Uses of a useless node

Today’s node will appear useless at first (and is also trivial to implement in BP):

UFUNCTION(BlueprintCallable,
          Meta = (DevelopmentOnly, CompactNodeTitle = "Do Nothing"))
static void DoNothing()
{
}

But sometimes, being explicit about nothing can be useful. Take this example:

What it does is irrelevant, but at a glance a False branch is “obviously” missing. In the middle of a frenzied debugging session you might think exactly that and “fix” the problem by adding a similar latent node as the others, which might appear correct but will break something later.

You could (and should) add a comment there, but in more spaghetticomplex situations it would not be obvious what the comment is referring to, which means you need to type extra text which makes it even worse…

…or you could just be explicit that you intended to Do Nothing here, connect it to the branch’s False pin and avoid these issues altogether in a nice, compact, self-documenting way.

It also has a few other uses:

• Comments can be attached to the node itself instead of a comment box
• These nodes can have breakpoints in BP and in C++ (if you write them in C++)
• You can add debug prints inside without having to replace every instance
• They come in multiple flavors! For example a similar Should Not Happen node (that you can fill with an ensure() in C++ and/or Print String with a breakpoint)