[REQUEST] Blueprint Graph Shortcuts

General Feedback & Requests
1

Hello; We know that the worst part of a visual programming environment is the eventual spaghetti your graphs becomes after you add some functionality to it.
I try to avoid the mess as much as I can using subgraphs for everything possible, even though doing that is not enough to avoid tons of wires going wild everywhere in most of these graphs.

I’d like to suggest a simple way to help with organization and workflow; Would be the possibility to add “shortcuts” to a node instead of linking wires. Shortcuts for a wire, like this:

Than when user hovers mouse over a shortcut, it draws the wire to the node it is actually linked to. Would be sooo much less visual pollution.
Would be a good addition if possible to add this to the blueprint system, sometimes when you try to link a wire from a node to another node far away in the graph is a pain in the *** to link them together…
But before we have this kind of new features, bugs like the annoying errors with “Transient” data for functions inside blueprint libraries must be fixed :confused:

2

Hi ,

Unfortunately your image did not come through, can you repost it? Thank you!

3

Oh sorry, I fixed image url.
I don’t know how exactly Blueprints system is built so I don’t know if something like that is possible or not, but having that kind of shortcuts would be nice to link nodes far away from each other in a very big graph.

4

Hi ** **](https://forums.unrealengine.com/member.php?434--), I use to set variables for don’t need use long lines.

ammototal.JPG&stc=1

5

Yeah, but variable instances can be used only with, well, variables.
When you have many nodes that are not just variables, that won’t help.

6

Agreed there’s lots of opportunities to improve clarity with complex blueprints. From past experience I found that hover toggles end up not being great as they break readability for scripts (not an issue for smaller projects, but terrible for multi-developer setups). Once we get on the other side of these stability and performance improvements for blueprints I think it’ll be a great opportunity for us to deep-dive into some usability improvement brainstorms - ideally in an open manner that allows developers such as yourself to be involved.

7

Alright, thank you for taking note about this; I don’t use Blender but I hear that its graph editor has a lot of smart workflow tools. Would be nice to see Blueprints evolve to a very versatile system like that. Thanks!