How about having a visual feedback regarding cables when they carry data? For debugging!
Sometimes you can’t quickly see which cables have data and which ones do not.
You might wonder what’s going on when your graph is not doing what it should!
The suggestion here would be: have an optional debug switch that can be turned on to debug cable data flows. Maybe you could even leave it permanently on, if desired.
Visualization could be:
Glowing highlights a cable when it carries data. It’s not glowing when no data is on the cable.
Maybe additionally an animation could be shown on each cable with arrows (flow direction) where data flows.
For short-living data the feature should have a (user defined?) minimal glow time so that you won’t miss that there was data on a cable.
Audio cables might have an extra option to only light up, when they have non-zero audio going through them. But this feature should be enabled optionally because maybe you just want to see how your graph switches in certain situations.
For MIDI cables e.g. you would ONLY see the invloved cables light up when notes are on the cable. Otherwise it would look boring normal.
So all requested features would be:
optional cable data flow visualization with glowing, animated cables (ON / OFF)
switch: silent audio cables will not light up (ON / OFF)
minimal glow time in ms for short-living data
I believe seeing your data would really help debugging your graphs
And it’s eye candy, too
The key word in this post and thread is “optional”. I would not want an even busier, automated visual model on the canvass than what I already get with complex patches. While I can see this feature might be useful to some, its not for everyone so keeping it as something that can be toggled on or off in the settings gives everyone what they want.
Maybe it would help that a SELECTION of nodes reduces this feature (an only if it is enabled of course) to these nodes and all connected other nodes.
So when you select a single node or several nodes then the cable visualization is focussed on the selected nodes only and all others will not trigger cable visualizations.
This could help to focus on certain areas and look whether they work as expected.
A related feature for debugging would be an optional tooltip like popup that displays the most recent value received (inputs) or produced (outputs) when hovering over a pin. This may or may not be achievable depending on how and where the data values are stored in the underlying implementation. I.e., it may not be possible to know exactly what the most recent value for a pin is, depending on how the pin is used internallly.
Another useful debugging node would be a cable monitor that is like a print node but can be “attached” to a cable while debugging to just report the values that cross the cable. In perform mode these nodes would be auto-bypassed to eliminate their CPU consumption.
