Rack Palette - Operators Manual - Strand Lighting

Macros and Show Control
Macro Editor & Scripts
The Lua Language
Advanced scripting in Palette uses the Lua programming language and can be
constructed to execute very complex routines that access the Processor's operating
system, file system or other external non-lighting related devices. Lua is a full
featured programming language that offers IF THEN ELSE type routines as well as
user definable functions, string manipulation and local and global variable storage.
If you just want to run cues or control your media player or Power Point, you can,
but do not need to use Scripts. Common tasks can be achieved using simple Macro
Commands.
This topic can never cover the extensiveness of what Lua has to offer. It is a very
mature language that has a avid group of uses easily found on the web. To describe
Lua a little more succinctly, we took this from www.lua.org:
Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs
based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed,
interpreted from bytecodes, and has automatic memory management with garbage
collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.
The HC Library
To make Lua capable of doing more than setting Variables in Palette, we've
extended the language by writing a specific HC library that talks directly with
Palette's fade engine. All variables and library calls in Lua are case sensitive, so
we've made it easy by providing you a list of available macros calls right in the editor:
Below is a list of available calls to the HC library. You will find that many of the
routines are almost exactly like the common Macro Commands, but the syntax is
slightly different. There are also some calls here that are not available as
Commands.
Cue List Execution
HC.CueListGo('cue list')
HC.CueListHaltBack('cue list')
HC.CueListHalt('cue list')
HC.CueListRelease('cue list')
HC.CueListAssert('cue list')
HC.CueListGotoAndHalt('cue list', cue)
HC.CueListGotoAndExecuteFollows('cue list', cue)
283 Palette OS Operations Manual