Creating a Simple Hello World program

Creating the project

Now that you have installed FlowForge, let's start with a little Hello World program.

First, click on "New Project" on the startmenu. Dont worry, you won't be prompted to select hundreds of project configurations or anything. FlowForge aims to be a light-weight and simple tool, and we will keep it that way. Upon creating a new project, you will be redirected to an empty canvas with only the Start Node in it.

We will be referring to the blocks as "Nodes"

The Start node is the main node where the execution of the program begins. Notice how you have two output options. "Output" and "OutputX". The "OutputX" refers to the External output points we will use, to trigger special operations like setting up variable data, or passing data between nodes.

To print to the console, we will use the print node. You can select it from the functions tree on the left side of the screen. Simply double click and the print node will appear on the screen. Or, the more efficient way to connect nodes is by Dynamic Connection

To start a Dynamic Connection, click on the output button on the start node and move your mouse where you want to place it. The connection link will appear and follow your mouse

After that, click on the position where you want to place your node. You will see a search popup menu appear. You can search for the particular node you are looking for. In this case, the print node is right at the beginning. So we can click on it to place the node

Once you have placed the print node, the connection will be established between Start node's "Output" and Print node's "Input". You can connect more connections this way, but remember the order of the execution will correspond to the order of the connection you made first. After that, in the print node, you will see a textfield. You can type the message you want to print and leave it there. That done, click on the "Run" button to execute your code.

Congratulations! You have succesfully created a basic hello world program in FlowForge. Now that you have the basics covered, you can explore other nodes and play around yourself, or keep following the tutorials to learn in detail.