multi-transmitter/multi-receiver concept

Hi David, hey guys

Maybe it's just a silly thought, but wouldn't the whole wireless connection concept be more intuitive and useful if there were additional "transmitter" components?

I imagine it could work like this:

1. Somewhere on the canvas you insert a Transmitter component, set the number of input parameters and connect data. Somewhere else you create another component for a different data set.

2. In a distant part of the GH universe, far far away, you insert a Receiver component, right-click and choose the outputs you want - from a list of currently transmitting "data channels" in the definition. You could also make the connections the usual way by dragging wires from the transmitters.

I think that it would help organize large and complex definitions and make them more legible with the use of a reasonable number of Transmitter/Receiver components.

What do you think?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on September 22, 2009 at 3:15am

Would it not make more sense if all inputs on all components were wifi capable? With a submenu on how to draw the wires? Maybe an option to change all the wires in a selected set, etc...

Though I think your suggestion would be interesting in terms of organization.

Permalink Reply by Frans Magnusson on September 22, 2009 at 4:31am

I´ve been thinking along these lines as well and I can really vouch for the need for something like this. It would save me hours of traveling through huge definitions. (well, maybe not but you know..)

Permalink Reply by WT4 on September 22, 2009 at 5:23am

The re-instatement of the cluster would help a great deal in making the flow of the script easier to understand.

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on September 22, 2009 at 6:50am

I actually think that Luis is on a good track with just being able to make all nodes available to transmit/receive. Then we don't have to worry about having special components to do so.

Extending this thinking to how transmitters fit into workflows, I've been thinking that the ability to select wires would be extremely beneficial for a number of reasons. In this case, it would be nice to be able to just select a wire, right click on it, and say "Switch to Transmitter" or something to that effect.

Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on September 22, 2009 at 6:59am

There was a discussion on the old newsgroups where this came up and David acknowledged this could be a good way to go. Seems there might be some heavy work going on in Seattle so maybe we see clusters come back and some features like this eventually implemented.

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on September 22, 2009 at 7:43am

Yea, David had just shown up there right at the end of my stay in mid August. He said that he was going to be rewriting a number of things relating to the core, so we'll see what comes of that. David never really liked the way clusters were implemented, so I think some of the core adjustments that are being made are going to lead to a better implementation that does more than just visually regroup them. The node-> transmitter thing I hope can be quick. The selecting of wires is something that apparently causes issues though.

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on September 22, 2009 at 10:04am

So that's why he's been posting at the wee hours of the european morning. I just thought he didn't sleep at all.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on September 22, 2009 at 10:41am

Heh, now that I'm working in Seattle for 2 months I have to adhere to office hours. Oh the agony!

For the record: Clusters were removed because I cleaned out the core, and it proved to be impossible to maintain them without adding back in a lot of nastiness again. They will make a re-appearance in a hopefully far superior fashion.

There's a number of reasonably exciting projects that recently broke through the surface at RMA. While I'm in the same room with the Rhino core team I'm mostly working on collaborative stuff (hence the slow release-cycle lately).

I do hope to have a new version out for Acadia, but as always, no promises.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Robert McNeel & Associates
Seattle, WA

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on September 22, 2009 at 10:37am

Love the icons :)

Actually, I've learned to loathe the Receiver component. It's completely messing up my ability to read other people's networks. This UI needs some serious attention and probably some global overrides.

Luis' suggestion makes the most sense to me, why introduce more types of object if this could be done by adding an option to the existing objects?

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