Comment/Note Tool
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We sort of have this already in different forms. How do you see the "note" gadget working? How would it be different/an improvement over these methods?
- Text gadget with "big gadget" turned on, which shows the text on the gadget itself. Powered off so it doesn't show for the player.
- (Where applicable) Naming gadgets with what role they play for the logic. Colour coding them to make it quicker to parse at a glance. Setting their icons to get an idea of what they do at a glance.
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I was thinking it would essentially work by allowing you to stamp down a note somewhere (at least within a microchip, possibly even elsewhere in the scene), which you could then enter text into. The note would be displayed in a style that made it clear it's not a regular gadget, just a piece of text. It could also be resized to take up less room or fit more text.
As for why the other methods don't quite suit what I have in mind:
- Text Gadget: This is actually fairly close to what I'm thinking of, and is a good rough reference for the concept. Unfortunately, it's not always clear that the text gadget is being used for this purpose, whereas a dedicated note is very clearly intended solely for developer reference. Also, they can't be resized, so they'll sometimes feel like they take up more space than necessary, and sometimes feel like they're quite limiting.
- Naming: This is a very useful approach to documenting logic, but can't really be compared with notes. I don't know how familiar you are with traditional text-based programming, but I would say naming gadgets is more like clear naming of functions/variables, and the note tool I have in mind is closer to placing comments in code. Both are useful techniques for documenting code/logic, and they should both be used where relevant.
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I would love this.
Text gadgets and node-naming both feel kind of workarounds (because they are), also text gadgets also fill thermo, a small amount of it, but still.
A note tool would also be used as a graphical way to enclose specific parts of a microchip (maybe even by drawing rectangles or polygons directly in the chip) just to make a note of a specific part of a web of complex logic.
Expanding that, you could have semi-transparent "notes" with specific polygons enclosing parts of the scenery, with notes popping out on imp hover. These would be visible only in edit mode and (ideally) take no thermo.
In general more tools for logic commenting would be good.
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Yes, I've been programming for years. "Self-commenting code" is something akin to naming gadgets, I think. For me, most of the time I don't make text notes beyond that for myself or even others to use the logic. I just lay things out and name gadgets in a way that makes it easy to understand what things do.
Personally I feel like the convention of using a powered-off "big" text gadget as a developer's comment is pretty ubiquitous at this point. Started back in beta, and people are still using it this way. Any time I see an unpowered big text gadget, I know it's a comment. For any real text, it would not be turned off (or would have something wired into it), so that's how I tell the difference.
Also with the text gadget a user can hover over it and see the full text on the screen--so if you prefer you can make the gadget small and the user can still read a lengthy comment just by hovering.
Another thing we could do once the change goes live is, changing the colour of the text gadget itself. We used to be able to do this in beta, but things were changed. I believe they have plans putting that feature back, as it's very useful for colour coding. And in this case, could be used to further differentiate it as a "comment."
I think personally, a "comment"/"note" gadget would be so amazingly close to a text gadget it's not even worth making a distinction. Perhaps the text gadget could be expanded on to fit what you're thinking of, and it would save developing a whole new gadget and UI and QA-ing it all from the ground-up.
A note would also use thermo by the way; it wouldn't be thermo-free. If it's saved with the creation, and there in edit mode... it uses memory and thermo to be there.
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