So, my wife(etherElric) and I, got annoyed to work on huge graphs without any ways to search for nodes we added and wanted to explore how a node finder could work and be done for unity visual scripting. So we started to work part time, on a node finder for unity visual scripting. This a pretty early version, but the concept seem to work well.
We plan to put this tool on unity asset store for free if we can get the time to work on it a little more, so everybody can get access to the full tool for free.
Will be nice to see if there is a demand for such a tool ;).
Brilliant work! I assume they’ll get their own search functionality with GTF migration but that’s like 2 years away. So this is very much needed in the meantime.
I hope they will have this functionality when moving in GTF. DOTS Visual Scripting got a naive integration of Ctrl+f functionality in graphs, that was done by Dev Theo.
If it is in 2 years, it means 2 years before getting a unity version LTS with the functionality.
Then depending on your production, it means approximately 6 months to 6 years and more stuck in a version of the editor not having the feature because you lock your editor to an LTS version to make sure nothing breaks :p.
By working on my personal project that we try to make only in visual scripting and very early in its production life cycle, I can imagine how tough it will be at the end of a production with the tool at this level.
Also, this thing was part of my top 1 graph feature to get. This is sad that Lazlo never was able to work on it.
Yeap, all the Unity goodies in the oven are still anywhere from 1-3 years away, unfortunately. Longer if you’ve frozen engine version for a multiyear project.
He implemented a fully featured search for Bolt 2 but it was also a lot easier to do that there as a lot of stuff was GUID based and didn’t depend on basic string equality. I’m fairly sure the search tech wasn’t even that tightly coupled with Bolt 2 core as he’s using it also in Peek. So they could probably port it fairly easily. The problem, of course, being that they want to standartize all graph based tools so what works for just UnityVS now probably wouldn’t extrapolate to other graph tools. Especially if that search tech uses some middleware not native to Unity. So we’re stuck waiting.
Now that you can search in variable and custom event names, could it be possible to implement a basic search and replace for variable/custom event names? Refactoring graphs currently is entirely manual and therefore slow and prone to error.
EDIT: Holy shit! The custom event search is amazing.
First we need to fix a bunch of issues coming from different node types and also fix the find in current graph functionality that double the code at the moment as we tried to use Bolt classes and OMG, this thing make it so much more complicated than working with IO on files in the project.
This what we planned to do.
Find in graph (WIP Almost at parity with the find in all graph)
Find in all graph (Done)
Find embed (WIP May not ship this one)
Add node icons (Done with some issues)
Add user preferences. (Front end done)
Add the tool to the Asset Store + Open UPM
Move tool to an open repository possibly with an MIT license.
Add Find and replace.
Look at using the quick search back end.
Add right click actions in graphs (find usage).
Add Rename option for variables and custom events.
Jus tried it out. It’s absolutely brilliant. Got API out-of-date warnings in 2021.2.8 when importing, but Unity offered to auto upgrade. Anyway, it worked out fine in the end, console is clean and the tool is simply amazing and literally a lifesaver for medium to large sized projects using UVS.
You can from the git repo. Simply get the tag 0.1.0. You can delete the folder com.sokatoa.uvs.finder, in your asset and drop the one from the repo in your folder to test. You can also use the package manager and it with file path.
Or you can just wait ~2 days to get it on the asset store. It take normally around 5 working days when I get the Unity message saying it will take ~3 working days to get approval. The 5 working day is when you are lucky and nothing fail :P.
