Suggestion on Action List editor node auto-connect

oxyscythe

Is there a way to turn this off? I know it sounds helpful at first glance, but actually, when you have a fairly complicated graph, there's more chances that it will connect to the wrong thing than the right one. And in this case it takes more clicks to fix the connection than to set up a new one.

I am loving working with AC so far (about 2 weeks), but the one thing that wears me down a bit is the amount of clicks it takes to do stuff and just generally the amount of time it takes to set up even simple scenes.

HOWEVER! And this is important to anyone new reading this. This is entirely justified as the truth of the matter is that it does take time to set up these things (I have a new found appreciation for the adventure game creators of yesteryear since working with AC and seeing what it takes!)

Still, I think there's definitely a lot of opportunities to minimize the clicks and I think this is one of them.

ChrisIceBox

There's a couple of things you could be referring to, here - could you be more specific?  I'm looking into improving the node editor in 1.40 - already in the changelog is the ability to "auto-arrange" your nodes, among other things.

Xidore

Got my vote for "auto-arrange"!

oxyscythe

Sorry, re-reading this I realise I am not being very explicit.

So, I am referring to the fact that when you create a new node (or when you copy paste a new node), the system appears to make some assumption about how it should link this node to the rest of the graph. 

Quite often this assumption will be wrong and what would take one click (connect intended node to new node), now takes two (disconnect automatic connection, connect intended node to new node)

I'd like to be able to tick (or untick) a tickbox somewhere so that this autoconnection won't happen and I'd *always* have to manually connect new nodes to the existing graph.

This to me (personally) would be more useful to an auto arrange feature as I tend to arrange the graph in ways that potentially wouldn't make sense from a "does this look nicely aligned" perspective, but it does make sense from a "scripting" perspective (this is the part of the graph where the case where the character doesn't have this item is being handled, this is the part of the graph where we check for this variable etc,)

On that note what would be more useful to me would be the ability to group nodes into simple panels (basically rectangular outlines), which I could then annotate with a simple comment (Unreal's Kismet visual scripting system did this and it was quite handy when your graph's scale started getting a bit out of control

oxyscythe

In terms of autoconnection features, the one that I do like is the fact that if you release when you're dragging out an output connection it will automatically create a node for you.

Even then though the node will rarely be the one you want (but I'll open a new thread for this so as to keep the content relevant)

ChrisIceBox

The "automatic connection" you describe isn't so much a feature, as more of a side-effect:

When a new Action is inserted / pasted, no other Actions are affected.  The connection will be made if the Action at the end of the chain has it's After running field set to Continue, since that'll basically latch onto any Action that comes after it in the Inspector list.

I'll consider running some kind of check when adding new Actions to convert these others to Stop, to prevent the automatic connection.  Like I said: it's not an intended feature, so I'm not sure it should even be an option.

oxyscythe

Aha I see, interesting. Yeah defaulting it to Stop would make a lot more sense imho.