Q Light Controller+

Hello!
I'm in the process of developing a "busking" style lighting desk for a medium/medium-large virtual venue (a little over 100 fixtures). Since the functions I have created control multiple channels, including intensity, I wanted to create sub-master sliders in the VC that control the maximum brightness of certain groups of fixtures rather than the functions themselves.

Example:

I have 30 movers that are playing different chaser/matrix animations. I would like a slider that would set the maximum brightness of these fixtures without disturbing these animations.

I'm aware of the method to use the loopback universes to send DMX signals to dummy fixtures and having the loopback output to the fixtures through VC sliders. With a slider in sub master mode in a frame with the appropriate dimmer sliders, this works as I would like, limiting the dimmer channel of the movers.

The problem here, however, is the amount of work this would entail. We are well into 3 universes, almost 4, worth of fixtures, and having to create and map dummy fixtures and sliders for each fixture to pass through the loopback channels just to have the level of control we want is not ideal and will take a rather unreasonable amount of time/effort.

The Question: Is there a way to automate this process, an alternative method, or perhaps another fork of QLC+ that caters to this style of busking for larger scaled projects?

The version of QLC+ that I'm using is 4.12.4 on Windows 10.
An image of the console setup is provided below.

Thanks much,
AC

You know you can work in groups?
I cannot find the reason you would want to be in control of each fixture's intensity. I'd opt for group work.
To set a general look intensity, you either use sliders in level mode (and this will impose problems if you like dim-chasers due to HTP), or work with submasters.
All intensity programs should have their own frame with a submaster control. I'd suggest doing so per group. Now create a master submaster per group. As you described, doing thee loopback magic.

To answer the amount of work... a medium-sized gig (8 spots, 8 wash, 20-some static pars, 4 blinders and smoke) QLC+ show building from scratch would ask for 5-7h of work to have a busking ready show with external controls... While busking thru the night, I'd say that a good 10% of new functions are programmed while being busy...
Looking at your VC, I'm already seeing that you lack control over the width and height of the EFX engines. Being in control of the fade times would be a-nice-to-have also.
(Gobo presets, color picker, beam adjusters, ...) I know - it IS a lot of work.

I appreciate the reply but I think there's a bit of confusion of what I'm asking. I do want to work in groups, not individual fixtures.

I have plenty of groups and collection functions for that reason.
The problem is that there seems to not be a way to actually control a group's intensity with a VC slider, only a single function, a frame (with a submaster), or individual channels.

Controlling individual channels with a slider overrides any function's control of intensity. This seems to be true in both HTP and LTP modes.

Controlling a function is something I considered, but there's not a way to activate a slider through another widget or a function (except maybe weird loopback tricks, which got messy really fast)

Controlling a frame would be ideal, except you cannot fire multiple functions at the same time without a collection. When firing a collection, only the button that fired the collection is affected by any submasters. Any other buttons that have functions from that collection are put into monitoring mode and the submasters in their frames do not do anything.

I.E. I have collection A with functions B and C (which are intensity functions tied to the same fixture group).
Collection A is in a frame by itself, while B and C is another frame with a submaster.
Collection A is fired from a frame. This causes B and C to fire.
B and C's buttons turn orange and are in monitoring mode. Their submaster fader does not affect the functions as they are in monitoring mode.

This seems to be the intended behavior for some reason so I did not question it. So sub-masters don't help me here.

The reason I'm asking to avoid the loopback magic trick is that trick would require me to make a slider for every channel for every fixture, a frame of sliders per fixture routed to its proper loopback channel. Then a frame of frames of sliders for each group of fixtures, then putting a submaster into that frame of frames.

If I have 45 13-channel movers in a group, 30 10-channel blinders in another, and want to create a submaster for both groups:
I would have to route 585 sliders, divided into 45 frames. (This is shown in the frame on the right with multiple pages of sliders)
And another 300 sliders, divided into another 30 frames.
We are now at almost 1000+ sliders and are not even halfway done.

We calculated it and found setting all this up would take around 114+ hours of work, non-stop, with our current setup.

This wouldn't be as bad if I only had to make sliders for the channels I want to control (i.e. dimmers), but I have to pass the rest of the channels (for example my pan/tilt channels) from the loopback universe out to my Artnet universe, and the only way to do that is with more virtual fixtures and sliders. Unless i'm missing something and there's a way to pass through the other channels without having to make sliders for them

(For some context, these fixtures we're controlling with Artnet exist inside a VR game we have programmed to take ArtNet data from the loopback network to control 3D fixtures inside the game world, hence why we're able to have so many, but don't actually own any proper hardware to control them.)

Also, I have more controls for width height, gobos, etc, all at the bottom of the screen, I was just showing the main area I'm currently working in at the time, which are the collection firing frame and getting submasters to work for them.

I'm quite sure that you are overcomplicating things.
Firing collection A holding some functions (which are also part of collections B and C) would mean that the (identical) functions inside B & C are also fired. That's nature. If this is unwanted, you'd have to clone them in B & C.
If you keep functions inside their work area; you won't be needing this complexity.
Keep statics, dynamics and efx apart. Same goes for intensities. Don't create scenes where and intensity and positions are changed.
I'll share a project of mine at about halfway to production-ready (backup of 17h34).