Changed

• The profile NodePilot ships is now called General, not NodePilot, and is the one in use until you pick another. On first start your edits to it, and any setting or department that picked it, carry over to General. A General of your own is never overwritten: the old overlay then stays your profile, called NodePilot. Project and organisation files saved under the old name are read as General's and left in place, so teammates still on 2.1 keep them.

Documentation

• Troubleshooting: what to do when a profile you did not expect is in use.

• Settings: Reset to defaults sits top right beside the name (TumbleTrove 0.44 or later).

NodePilot still works without TumbleTrove. Departments, shared profiles and declared package folders need TumbleTrove 0.42 or later (0.43 for contributions=); without them, one profile is in use as before.

Added

• Profiles follow the workfile's department. Pick a profile in a Rig workfile and every Rig workfile uses it; other departments keep theirs. Scenes without a department use the Profile setting, as before.

• Profile tabs down the left edge of the candidate list: the lit tab is the profile in use, a click switches, + creates one, and a right-click offers duplicate, rename, reset, delete and save-for. The header names the department.

• A settings tab (the gear) on the candidate list: this department's profile, each package profile's mode, the department picker, the description panel, chain and selected-node suggestions, the hotkey, and All settings….

• TumbleTrove ▸ NodePilot ▸ Profile, for switching with no list open.

• Shared profiles: profiles come from you, the project, the organisation, packages and stock. Save for This Project / Save for the Organisation shares one with everyone there.

• Package profiles can carry "when" ({"department": [...], "entity": [...]}), and each has a mode: In its departments, Always or Off.

Changed

• Packages declare their nodepilot_profiles/ folder: with TumbleTrove, package.register(..., contributions={"nodepilot_profiles": folder}); without it, nodepilot_profiles.add_profile_dir(folder, package=...) or NODEPILOT_PROFILE_PATH.

• "Skip these package profiles" becomes the Off list; a new Always list sits beside it. Existing choices carry over.

Fixed

• An unversioned entry offers the newest installed version when only versioned types exist: an entry boolean offers boolean::2.0, and th::apex_joints offers th::apex_joints::8.1. Before, it was dropped without a word.

Fixed

• On Linux, Houdini no longer crashes with a segmentation fault the first time you work in a network editor, typically on the first Tab. The key poll called libX11 through ctypes without declaring its types, so the display pointer was cut to 32 bits and the first poll dereferenced what was left. Reported on Houdini 22.0.454.

• On Linux, held keys are read correctly. The keymap was read as bytes and the bit test raised.

• A new property suite pins both against a stand-in libX11, and the troubleshooting page covers the crash.

Changed

• NodePilot no longer adds its own Settings… entry to the TumbleTrove menu. TumbleTrove ▸ Settings… opens the same dialog, and so does NodePilot ▸ Settings… in the network editor's right-click menu.

• The manual describes the Suggestions Editor at TumbleTrove ▸ NodePilot ▸ Suggestions Editor…, where TumbleTrove 0.39.0 places it. With an older TumbleTrove it is still listed as NodePilot: Suggestions Editor….

NodePilot still works without TumbleTrove; nothing new is required.

Breaking

• The Python entry points moved: node_predictor is gone. Suggestions are read from nodepilot_suggestions, profiles through nodepilot_profiles (add_profile_dir and rescan_profiles live there now), and settings through nodepilot_settings. A package that registers a profile directory from its startup script needs the new import.

• The bundled profile is always the bottom layer of what is suggested. A profile you create starts with the shipped lists showing through instead of empty, and editing while the bundled profile is active writes an overlay rather than a copy; Reset to Default deletes the overlay.

• Suggestions are no longer scored. Position in your list is the ranking; the confidence cutoff that could hide a whole list when its first entries were dropped is gone, and a dropped entry no longer costs a slot.

• The settings file from versions before 1.5.0 is no longer read.

• A hotkey that is not a single letter or digit turns the hotkey off, with a warning in the console, instead of being mapped to something else.

Changed

• A node placed from a cursor-following ghost now chains like one placed from a pinned ghost.

• The candidate list positions itself from the editor's own geometry rather than calibrating against the first mouse event.

• Everything NodePilot prints goes through one logger with the [NodePilot] prefix; NODEPILOT_DEBUG=1 turns on the debug level.

• A malformed active profile is reported and refused for writing, instead of being read as empty and written over.

Fixed

• The hotkey stands down while Houdini's Tab menu is open.

Internal

• node_predictor split into settings, profiles, candidates and suggestions; the network-editor pieces share one session module and typed slots; both ghost contexts run in one frame; the editor is one class. The property suite grew from 180 to 226 checks.

Requires TumbleTrove >= 0.27.0 to render the documentation; an older TumbleTrove opens the docs folder instead. NodePilot still works without the container package.

