I'm a traditional man. Code goes left to right, and new stuff goes top to down.
Respectable. What do you mean by "new stuff" ?
Suppose Epic flipped a switch and Blueprints suddenly worked this way: data pins continued to be on the top and bottom and you lay out your blueprints horizontally. But execution pins are now on the top and bottom and you lay out your blueprints vertically. Here’s a mockup I made
What are the vibes? Love it? Hate it?
Pros:
Cons:
Apparently there’s a package for Unity called uCode that already does it this way so you can see how a completed implementation might work.
Really cool and you wish it worked that way? Weird but something you could get used to? Never in a million years?
I'm a traditional man. Code goes left to right, and new stuff goes top to down.
Respectable. What do you mean by "new stuff" ?
You should do some research into Unreal 3s Kismet. It's what you are proposing but the other way around.
Some DDCs work that way. Houdini, for one. Having used both styles… hmm… not sure if I have a preference. Houdini also encourages user workspace layouts. You can sort of zoom in on different pieces of the graph in multiple sub-windows. Maybe it works better for that?
I think Houdini gets away with vertical flow because most of the graph is dataflow, so direction and dependency mean the same thing. Blueprint has two competing grammars: white wires describe time, colored wires describe values. Rotating execution might clean up math islands but it also makes every branch fight the monitor's short axis. I'd steal Houdini's multi-pane navigation before its direction: keep execution left-to-right, let a node's data subgraph open in a temporary pane or collapsible shelf. The real enemy isn't orientation, it's one canvas trying to be a timeline and a spreadsheet at once