What is the “text output” node for/where might one use it, and what can it be hooked up to? (I couldn’t figure out what it can attach a noodle connection to, and didn’t find it in the user guide or device reference info.)
This is a quite popular question, and I admit it is quite obscure at the moment!
There are not many devices right now that export XML or text based data, making the Text Output not so useful. However, in the future this will not be the case.
Devices that use it right now are specifically:
File Input device exports XML data on its metadata output that contains the scaling information if the input heightfield contained scale. This can be piped into the File Output device
to maintain exact scale compatibility with the original file, or piped to Text Out to export as a seperate file.
I tried this out but wasn’t able to get it to output anything yet. Tried both txt and xml output. If I open the Text Output node and tell it to write output to disk it builds the world and then gives an error window:
“Error saving the File: Device built but no output buffer content found”. However, in the build statistics window for the Text Output device it lists it’s state as “Unbuilt” so am unsure if it actually was or wasn’t “built”.
By no means do I need to use this node right now, but rather was just curious how it would be used, and now reporting what I’m finding now that I know what I can hook it up to. Thanks for the info about it!