by danwills | 2025-04-29 13:09:00+00:00
Really cool! I love programming with nodes and this seems like an awesome start!

One thing I didn't like much was when dragging a node that has an input connection, to the left: The shape of the connection snakes behind the node and has some very sharp corners on it. Apart from being a bit of an ugly shape for a spline to be in (personal opinion) I think going far behind the node like that might have the potential to obscure the connection in certain cases. Legibility of the network should be a top priority for a project like this in my opinion (and you've already done very well! this is more of a niggle, not a real criticism!) Good old adage says that reading code is much harder that writing it and node-networks don't really revolutionize things on that front even though they can help a bit in quite a few cases.

I've used SideFX Houdini a lot and am very familiar with Vops: Node-based Vex code editing in Houdini (to see an example get inside (doubleclick or Enter-key after selecting) a 'Point Vop' inside a 'Geometry'/Sop subnetwork). I'm a massive fan of the way that Vops works! Plus you can inspect the actual code that the overall network is generating by RMB->"Vex/Vop Options"->"View Vex Code" on the containing node. Ah I see flowcode has 'View/Fork Code' for the code of individual nodes, which is awesome!.. but is there a way to see the code of the 'overall network' too? (ie what the wires become in terms of calling, if the nodes are like methods).

So yeah, I think Vops is great, and super fun! If you haven't played with it a bit I think you should! (and you totally can check it out for free!)

I've added a LOT of additional accelerator/helper tools to Vops that I think make the overall workflow much more pleasant. Would be happy to go into what they do in an email or something. I think Vops really shines when you want to quickly belt out a small data processing/generation task quickly without heaps of typing/syntax. The results are generally great too I reckon (certainly run very fast when processing huge batches of similar things).

It's not good for future editors when the number-of-nodes+wires gets too large inside any given subnetwork-level though! I think it's totally fine if there is heaps of nodes/substructure inside loads of 'subnetwork' (slash Houdini-Digital-Asset '.hda' ('.otl') levels as long as the function of the node is well 'encapsulated' (just like a good function/method should be!). Once networks get too big and complex it can become a bit of a maintenance burden, and it can often be sensible to switch to editing Vex as text instead, and putting things in headers/libs and so on when Vex things get reeeally big.

Aaaanyway I shouldn't go on about it I just want to make one main point about the wires in Vops: There are 2 'wire styles' (Shift+S to toggle): Rounded (my preferred style) and 'Default' (which I think is maybe also called 'Straight' in some places but it certainly isn't straight lines, just as straight as possible!). With both of these wire styles, if you have two Vop nodes stacked vertically, and an output on the right of the upper one is connected to the first (uppermost) input on the left of the lower one, you can move either of the nodes vertically about as close as you like to each other (without touching) and the wire will still go through the gap! This is especially so for the 'rounded' style as the line can literally go straight-horizontal through the gap! Of course it's still perfectly possible to make a wire to go behind a node, but in general I think they've done it very thoughtfully! I haven't really stopped to appreciate how well-done it really is, but I think it's top notch and encourage you to check it out, wire then drag some 'null' nodes around and see how it behaves and maybe it might yield some inspiration for flowcode? (And I'll feel quite silly indeed if you reply with 'yeah I know Vops plenty well myself', so apologies if that's the case!!)

Edit:Clarity