One of the more interesting features that has been designed into the new Visual Editor for OLab3 is the ability to work with predefined sets of nodes.
We have created a short podcast which gives you some idea on how to do this. Check it out at:
You can select set of nodes from a case, copy them to your clipboard and then paste them in elsewhere. You can also do this between cases. This really opens things up in rapid case design. If you have a useful set of nodes that present some common choices in a case, you can reuse them.
Thinking along these lines, we have been creating a few generic set of nodes, which we call snippets, that can be copied into your case, thereby speeding up authoring.
The other useful feature that we now have in the new Visual Editor is the ability to insert predefined sets of blank nodes, called templates, set up in common node patterns. Over the past year, we have been making great use of a node pattern called a dandelion to present better options to players. But dandelions are a bit of a pain to code by hand. The new Visual Editor allows you to drop predefined dandelions into your case.