Open project to implement our own led effects for Mystic Light-enabled MSI products
You may know that MSI has released a C++ SDK (update: I uploaded here the sdk reference since the link on MSI's own website is broken) to embed led control in third-parties applications. As the official Gaming App doesn't support many effects (and in my case, I'm limited to 7 colors), I'm planning to code a customizable led tool to get the most out of our leds :)
If your system is not compatible with Mystic Light 2, there's a nice alternative which interfaces directly to the hardware and doesn't rely on MSI's stuff: MSIRGB. Unlike Mystic Light, there is no colour limitation (which is a software limitation, not a hardware one)
UPDATE: For now there's just a stub on how to use it. You need to run the program as administrator to make it work (thanks jugglincode, see issue #1). It works with Mystic Light 2 compatible systems, I tested with ML1 and I got errors after initializing the sdk, feel free to try tho. I'm going to build a user friendly program with Qt soon (I think it's the best library to interface C code with an UI), so even people not comfortable with programming can use this. For reference, here's a link to Mystic Light 1 installer, and another one to Mystic light 2. I got the library working in Visual Studio 2017, I suggest using that. Remember to compile for x86, the dll won't load in 64 bit applications. If you manage to get it working, please let us know, feedback is much appreciated!
If you look at the documentation (which is more a reference than a documentation as there's no hint about what every function does), you'll see that every function (except for Initialize and GetDeviceInfo) require as input parameters BSTR type, DWORD index, which are exactly the elements of the two SAFEARRAYs returned by GetDeviceInfo (pDevType and pLedCount).
The reference says that pDevType contains the "defined type of all devices". With this they mean that every element of this array is a string (BSTR, to be precise) containing the identifier of each hardware you can control leds of (ex: item #1: motherboard name, item #2: gpu name ...and so on). This way the functions setting the lights know which part of the pc you are referring to.
The second paramater, index, lets the functions know which led (or led area, if they aren't controllable one by one) you want to set the colors of, and again, pLedCount will give you the led (or led areas) count for each hardware (ex: item #1: 2 (e.g. mobo may have two led zones), #2: 1 (e.g. gpu may have just one led area) ). This way you know the maximum index you can pass to the functions.
If you're not familiar with Safearrays, here's a MSDN article about them: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/mt795188.aspx