Release 0.9.0 – Introduction of Layer Bolts
I thought I’d start making a blog post for each release to highlight some of the updates. It’s been almost a month since the last release because I made a lot of deep changes. Unfortunately that means this version is incompatible with older versions. In these early days that’s going to happen from time to time.
Layer Bolts
The biggest new feature is called Layer Bolts. The name comes from the fact that they bolt on functionality to layers. In this initial release all the bolts are layout related, but in future versions they could add interactivity or change how layers are rendered or any number of things.
Bolts appear next to the layer in the layer manager. Clicking on the icon loads the node parameters in the editor
So what do bolts do? Right now they mostly do layout. There’s an align bolt that keeps a layer aligned to either its parent or the scene. The linear layout bolt will position and space each child equally. The padding bolt is used to add padding that will be factored in when being laid out.
Spacebar Quick Menu
Pressing and releasing the spacebar without moving the mouse will now popup a menu for quickly searching for nodes to add to your scene. In the future this menu will gain context dependent options, but it’s a start.
Graph Editor Changes
In my ongoing quest to improve the usability of the graph editor I’ve made some major changes. The biggest change is that the graph editor now only shows the nodes of the selected layers. This is to try and keep the editor clean when there are lots of nodes in a scene. Each layer is represented by a column in the graph editor. Nodes can be added to various layers by right clicking within the column. Columns will also resize according to the contents. This is still very much a work-in-progress so expect more changes in the future.
List of Changes
Features
| Added Spacebar quick menu |
| Added layer bolts |
Usability
| Added middle drag to scroll in parameter editor |
| Added ability to turn off stroke scaling with layer scaling |
| Scale has been changed to a percentage |
| Graph panel now shows only the selected layers |
| Certain inputs can now accept multiple connections |
| Ports that can have multiple connects now look different from ports that only allow single connections |
| Loading a saved project will now reopen the last open graph |
Bugs
| Fixed variable thickness stroke getting cut off in raster scenes |
| Fixed scene start and end frame bug |
| Fixed scene resize issues |
| Fixed crash caused by delete certain nodes |
| Made parameters display a consistent height |
| Fixed crash caused by changing layer order |
| Fixed gizmo scaling on scaled layers |
| Dragging multiple layers new keeps the selection |
| Disconnected nodes will now clear data |
| Fixed layer parenting undo bug |
| Parameter locking actually works now |
| Fixed viewport background peeking out at certain zoom levels |
| Nodes that have parameter which affect parameter layout will now initialize correctly in the editor |
| Made drawspan node work in local space instead of global space |
| Added undo capability to group layers |
| Added undo capability to create layer |
| Fixed delete and undo of nested layers |
| Added material undo |
| Fixed copy/paste and duplication of nested layers |
| Removed animation features from read only parameters |