Added

• A user manual, shipped in the package as Markdown and opened from TumbleTrove > Documentation > NodePilot: getting started, a UI tour, every trigger (wire drag, pinned ghost, hotkey and chaining, starters, recipes), the editor, profiles, settings and files, shortcuts, troubleshooting, and three developer pages.

Fixed

• Tab from a cursor-following ghost on an input drag now wires the node picked from the Tab menu; it used to place it unwired.

• A node placed as an input suggestion from a wire drag no longer takes the display flag off the node it feeds.

• The description panel shows descriptions during wire drags and starter placements, not only on pinned ghosts.

• Inspect JSON works on macOS and Linux.

• Without TumbleTrove, the description toggle holds for the session instead of reverting after a second.

• The status bar hint says what the keys do: scroll cycles, Tab opens the Tab menu.

Requires tumbletrove >= 0.26.0 for the TumbleTrove integration. NodePilot still works without the container package; only the settings UI depends on it.

Breaking

• NodePilot no longer ships a settings window. It declares its settings and TumbleTrove renders them, in the one dialog every package's options appear in — reachable from TumbleTrove > Settings, or from NodePilot > Settings in the network editor's right-click menu, which now opens the same dialog on NodePilot's pages. Two pages: General, and Package Profiles.

• All fifteen settings live in TumbleTrove's settings.json under the nodepilot namespace; the local file is gone, with one storage backend instead of two.

• package.install() is gone in TumbleTrove 0.26.0; the call is dropped and install() is renamed register_package to match the sibling packages. Against 0.26.0 the old call raised at startup and NodePilot registered nothing.

Other

• One source of truth for the defaults, read by both the declarations and the runtime.

• The verify scripts use TumbleTrove's shared harness, which aborts rather than writing outside its sandbox.

• The layering property suite is caught up with the settings migration; it had been failing since d9bfaa9, unnoticed because ci.yml runs on tags only.

Six things in this release had never worked, or had stopped working in 1.3.0. If you installed 1.3.0 and wondered why NodePilot suggested nothing, the first item is why.

Fixed

• Bundled suggestion profiles were unreachable. 1.3.0 moved the package layout and left four resource paths pointing one directory too high, so the shipped profile could not be read at all — no suggestions out of the box, on any context. The same fault blanked every icon in the candidate list and the suggestions panel's logo. Nothing errored; a missing resource simply read as an absent one.

• The entire Copernicus context of the bundled profile had never worked. 123 of its 124 Cop slots were keyed by port name ('color', 'temperature') where the reader addresses a port by index, so every Cop suggestion resolved to nothing. 106 have been remapped to the right index; 17 named ports Houdini no longer has are dropped.

• 21 of Houdini's 118 tool recipes — every Copernicus one — were silently discarded before you could ever be offered them. Copernicus recipes name their ports, and the parser insisted on an integer.

• Adding a description to a recipe in the suggestions editor corrupted your profile. The entry it wrote could not be read back, and from then on every merge failed and all suggestions in that context stopped appearing. The editor also refused to reopen on the affected port — the one you needed to open to remove it. Both are fixed, and a damaged profile now reports itself on load instead of failing silently.

• Exporting a profile and importing it back silently discarded every description and every recipe it contained.

• Choosing a recipe during a wire drag never placed anything.

• The ghost sometimes appeared beside the node instead of under the cursor when you dropped a wire in empty space.

• Clearing a suggestion list and pressing Apply left an empty entry behind rather than removing the slot.

Changed

• The selected_hover setting is now hover_activate. It has always done hover-to-activate — hovering a ghost makes it the active slot — while its old name and the README described a feature that was never written. There is no alias: if you had turned it off, it returns to on once.

• Recipes can no longer be added to an input port. They were accepted there, saved, and shown back to you, while nothing would ever offer them — a recipe is wired relative to its entry node and has no meaning upstream.

• Learn from scene now looks inside your unlocked HDAs, matching what the offline learning tool always did. Locked assets are still left alone.

Internal

Substantial consolidation behind all of this: one settings accessor, one port direction vocabulary, one slot lookup, one graph walk, one palette, one recipe entry reader, and ghost placement geometry moved into a module that can be tested. The property suite grew from 108 checks to 173, including guards against each of the above recurring.

First release published through the signed release pipeline.

No functional changes since 1.2.0 — every commit in between was work on the release pipeline itself. The last version the registry can actually install is 1.1.0, so upgrading from there also delivers everything 1.2.0 was meant to ship: starter suggestions on double-click, chain and created suggestions split into separate settings, cross-platform routing, and Lucide icons.

Packaging

• Package path is now tumbletrove/nodepilot. The old tumblehead/nodepilot path no longer resolves; reinstall from the new path.

• Manifest 2.0: the supported range is declared as [compat] houdini = ">=21".

• Minimum Houdini is now 21. Versions 1.0.0 and 1.1.0 advertised 20.0.

• Archives are built by hpm pack and are signed; the registered build carries a real signature rather than a key id alone.