Effects now saving as group scenes not per-light scenes?

Hi Thomas and first off THANK YOU for the sheer amount of work you’ve been putting into this app for a very long time.

I had a query about something that seems to have changed in the way effects are saved.

I’m not quite sure what’s happening but I updated an existing effect (a sequence of scenes) and it’s caused everything to go wrong. What I THINK has happened is that the app (on Android) now saves effects as group scenes, rather than as scenes that specify data only for lights whose values are being changed (you might call them “light scenes”). So, instead of what happened previously, where I could hack the individual scenes of an effect in another app to make a scene only change 2 lights out of 10 in a group, Hue Essentials effects now saves scenes that have values for all 10 lights automatically. Because my old frames didn’t do that, after updating the effect with the new version of the app, each time there’s a scene that only had data for some lights, the rest of the lights have been assigned the wrong colours and brightness automatically.

If that is what’s happening, and if it is actually because of Hue Essentials rather than a software update to the Hue Bridge itself, is there any way that I can go back to a previous version of Hue Essentials before it started saving effects to the bridge in this way?

My reason for wanting to do so is that, when you combine Hue Essentials with other apps that can see the effect scenes on the bridge and edit them per light, you can do things with animations that are impossible otherwise, like animating two lights in a group while leaving the remaining lights in the same group in whatever state they were in before you ran the animation.

Thank you!

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You are correct that this was changed. Hue Essentials now saves the effect scenes as Group scenes instead of Light scenes. This was done so the effect scenes automatically add lights that were added to the group. I understand this is not what you want. I could add an option to disable this. It is on the wish list for future development.

That would be amazing - - thanks Thomas!

This will be added in the next version of Hue Essentials. That will be version 1.15.0-beta7 on Android and version 1.9.0 on iOS. The Android version should be available in a few days (in the beta). The iOS version will take some more time.

The new option will be called “Add new lights automatically” and is enabled by default, see the following for more information: How to use the Effect Creator?

Thanks so much, Thomas!