[FEATURE REQUEST] [Blueprint] Different Color Exec Edges for Loops

[Fluxilis]

Hey there!

What if Exec edges&nodes originating from a loop node (such as ForEachLoop) would have a slightly different colour?

I've come across this issue a couple of times now, that I added nodes at the end of some other nodes, which were actually part of a foreach loop.

Incorrect:


Correct:



Making the Exec nodes and edges that are part of a loop a different color (such as dark grey), or perhaps animated, would make this a non issue.

Cheers!

[ambershee]

You can also avoid creating these problems for yourselves by not arranging your node blocks horizontally like that; line the second block up underneath the first as so the completed node connects to it more gracefully.

[Fluxilis]

Hey ambershee, thanks for the reply.

Did you mean something like this?


That would definitely help in terms of the problem i described, but it's not very good looking, and would get worse the longer the body of the loop becomes...
From what I've heard (and seen) Blueprints were made to orient them left-to-right, so this would be very counter-intuitive.

[Fluxilis]

I just realized this can happen with simple branches as well, and any other multi-exec-output node.
So a nice solution could be if edges could have a color assigned to them manually (right-click -> "Select Pin Color" -> then color picker).
I could imagine this would make the feature more complicated to implement, but it could be a huge help in organizing blueprints (could be extended to pins other than exec too)

[Dementiurge]

You can use macros and collapsed graphs to organize. Collapsing the loop body graph would allow you to hide it from the rest of the graph. You can also contain loop bodies within their own comment block, though comment blocks themselves are somewhat annoying. The interface when dealing with collapsed graphs is less than ideal, which could be why I rarely see anyone promoting them. That could be a focus for improvement.


While colored or themed execution lines would be useful, there are many colored lines in the editor as it is; this is a feature that should be used sparingly and for more significant features than identifying loop bodies.

[UnrealEnterprise]

though comment blocks themselves are somewhat annoying.

Dementiurge

Anything more to say on that, what part is annoying etc... As using nested comments is the easiest solution.
They don't even need to be 'filled' or contain a fill color. So they basically act more like a movable Label etc.

[Fluxilis]

Dementiurge Cheers for the collapsed Graphs suggestion, I haven't been using that before!
Using comment blocks to "wrap" a for loop isn't quite enough to be obvious, especially since I use them quite frequently :P


You certainly could ruin readability of your graph if you overdid it with coloring pins, but that would be at the user's discretion, so I don't really see an issue in that aspect. You could just as well place nodes randomly around the Graph, and readability would suffer just as much.


I agree with franktech however, I like the comment blocks.
I suppose I could color the comment bubbles that wrap around a loop to make it obvious for myself!