Improvements to node groups and management

I'm working on a pretty complex volume shader and sometimes I wish I had more clarity in my node forrest.

There are some ideas that came to mind:

• Rerouting reroutes (wait for it)
• Front panels for group nodes

rerouting reroutes sounds weird? how about portal magic. Sometimes we just need to pass one little base value across the whole node tree because its actually needed right THERE too..

My idea was to add a level behind the nodes, a virtual rug to sweep all those connections under. More precisely, when selecting a reroute, give us in the node menu the option to connect it to a second level, a background behind the background. only reroutes allowed, and only those who have that option enabled. the node tree could still be projected, as a blurred, more transparent version just for navigation purposes in this magic space.

The second idea is more an ease of life hack that has some magic to it too.

Front panels for node groups.

Maybe its my own fault for ending up 5 levels deep in a node tree to change a value here and there. but I don't think that cant be solved. Actually, a new group input could help: "Panel"

Its like the default group input, but its not immediately visible. You connect the sockets of the input to a value and could decide wherever its a switch (as simple as a round node connected to a truncate. this is really mundane so it should be possible), a value slider with min/max options or a socket.

I realize that some developers just stopped reading when they heard socket but hear me out: the whole panel is just instanced. sliders and switches would be affected on every panel instance evenly, sockets that are used in another instance are greyed out (closed for new connections) or disappear entirely (that should be only an option)

The panel could only be instanced on a node group that contains the node group inside of it, or the node group itself.

the source input for the panel could however be only placed in one place, and different panels could connect you to different node groups inside the node group.

A final touch would be that fancy [v] button on top of the panel instance that you can click and it turns into a [>] and the whole thing just collapses to unused sockets.

I never learned to code but, it just seems doable to me.

yeah so basically I have no idea why that can't be a thing.

~sev~