Developer News - 20_CW33 - The background around the new Input Assigment

One of the main topics in and for DMXControl 3.2 was, as is well known, the conversion of the Input Assignment. As can be read in the DMXC-Wiki in the article of the same name, various input devices such as a DMX console, a MIDI controller, a stream deck and much more converge centrally to operate various functions of DMXControl 3 and trigger actions. But how did it come about that this central function for DMXControl 3.2 was written from scratch?

To understand the background, it is important to understand the history of DMXControl 3 development. The Input Assignment was in the version 3.0 the topic which we have begun as the last to implement. And as it is relatively known, we were already late with the delivery of DMXControl 3, therefore, we have not put so much time into the concept as would have been necessary. Besides, it was also so that this part could not mature. All other program parts could mature over the years of DMXControl 3.0 development and were also changed several times. We have stopped counting how often the HAL was fundamentally revised at the beginning.

In the result DMXControl 3.0 was delivered with a functioning input assignment, but it did not correspond to what we had imagined. The idea with the graphic representation was not new. There were first beginnings to it already 2011 in the program code, but it was not finished just for the version 3.0. We were aware from the beginning that this Input Assignment was not the final version, although the performance and usability were also in need of improvement. For 3.1 we already had many other things on the agenda, so we moved the issue to 3.2. With this in mind, it was logical that we reworked the code from scratch to get to what we have now. And to be honest: we are very happy with the result. The basics are in place and now nodes, inputs, outputs can be easily added and used. Meanwhile version 3.2 has been out for a year and we have delivered the first improvements with 3.2.1. The concepts of the Input Assignment v.2 work and are a good basis for what we are still planning. So, we want to simplify the automatic generation of links in the future and have many more ideas.

But in the end, we always pick out the biggest problems and tackle them in the next release. For the 3.3 these are the network communication and the timecode player, which has already been postponed very often. The background to this consideration is that we are developing the software in a balanced way. It is of no use to anyone if we gold-plate some parts and make others difficult or impossible to use. So we'll see how many of our input assignment ideas make it into the next versions.

Your DMXControl Team