When working with heavily parameterized graphs, something I feel would help a lot that perhaps may not rock the boat too much, would be the ability to direct properties and attributes in-slot, in addition to dragging wires around. Something like you see in many ‘scriptable object’ based architectures. Take the following example:
It’s a bit contrived, but demonstrates some of the issues I see in a lot of real-world graphs → crisscrossing wires, wires crossing nodes, wires crossing over large spaces (portals are coming soon though I think?), nodes that are near blocks converging and fighting for vertical space. Spaghetti. As blocks get added to the different contexts, you’ve really gotta work to keep things vertically organized. And as more complex behaviour is added it becomes both more difficult to look at and also wire things up.
What would be great would be, in addition to the existing wires and ports, a button or context menu next to the port to set them to properties or attributes directly, without running additional wires or anything. Not exactly like you see in “scriptable object architectures”, but something like:
I could mock up a more detailed example, but I think anybody reading this who’s familiar with the concept gets the basic idea. I started this post with just VFX graph in mind, though as everything seems to be moving towards a Graph Toolkit base, it would be nice to have this elsewhere too. Or maybe it can be done already in GTK? Thanks!
