I’ve spent about 12-16 hours on TD tutorials this week, getting back to some learning I started in July mid-pandemic just before relocating…
It’s been nice to take a deep dive finally. I’m not exactly a totally newbie - I have experience with other apps and platforms (like Magic Music Visualizer), and the graphic stuff I’m getting into complements 20+ years of experience in audio recording and production and software design/analysis.
Right now, in the middle of a rather basic TD sketch from a MUTEK lesson, the Node Flags disappeared completely and I have found no way to get them back from the dialogs provided within TD. Below is an example of what I’m seeing.
All node flags - on all operators in the network - have disappeared. View, lock, bypass, clone immune… all of them!
I have searched the TD wiki using link below, and have not found anything about how these get turned off or turned on. It could be a bug, or it could just be something dumb.
I’m on Mac, High Sierra, and found that I have to run build 26630 in order to prevent some other errors I was getting. I worked through those issues myself.
If I rebuild this sketch in another project file it’s OK and I have the node flags as you’d expect. I’ve also since done other lessons with no problems, but this one lesson is really messed up. So I’d like to know how to get the node flags back in case this is happens again.
Operator Flags are hidden when the Network Editor’s “Viewers Always Active” option is enabled. To change this, use the Network Editor’s RMB Menu.
We determined this to further be a usability issue with the UI. Especially when resizing operators to larger sizes the visibility of an operator’s frame and flags become hard to see.
Generally we try to encourage making use of our ZUI and only resize operators to signal importance.
Thanks to Markus for his help here. I typically do not post to a help forum or log a bug unless I truly feel it is warranted. In this case we worked out the issue after the bug post was created.
I would agree this is a UX issue (not a true bug). The ZUI (mere jargon to me as a new user just learning from online lessons) is overall OK and was being used as intended… but this issue stopped me in my tracks while following a MUTEK tutorial, and nothing in that specific tutorial helped be get back on track - thus killing the vibe. Granted, the issue popped up because of some fat-fingering or hotkey craziness (can happen to anyone). If I have no way to tell how the error occurred, people can’t help as easily. Possible approaches: a) prevent the error from even occurring or b) provide quick recovery. A is not likely, so maybe B can be discussed.
This issue wasted a lot more time than I would have expected. My concern (from a UX/design perspective) is that there was not an easy way to recover from the problem. There’s no graphical examples in the wiki that cover this issue, and it was only by making some videos to share that the issue could clearly be seen. So perhaps some more clarity on this in future builds would help others.