BLC

About

BLC is a program that reads and parses QLC+ workspaces and allows for the rendering of the contained functions. The goal is to bypass QLC's rather sketchy and inconsistent rendering system, while still using QLC+ to actually edit workspaces.

Modules and Requirements

BLC itself requires a modern Python 3. "Modern" means "as new as you can get" in most cases. I don't guarantee the success of anything less that 3.7; I believe that 3.3/3.5 is the minimum that you can get away with but they haven't been tested.

The workspace module contains the core classes and functions of BLC and handles both loading of workspaces and rendering functions. It has no special requirements.

The audio module defines the AudioPlayer interface for playing audio and defines a couple of concrete implementations. The FFPlayer class requires ffmpeg and the MPVPlayer class requires mpv along with the Python module python-mpv. Note that the dependencies for the concrete classes are unnecessary if you don't intend to use them.

The image module defines some useful functions for visualizing the lighting output of functions by turning them into images. This was primarily used in testing BLC's rendering functionality, but looks cool regardless. It requires PIL (tested on pillow) for the actual images and ffmpeg for reading audio files.

The output module defines the LightingOutput interface for sending light cues.

The ola module defines the OLAOutput implementation of LightingOutput, which sends cues using OLA's Python bindings (usually built with OLA). I highly recommend using this output; it moves the responsibility of handling the actual output devices to better-tested code (OLA). It should also allow QLC+ and BLC to operate simultaneously on the same output (untested).

The render module defines (primarily) the BasicRenderer class, which should be sufficient to serve as the actual live renderer for a user interface. This supports the rendering of "toplevel" functions, which are Chasers and Shows.

The tk module defines a couple of useful Tk widgets for dealing with BLC. It requires tk to be installed on your system (usually included on Windows, try python3 -c 'import tkinter' to check).

Workspace Architecture

BLC attempts to maintain the same structure as QLC+ wherever possible. The architecture of a workspace is split into two parts: topological and functional.

The topological part represents the "physical" layout of the workspace: the fixtures, the channels, and the universes. Channels are assigned to Fixtures and Fixtures are assigned to Universes, as in QLC+.

The functional part encompasses the actual lighting functions. BLC defines a base Function class, which defines a render method that renders the output at a given time. BLC implements most of the QLC+ functions (the ones used by incandescent lighting anyways): Scene, Chaser, Show, and Audio. QLC+ sequences are implemented as Chasers in BLC; I have no idea why this is not the case in QLC+. Composite functions like Chaser and Show delegate the actual rendering to their sub-functions, demuxing the output and fading as necessary.