Group comments are like embedded laTEX doco in your code. Something you do when everything is done, or close to, and in good order for somebody else to pick up, or to remind yourself of this or that hack or workaround or creating visual sets inside the graph.
It was never a very good comment on the fly thing, it would only become one if nodes could be tagged as part of a group comment with an ID that would resize to their screen BBox without having to be managed manually. Compounds, however, I find are an even worse way to keep track of things while working in more cases than not. The rigidity and messy-ness of port handling makes it so. I have some default empty compounds with a number of pre-existing ports hooked to pass through nodes I load in for what you describe, and that kind of makes them useful to organize work while in progress, but the inability to view explode them without exploding the actual subgraph makes them tricky, especially when you start nesting. A simple shortcut with ctrl _ mouse wheel in and ctrl + mouse wheel out to hover on a compound and explode/implode it temporarily only visually would go a million miles in those regards, as would auto-pass through nodes on ports to prevent the stupid inability to connect/disconnect them once connected, would save a lot of clutter. All in all, ICE still works better than well as an editor. I've done a lot of work in ICE in the last couple years, some of the recent graphs I had to produce are nothing short of massive by any standard (talking hundreds of nodes and a painful level of discipline to keep things well over real-time involving all kind of hacky workarounds and manipulations), and very rarely I had some of the OMFG moments I've previously experience wrestling some hypergraph assemblies. Maya was in sore need of this, and it will hopefully overcome its original "yet another view not quite fully replacing any" status soon, and then move on to get the fabled MayaFX engine for its evaluation. That would make Maya not completely crap to use, and given the way things might go in the future, if I have to use Maya regularly again on my next job I would very much like it not to suck the same mileage of donkey penis it's inhaling currently :p On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 6:13 AM, Grahame Fuller <grahame.ful...@autodesk.com>wrote: > Actually, ICE does have both grid snapping and Ctrl+R. > > About group comments, I've pretty much stopped using them because of the > problem with rearranging. I find it's better to just make a compound on the > fly, and add a comment to that if necessary. > > gray > > From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto: > softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Steven Caron > Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 01:52 PM > To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com > Subject: Re: Maya 2014 Node editor features we've been wanting in ICE > > why choose one or the other? can both not be implemented? :) > > On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 10:49 AM, Peter Agg <peter....@googlemail.com > <mailto:peter....@googlemail.com>> wrote: > In their defence I'd take Ctrl+R over grid snap any day of the week. > -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
