Work in progress: Improving the editor

Some comments Constellation receives are about the feeling of complexity and the difficulty peoples have to understand what is happening inside a Constellation. A lot of new features will be added in the next few months to reduce this feeling.

Improving user experience

The work has already begun! The first step is to add more contextualisation to the interface. Now the delete and help buttons will be hidden unless your mouse pointer is over. This is reducing the amount of "stuff" and populationin front of the programmer.

The links visual have been reworked too. They now have more shiny look and they now take the color of the type of the variable transported.

Old version New verstion

Improving the learning curve

The other important aspect is the learning curve. A lot of peoples learnign by trial and error. The best way to achieve that in Constellation is by using live editing which unfortunately is a bit buggy in the current version.

Hopefully it as been completely refactored. Now a script is working like a prefab. You have a file on disk which save the preset. At runtime it is an instance that can be applied to the saves file. The goal is to do exactly the same with constellation scripts. It's almost complete and will be implemented in Constellation 0.5 (Soon!).

Here is the current direction constellation is taking. Of course a lot of new nodes and features will be also added too. But it's also important to look back a check what is working and what isn't to have a good base to continue.