You can see the error in the Spirit of 76 effects from the PyroJam competition catalog. Effect GM486Am, GM486B, GM490A, GM491A This also impacted the Wizard Go-getter cakes.  

Not to worry, your VDL hasn’t changed, it’s the way your VDL is being interpreted (i.e., parsed) by Finale 3D that has changed. There is a known bug with falling leaves in cakes. The bug was introduced in the June 20th beta release, and should be fixed in the next beta release. We’re not aware of bugs with other effects, but it’s possible given all the recent work in this area. To help us fix the effects, please send a show file with one of each broken effect on the timeline to support@finale3d.com. After you send the show file, you can get your effects working again just by rolling back to the release you were running before your updated.     Dustin Leary

I have updated to the most recent version, actually the last 3 versions, and a significant number of my created effects are messed up. This is especially true of swimming stars (go getters), falling leaves, zippered comets, and crossettes. Is there a way to get my old VDL back?

So I can 100% confirm from this year’s show that king dragon is random, despite the labels. The effects DO NOT match the labels, at all.   Joel Robinson has the exact same problem.  

Thanks for the info and work-around.  Was hoping I could “cheat” definitions for 36M and 72M as custom options so I could assign them to positions and have a more automatic way of documenting in reports and labels for the new crew help that has no concept of “it’s just X number of 18M in one box”  Not the end of the world but would be nice in a future release if possible   J

Each firing system has a single custom module type option. If your show uses one firing system, then you can have one custom module type. If your show uses multiple firing systems of different kinds, then you can have one custom module for each firing system. A possible workaround to these limits would be to define a custom module, address a portion of a show, lock the addressed portion, then change the custom module type definition and move on to another portion of the show, etc.   Correction: The current limit is one custom module type per show, not one custom module type per firing system. We plan to make it possible to have multiple custom module types per show in the future.

Regarding custom modules, is it possible to have multiple in the same show based on the same “base” module ?  

Great job! Thanks for posting!

Here is the side by side video.

This is my show from July 1st. I couldn’t be happier with how it went. Finale makes scripting the DMX features and predicting the lift times so much easier! I will do a side by side simulation/show video later today.