Association News - 22_CW36 - What is currently going on

You might have noticed that the latest news were a bit different than the ones before. On the one hand, the news were not as frequently as once a week like before. On the other hand, you have mainly received Live@Works and less insights into our current work. There are several reasons for this, which we'll discuss here and you'll get an update on our current topics.

Of course, you might think that this situation is due to the usual summer slump, because many of us are on vacation during the summer holidays. This is partly true, however, some of us were also very busy in our main jobs, because projects were just taking off, bigger challenges had to be mastered or we had to find our way into the activities after a job change. But if you observe the event industry, you will probably notice two things: On the one hand, one could get the idea that Covid is over, because many events are taking place again. On the other hand, the last years obviously have to be compensated, which is why there are now apparently more events than usual. Of course, we cannot completely escape these two circumstances. This leads to the fact that some of us spent a lot of time in the last weeks and months for the preparation and realization of events - for concerts of singers and bands, lightshows or martial arts events. We wanted and want to let you participate in them, which is why several Live@Work came (and there are still a few in the pipeline). So you can be curious about them.

But it also comes to the fact that we have been working on smaller topics in the last weeks that might not make it into a full news or are not quite ready to be reported on in a big news. Therefore we collect these topics here a little bit.

The DMXControl 3 development is going on - a little bit slower but steady. According to the motto "Stop starting, start finishing" we are currently working on finishing longer planned topics and existing developments. One of these topics is the conversion of parts of DMXControl 3 to the newer .Net6 as a basis. This was partly necessary because software libraries we use require this. On the other hand, the change of the .Net version also promises a certain performance gain, which we are happy to take. Another topic is the management of DMXC projects, which we are currently changing completely. This was actually necessary before, but we were scared a bit to change it. Now, however, we have developed a concept for this some time ago, which is currently being implemented and is in the final stages. We will present the new Project Management to you in more detail in a separate news. We also worked on the topics RDM and MIDI in the last days and weeks, so that these should now be fundamentally integrated on the one hand, or in the case of MIDI, work better and more error-free. The beta testers have already received parts of it, parts are still pending. But that brings us to the next topic: beta testing. Of course the tests are going on as well as the development. The beta testers have the same problem with the available time as we have, but there were some tests and feedbacks.

Our documentation team continues to work on our wiki. On the one hand, various parts of articles were added or reworked. On the other hand, we also worked on the underlying template structure, for example to improve the display of effects. More tutorial videos, however, have unfortunately (unlike planned) come a little short. But in the darker season there should be more time for that again.

Our IT team was no less busy, because maybe one or the other here in the forum has noticed it: Some things look a little bit different. That's because we updated our forum software last week. The most noticeable change is the redesigned menu and the now more visible buttons to mark threads or news as read or to sort the lists. Of course, this did not go without certain adjustments and bug fixes, which we have added over the course of the last week. We went through the forum and fixed the errors we noticed. But if you notice any further display errors, please let us know, so we can fix them.

To the hardware corner and the store: Here we have good and not so good news. The not so good news is of course the still stressed situation on the hardware market, which leads to the fact that we can unfortunately still only offer a few new Nodle R4S in the store from time to time. We hope that this will relax in the next few months and we will soon have more interfaces in stock again. Just because we can't offer the interface as we would like to at the moment, doesn't mean that the development in our hardware team doesn't continue unabated. So at and after our DMXControl meeting in summer we worked on a new smaller hardware project, which should surely help one or the other at their events. We don't get more concrete yet but we already have the first prototypes incl. first test stands of the software and it woun't be long until we can present the project to you.

We hope this round-up has brought you up to date again. As soon as we have finished some of the bigger topics, we will present them to you in different forms - partly as bigger news, partly as livestream for example in a "spot on" video.

Your DMXControl Team