it is not stupid at all. i mean in theory it would make perfect sense to argue that patches are just one category of nodes and further ask why they should have an ability that other nodes don’t have…
i am asking for application scenarios because i see a downside of putting such a pin on more or even all nodes: a performance penalty that arises by evaluating if nodes should be evaluated… i mean the more pins there are that specify that parts of a graph should or shouldn’t be evaluated the more calculations have to be undertaken just to get a go.
for the case that you don’t build up some logic to handle this additional task - like it is the case up to now - you will end up with a performance hit that is bigger the more pins decide upon this matter…
so the example with the big patch:
i doubt that putting an additional evaluate pin on each node will be helpful, since you would need to feed too many nodes with that info to disable a complete subgraph. it would be painful and look bad. it might get better when we reduce the amount of nodes that have such a pin to those that are stateful and therefore do automatically evaluate themselves even when the ouput is not needed. but still you would probably end up with too many connections that just mess up your patch.
on the topic of animation node features: maybe the simple animation nodes just should get some simple features like pause that nowadays are only available on the advanced versions?
