On horizontal-only node networks

[const]

Perhaps we must make it a formal request, to revamp groups into a more proper UI paradigm.

[silex (Jakub Jaszewski)]

From what I remember the easiest way was to implement grouping to frames and back. But to do that frames must retain all grouping information like sockets, naming etc.
Also when ungrouping into frames should take into account the order and placement so there is as little of overlap of nodes as possible. But this might be tricky to do.

[Hadriscus]

@const

perhaps at some points you might have a connection starting from the beginning and after 1km of length ending on the end of the nodegraph – this is just brings clutter – essentially you would have to spawn the same input nodes closer to where you need them instead of making long connections in order to reuse the same sockets everywhere (perhaps there are other solutions as well, such as creating some sort of BPY variables or something?)

There were discussions (and even proofs of concept) of invisible/hidden links at some point, a bit like Nuke has. I forget the name. I think it’s likely to get in at some point. There needs to be a bit of an interface/UX push to polish all those aspects

[Secrop]

Hidden links were possible in Blender 2.80. It was just a matter of hiding the socket where the link was starting. The link would still be there and seen by the engine, but the Editor wouldn’t draw it… I still have a Portal node using this hack.

But in 3.x this changed, and the ‘hide’ value of a socket is now ignored if it has a link.