My Code Camp talk about writing software for lighting is something that I've never really stopped thinking about. I'm starting to get more confident programming the MA3 console by coming up with various scenarios and trying to make what's in my head happen in real life. But "programming" lights is different from "coding" software that tells lights what to do. So when I'm setting up an effect or a series of cues, I'm thinking a lot about how that must be coded under all of that UI. The funny thing is that it routinely feels like the UI concepts were conceived by an object-oriented programmer, which makes me feel like there's a better UI approach that just hasn't been thought of.
I did some digging on the standards used for fixture definitions and such, and they're pretty straight forward, and easy to model in code because they have XSD's describing the schema. The thing that I keep coming back to is that this isn't nearly as hard as it looks, in terms of the engine and data structure to make things go. So it does come back to UI. There have been some attempts at this outside of the big names (MA, ETC, ChamSys, etc.), and they're all pretty bad. I am also not much of a designer, so I don't know that I could do better. The biggest thing is that the good stuff includes visualizers, taking into account how a show would actually look, as well as different approaches to adjusting curves and such to make effects go. The latter is really clumsy, in all of the things.
Still, if I were serious about this, I could get to a solid prototype to only do straight up theatrical style cue lists. In other words, an all-digital version of what boards did 20 years ago if they had internal memory. Well, except that it could control way more than dimmers. Also, I can't get off the idea of it being browser-based, so you could operate it from anything on the network with a browser.
If I could get that far along, then I could go further and think about effects and such. Is it a product? I dunno. It would have to be awfully compelling for anyone to buy it. The thing is, the MA consoles are literally made by hand in Germany (likely why the big ones cost $80k). I assume ETC makes theirs in the US, probably close to by hand. ChamSys is UK-based. There are lots of terrible knock-offs and even illegal clones made in China, which is unfortunate. But what about something well crafted that you can access from your iPad or laptop? (Technically, you can do this with the other products, but then you've spent all of that money on those products.) I dunno, thinking out loud. I need a project that I'm genuinely interested in.
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