Sorry if this is a bit too basic but I greatly benefited from this advise years ago and hope it will help others...
I haven't seen the Sample Program, but generally I would scrap it and start fresh. My experience with Crestron Sample programs are that they provide a good way to see various features and understand *Some* of the logic to controlling devices, BUT trying to cut/paste this into a real system generally has major unintended consequences!!
The fundamental Swamp control is quite basic. All you need for basic control of each Zone are two analog sugnal Inputs - Source and Volume...? (Sonnex Tool can adjust most of the settings - Turn on volume, Min/Max levels, etc.)
Selecting a source value (1-24) and '0' for no source turns the Zone off
Volume is a plain 0%-100% (0-65535) so you can control this with something as simple as a ramp symbol.?
I have a Volume/Mute module that I built that manages the Mute by ducking the Analog and then restoring it, but you could use the Mute On/Off digital inputs as well.
My point is that I've found it generally helpful to tear things down to their basic elements, get those working as you need it, and then add the necessary items incrementally.
*** FTR, we do a lot of programmatic control of the Swamp, but it came from building things up. Starting with the example program can be at best, daunting, and at worse a cluster of logic fighting against itself!!...:)
For Party mode, if you start with the basics above, though it could become very sophisticated you could just start with hard INIT'd values that are passed to each zone via Analog buffers after being enabled with a 'GO' trigger or something like that.
I.E.
INIT to hard-code the Source and Voume settings for each Zone in Party Mode
TOGGLE to enable/disable each zone for Party
AND the Party GO trigger with the TOGGLE output
Output of the AND enables the ABUFFER with Source and Volume settings for each zone
Once that works to your liking, you could then get more sophisticated with how each Zone's source and volume get set for Party mode. Follow a specific zone's setting, manually set each zones settings in real-time on a TP and then GO, etc. etc.
HTH and is not too basic...
