wish: optional straight wires

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mani Mani on August 17, 2010 at 7:41am

I guess it would be a very nice option! but the interesting thing about the way David has set up GH compared to Pd or Max/MSP is the flow of the definitions[left to right]. Max and PD do have an extra dimension to them which allows you to go top-to-bottom and grow left and right. That way your process could evolve more freely but that also creates a bit of a messy/cluster-esque patch, since you lose the flow of data.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on August 17, 2010 at 8:24am

How would the kinks be defined? I can see a lot of human intelligence that went into the image you posted. If I just draw the wires with a vertical kink in the middle, it looks pretty horrific:

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Jacek Jaskólski on August 17, 2010 at 9:12am

yED, which we mentioned in an earlier discussion, does something like that:
http://www.yworks.com/products/yfiles/doc/developers-guide/orthogon...

there're are papers covering similar subjects:
http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~pjs/papers/gd09.pdf
http://www.springerlink.com/content/p50p344328370733/ (partially available through google books)

and as much as I like the current casual feel of GH I too would opt for new layouting features like these.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on August 17, 2010 at 10:31am

Even if I managed to implement that paper in a reasonable amount of time, their own implementation takes between 0.5 and 2.0 seconds on a medium sized graph. How is this supposed to go with the Grasshopper real-time interface?

It's an interesting paper and approach, I'll admit to that. But for this to work I'd have to make a large amount of changes (for one, every wire needs to know about every other wire and every other object) in the core, so this is definitely going to be a long term project.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by kleerkoat on August 17, 2010 at 10:41am

the idea is a good one, but you've got bigger fish to fry, like the Offset Curve component. ;-)

Permalink Reply by Shawn Fernandez on August 17, 2010 at 11:17am

I haven't looked at the paper, but it seems to me to have every wire aware of every other wire is a waste of processor cycles. Instead each wire could be a series of points that the user could drag to their desired locations. If a user drags a point then just the point moves. If a user drags a line or a selection of lines then the points attached to the selected lines move together. Right-click the wire to pull a context menu option add a point or align selected points horizontally or vertically. To remove a point select it and use the Delete key like everything else.

Permalink Reply by Doctor No on August 17, 2010 at 11:25am

"series of points that the user could drag to their desired locations" Yeah I mean that with the image above; setting a number of equidistant kinks by default that user could stretch in ortogonal directions.

Permalink Reply by Shawn Fernandez on August 17, 2010 at 11:38am

You'd also have to address how the wire point sets move when the components are moved. If they are move together, the point sets move with them relatively, but what happens when you move only one of them?

Permalink Reply by Ben Sitler on September 9, 2010 at 10:13pm

David,

Check out MAX and how it deals with wires. http://cycling74.com/products/maxmspjitter/ watch from 3:00 to 4:00 about segmental wires. I think it is a cool way to sort out the wire issue (though I like how the grasshopper wires just as they are now)

Ben