Testing Wanted for Joining Nodes Into Frames

Feature & Design Feedback
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I’ve used quite a few different software packages with node based systems over the years, and when it comes to frame management, nothing comes even close to Unreal Engine due to the simplicity.

You guys seem to be solving lots of issues related to hotkeys and muscle memory, yet UE is a living proof that these problems don’t have to even exist in the first place.

In UE it works extremely simply. As long as any node is fully enclosed inside of the frame, it’s part of the frame and moves with it. As soon as the node is moved outside of the frame, or only partially overlaps the frame, it’s not part of it and doesn’t move with it.

We are trying to solve the issues of explicit parenting, such as order of the operations to properly parent/unparent node to the frame or what the hotkey should be. But why not just step out of the box, and think about whether you even would want to have explicit parenting.

If you think what the node frames are, they are a visual and management aid to organize the clusters of nodes in situation where you still want to have direct access to them instead of abstracting them into a node group. So ultimately you want two things:

  1. To have visual aid that encapsulates and describes purpose of a given cluster of nodes.
  2. To have layout management aid of being able to move clusters of nodes as a single item around, without having to select them all first.

Given these requirements, if you ask yourself if you would ever want to have a node which is inside of a frame, but not parented to the frame, the answer will most likely be no. In fact when the node is inside of a frame but not its child, it’s in most cases just an error, because you forgot to parent the node to the frame.

So why even have this option? It’s just so elegant in the Unreal Engine. You:

  1. Never have to spend mental energy thinking about any hotkeys
  2. Never have to worry if you parented the node to the frame or not

Only small drawback is that you have to manage the size of the frame manually, so there’s no feature where dragging a node over frame expands the frame to encapsulate the node. But to me that’s very small price to pay for the simplicity and ease of use of node frames that require no hotkeys and no manual parenting.

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