After trying them all, I went back to the old 4 Modular Fungi colors. It’s also true that I don’t have the right hardware to make giant patches, so I don’t find it very helpful to have too many colors.
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After using the original palette for a while, I am liking it. Instead of approaching patching by colour-coordinating the types of CV, I find myself able to understand my patches by following paths of similar colours to their destinations. It frees up a lot of time not having to worry about what colour I’m using for what purpose and it looks beautiful.
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I think it would be helpful for vcv rack to also have cables with stripes. having just one alternate look that isn’t a pure color would be helpful, and then it could be any of the colors the normal cables have.
So like: black and white striped cable, red and green striped cable, u can pick any two colors for the stripes. Just an idea, I think something that isn’t pure color would be super.
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Next, you’ll want flashing, blinking, “marching ants”, and cables that wiggle ;-).
It IS useful to differentiate cables for whatever purpose suits you. These are the “performance” cables to switch around, these are ones not to touch during performance. These are gates, these are CV, and these are audio – and lots of other reasons.
I can imagine it possibly being useful to add a label to a cable so you can annotate particularly important ones, perhaps only shown on hover.
The possibilities are endless, but I’m quite happy with easily extensible colors – it’s enough for me.
The possible gamut of 8-bit RGB colors is already a huge number of possibilities.
well, cable wiggling is a thing already, there is a module called Shaker for that
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Ah Ha! Now that random YT comment makes sense VCV Library - Frank Buss Shaker
I did not know about this module when I created VCV Library - DanT Bright Idea so we have a little bit of cross over here… and I was considering making a module that allows you to use CV to control the camera and zoom, sorry for stepping on your toes mr Frank Buss
Still, in the context of this thread, cable wiggling is currently all or none, you can’t wiggle individual cables (as far as I am aware). However, when you hover over a cable, its opacity is changed, so there may be potential code hacking that would allow the effect to be applied to specific cables.
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cable opacity is set in CableWidget::drawLayer
This must be possible, there is/was a Submarine module that made all cables have moving stripes.I don’t think it was part of the plugin suite but perhaps the dev can explain more about it.
There was a christmas present in Submarine Free. I think I called it Secret Santa 2019 : A module which while it was in your rack, all the cables had stripes (like candy canes).
However it was introduced with the caveat that it would be removed again with the next release and that is what I did.
It was incredibly hacky and I certainly will not be putting it back in now that VCVRack is a fully fledged commercial enterprise. That would not be a responsible thing to do.
Edit: I had another look at that last sentence and thought it could be read as sarcasm. It is not sarcastic. It would not be a good idea to implement anything in this way.
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just played around with your code …
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Wow that looks freaking amazing. I could totally use this in my patches. I use different colors but it’s hard when u end up using various shades of the same color, using stripes would be so killer. Any way this can be a thing?
well, obviously, but it seems to need a person who wants to support it and maintain it as a “thing”. Would you like to volunteer?
As far as I found out, is not possible to use a 3rd-party module to provide striped cables, because the process of creating a new cable needs to bechanged dramatically, e.g. adding striped cable colors to the context-menu of every port, provide a way to save striped colors in patches, etc. etc.
At the moment it is possible to add stripes to all already existing and complete connected cables in the Rack. It would be possible to add stripes only to some predefined cable-colors, but it would not be possible to have some red cables with stripes and some red cables without stripes (edit: by using two very similar colors it would be possible but confusing for the user).
In this case, only Andrew could make your wishes come true, by adding striped cables to the Rack itself.
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I haven’t looked at the stripe code but I suspect a third-party module could continuously check the cable list to identify any new cables and make them striped as soon as possible, right? There would be a flash of unstriped cable sometimes, but it should work (soooort of…)
You could also handle all the stripes in an overlay by reproducing the cable drawing code, figure out where the cables were, and lay the stripes down in one pass. Making that work with mouse movements, etc. would be a genuine headache.
I would obviously NOT recommend either of these methods as it would be piling hacks upon hacks 
. Having a wider range of ways to draw cables would be a nice feature request for Rack–it would definitely be better if done officially.
Oh, I have’t tried that 
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Oh no, an idea is taking root
I guess if you turned the cable opacity down to zero and then did an overlay you wouldn’t even have to fight what was already there (except when the user moused over a port with a cable in it, since that hardcodes the cable opacity up to 1…)
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I love the Minecraft color codes
Minecraft is basically a linear arithmetically divided 6-tone palette (red+yellow+green+cyan+blue+magenta) with 2 additional neutral colors (white+dark grey). These 8 colors are doubled by darker variants. Dark yellow is replaced by orange (‘gold’), possibly because of its more attractive appeal. As far as the color values are concerned, the 6-tone palette is unproblematic because the large distance between the colors guarantees good differentiation in any case. With 12 or more hues, due to the smaller distances, a more sophisticated division is necessary for good differentiation (see equidistant DIN99 color space). In any case, also a useful palette for cable colors.
Ha, thanks for the info. I knew something was right when using this palette. I finally get Minecraft being old and all.
Checking out Cardinal today, they have this 16-colour cable palette by default. Thank you @falkTX !
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