Suggestion Box/Wishlist: what do we want from Ultrasabers?

My big wishlist post:

I'm going to break this down into categories, but I feel very strongly about most of it. I kindly ask that you read all of it, as I wholeheartedly believe all of it to be worth considering.

For the forum:
- A dedicated child board dedicated to the Diamond controller. Most of us Diamond owners end up posting in the Obsidian boards which leads to a bit of confusion as to exactly where to post, a bit of clutter, stuff not getting seen by the right people, etc. A child board would fix all of that.

For Ultrasabers itself:
- An annual/semi-annual "Design A Saber" contest on the forum! It'd be up to smarter people than me to make up the rules, but some sort of thing where once or twice a year, the Saberforum community gets together and submits some designs for potential new sabers; these are then voted on by the community, and the winning design becomes a new saber produced by Ultrasabers. Maybe the prize is one of the new sabers?

- More sabers that are mostly silver with black accents like the Bellicose or Emperor's Hand. A lot of the designs like Dark Shock, Dark Apprentice, etc. would look really cool - and much more Star Wars-y - were the black and sliver reversed. I'm a machinist by trade so I don't imagine this option would take much effort to introduce; just do the same process for the LE gold finish stuff but with black anodizing instead.

For Ultrasabers internal electronics:
- The plastic chassis for the speakers needs to be held on by more than a single small bolt driven into the plastic of the battery holder. Some sort of adhesive (either two-part epoxy or impact-tough super glue) should hold the chassis to the container in addition to the bolt. My speaker chassis came apart in my Diamond hilt during normal usage, with the bolt pulling all the threads with it. and while I was able to fix it (with some difficulty), it would not have been necessary had the saber been built to the advertised "most duelable" standard.

- The LED modules need to be secured in place somehow. Be it a set screw, an O-ring, or a simple Teflon tape wrap, the LED module in all three of my Ultrasabers are loose and rattle inside the hilt, sometimes even with a blade in. Aside from potential durability concerns, these hilts would feel much more like a professional product if they didn't have rattling bits of metal moving around inside.

For the Ultrasabers Launcher:
- The new express wizard for Diamond is awesome! The one thing I'd change: the "blade color" option in the center of the Diamond doesn't seem to do anything, and it's rather tedious to click every field and change it to the same color, especially if you're not doing one of the 16 defaults in the color picker. The "blade color" button should be kind of a master button that changes all the effects to that color (except for clash, lockup, and Force). You could then still manually tweak all these if desired. A "copy/paste" option would be handy as well.

- More points in the effects editor! 20 points is okay for a lot of stuff, but for certain things like advanced flicker effects or rainbows (two things the Diamond can do that no other guys' boards can), the 20 can be *really* limiting. I understand that there may be hardware limitations, but if there's any way we can push it, we should. Also worth noting: if you go past 20 points in a channel, the line glitches out and links back up with the first point, and the only way to fix the glitch is to turn the channel off and back on then start over. This error should be fixed, and a point counter up top to let you know how many points are used would be very handy.

- The max zoom of the Zoom tool in the Effects editor is WAY too close. 2nd to max zoom is .01 second resolution, but max zoom is .005 resolution O_o It's way too close to be usable, but I do want a bit more zoom than the 2nd level can offer me. Perhaps it's a typo and it was supposed to be .05 instead of .005 resolution?

- The "Add point with values for all channels" thing is nice, but what would make it even nicer is if it brought up the same color picker from the Express Wizard as opposed to having to type in numbers and guess.

- The Emerald's "impact threshold" option would be very useful on the Diamond. Even with impact sensitivity set to bare minimum, it is not uncommon for two or even three impacts in a row to sound from a single hit.

- We need a better way of selecting channels in the effects editor than just clicking the lines. That works sometimes, but if you have spots where two or more lines overlap completely, it's difficult to select your desired channel because you can't click the line. a little "selected" button next to the on/off toggle for each channel would do nicely.

- I'm going to say it again: the sound normalization feature needs to be *optional*. The "mix-and-match" sound concept does not work with pre-mixed sounds like Diamond uses, and though you can fix soundfont volume issues with the slider somewhat, it A. is extraordinarily tedious, and B. often results in a soundfont that is much quieter than others at max volume. If we could just use the native volumes of each sound file (all of which would be properly leveled if they were made right anyway), that would solve all of it.

For the Diamond Controller:
- If we can go 16 soundfonts up from 10, why not just bump it up to an even 20? We've got 256 MB on the board, and even with 16 soundfonts on my Diamond (some of them huge), I still have 100 MB left. My main limiting factor is the number of fonts, not the storage space. Most soundfonts are under 6 MB anyway so maybe even more than 20 could be done.

- This might just be an issue pertaining to my personal saber, so I am factoring that in. But, I don't think the Diamond is as resistant to dueling impacts as the epoxy casing leads me to believe. Even a moderate impact will cause the board to glitch out or reset. I don't know if it's a problem with just my board, or the battery casing, the Emperor's Hand hilt, or all Diamond sabers, but I think it is worth testing on your end to maybe solve a potential problem. One likely cause is that moderate impacts momentarily jostle the batteries and cause them to lose contact for a split second. Whatever it is, I feel that it's a very annoying problem to deal with on an otherwise astounding saber.

-Minor gripe; if you use a font that lacks a certain effect (e.g. no Force or Stab), and then switch to one that does, the newly selected font will not play the new effects until the saber is restarted.

Thank you for taking the time to read this lengthy post. Hopefully at least some of these will be implemented. I've owned Ultrasabers for a long time (my first ones were back from the PVC days), and I love seeing this company grow and improve. Here's hoping I can contribute to that. If anyone else would like to chime in on any of these points, please do.