.
      Add the new whole house model as a column in your Nutcracker grid.
      enjoy the new feature, many thanks to Dave Pitts!!
   -bug (dkulp) fixed issue with Star model with users sequences that were older than Oct 20th. This was crashing
      xlights at launch time.

[drlucas]

Yeah it just keeps getting better and better. Awesome.

[arw01]

absolutely a great kudo to Sean and Dave.

I told my daughter to download it and I would email her the house models and she could sequence her own christmas songs this season!

[David Pitts]

We have a bug related to single color stands in the whole house model. Stick with RGB only for now and backup your xml files. I will fix by tomorrow.