Mission editor: Arrange nodes BUG

[Sivonen]

I made a simple mission with about 30 linear nodes. 

Then I clicked "arrange nodes" and the rightmost nodes are off the screen, unreachable.

Seriously no one has never clicked that button to test if it works...?

[Sivonen]

To recreate: Make about 20 dialogue messages and link them together one after another. Click "Arrange Nodes" and see how all of the boxes do not fit on the screen and are unreachable.

[Sivonen]

Workaround: Delete one link between nodes and click arrange nodes again. Now it makes two rows. Relink the nodes.

[jclovis3]

The view can only be zoomed out to 20% so if the drawing board had only a finite amount of space, I'm sure they would have figured out a way to move nodes down to start another row. There is an infinite amount of space however so the linear arrangement is a sound one. Arrange nodes is not meant to fit them all in the screen. It makes them more aligned to a grid. The Fit in View option will attempt to zoom out as far as it can to fit most of it in the view, but it won't go past the 20% zoom level because they wanted the nodes to be individually distinguishable so you can select multiple nodes (holding shift) and move them around together.

You can use the arrange nodes to line them up, then select a series of them and drag them down below the first row if you want but the moment you use the Arrange Nodes option you will lose that move. You can only expect the tool to do what it was designed to do, and it can't know how long or tall you want your structure to be. Suppose you had 1000 nodes. You couldn't even arrange them all to fit on the screen without overlapping them, so how can you expect the algorithm to know how you want to resolve that problem.

The best thing to do is to understand what it can do, and use that. You can also submit a feature request to allow node shrinkage to something like a small colored dot so you can move them about as you want. I would also request a lasso selection option as well if they do this or you won't be able to grab a lot of nodes while being zoomed out.

[Superfluous J]

While I get that the tool can only do so much, it'd be nice if it was useful and not just a "irreversibly screw up your finely placed nodes" button.

Why can't it just align the nodes to a grid based on where they currently are?