Node workflow enhancements

Feedback Ideas
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1

Greetings.

Since the time I first tried out the tool months ago, my major chunk of negative experience with it has been UI and its rigidity and stiffness. I would like to propose some quality of life changes to the workflow with nodes in Gaea 2 and 3 that would allow much more fluidity and precious speed.

I will be using another piece of software for demonstrational purposes, it has great set of features that I find would be extremely beneficial for the users to see in Gaea. =)

Here’s a video of the features demonstrated with textual commentaries.

Contents, very briefly:

  • quick connect at any distance

  • quick connect for specific sockets at any distance

  • quick connection cut

  • quick mix without pixel hunting

  • quick rerouting (chokepoint insertions in one motion)

  • quick connection clumping

  • quick favourites configurable menu

  • font size control for groups and notes

  • double click on portal input to send to the output

  • alt-drag to take a node out

  • auto insert (hold alt to avoid)

You’ve already implemented preservation of inputs while duplicating nodes and branches, thanks a lot for that, it’s already saved me a lot of time! :3

Additional, beyond the video:

  • Duplicated nodes and trees have to be fully rebuilt from scratch. It can be quite an issue with high-res previews. It would be very nice if they used the same cache (or a copy of it) so you could work with them instantly. I believe creating a copy of cache in RAM would be dozens of times faster than recalculating everything.

  • Add a shortcut to “Combine as /Transpose”! I use that node pretty much as often as Combine while building the height, yet it refuses to appear in my most used list for some reason. It’s one of the most used ones. Also, consider adding a “swap inputs” button to it like Combine has, I find myself experimenting with swapping the sockets very often, too. Also, before we get remappable hotkeys, kindly consider switching its default shortcut for quick combine from Ctrl+8 (you have to use both hands for it) to something like Ctrl+3, so it could be within reach of the left hand resting on the left side area. =)

The quick menu was mentioned in the other post, but I left it here because it was still in the video, same as duplication with connections.

3 Likes
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All great ideas, thanks!!

Looping in @parvez who owns the Graph.

Btw, Combine and Transpose are becoming one, along with a few other new methods we will introduce in Gaea 3. I feel the same - I often need to switch between Combine and Transpose and it is a pain.

2 Likes
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A very welcomed change, I say!

Additionally, I would suggest innate “deflate before transposing” checkbox within the node, so that it only copies the microrelief without mesorelief. I don’t mind adding Deflate, but any speedup is appreciated. It could even have a slider of scale bias, similar to what /Shaper has when you toggle “Local effect”. =)

P. S. Seeing immediate response from developers is very… uplifting.

I have the best hopes for the further improvements to the software! ^^

1 Like
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I’ll be frank, I personally got sick and tired of Discord a while ago. We (devs) can only give a few hours a week to the community, and in Discord it felt like we were forced to participate in every conversation because it is rude not to reply to someone in live chat. With the forums, we can stay focused on topics that matter the most.

This was one of the big reasons we kept wanting to bring back the forums.

I probably won’t be this fast and responsive during the week :sweat_smile: but I can promise that I and the dev team will be here as often during the week as we can, and do our best to reply to all conversations.

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I know you won’t be on high guard all the time, hence I assumed during the switch day the forums would be monitored very closely, thus, perfect time to throw my suggestions while everyone is watching, tee hee. >:D

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We’re linking the feedback forums to our internal bug/idea/feature tracker. So we will make sure we never miss any feedback. :slight_smile:

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Another cool thing is that you and anyone else can just @ me (or the other devs) here, and I can take a look whenever time permits. In chat, it becomes really hard to keep track.

1 Like