I thought I would plug a very cool new resource for people using World Machine with Vue. Dax Pandhi from QuadSpinner has produced a new training video for using World Machine in conjunction with Vue.
Check it out if you’re interested. Dax is also planning on producing some World Machine training products a bit later this year — so keep your eyes peeled!
Hi folks,
After three beta iterations, we’re essentially at a release candidate for 2.2. I’m working on all of the ancillary things needed for release, and then will be pushing out the basic, standard, and pro upgrade and new editions in the next couple weeks. More news will be forthcoming soon!
I just thought i would post about a new device that will appear in WM 2.2.
The Colorizer device has been improved, and now allows you to create a bitmap from an input terrain using any of the built-in colortables, or your choice of external color gradient image files.
This has been one of the most-requested features, as many people like the builtin color tables. However, it also allows for more advanced possibilies:
Acid Bleached world color scheme.. modified by erosion
Here you see a simple test world using the Acid Bleached World builtin color scheme. However, the heights fed to the Colorizer device have been combined with the erosion flowmap. Note how the colors “flow” down the gullies.
Eventually you will be able to fully define custom gradients with the device as well.
A very simple addition, but it opens up a host of easy and powerful texturing abilities.
Just wanted to drop everyone a line to let them know that the 2.2 Beta is released! I swore to myself that it would be available by Christmas, and even though it came down to the wire it is now available to the beta testers.
Previous WM2 Betatesters: If you have purchased WM2 Professional, you are eligable to participate in the WM 2.2 Beta, and already have forum access granted to the beta forum. Go there for more details.
If you have emailed me wanting to participate in the testing, expect an email within a day with further instructions.
It’s now time to go enjoy some time with family for the holidays. Merry Christmas to everyone out there.
I’m just finishing up the last two issues on my pre-2.2beta todo list, and then it will be released to the beta testers. Those of you who have emailed me will be receiving information within the next week about how to access thebuilds, report bugs, provide feedback, etc.
I decided a while back that 2.2 would focus primarily on user experience improvements. This means improving some aspects of the UI, the Installer (and the various standard user / vista issues that sometimes appeared), improved memory handling and world size capabilities, and improved speed. Feature improvements are slated for later, and will build upon the improved base provided by all of the 2.2 improvements. 2.2 will be a free update, whereas feature-focused updates will likely have an upgrade fee. There are a number of improvements already in place for 2.2 that achieve all of those goals.
To provide a little more detail about what I’m working on at the moment:
As of the 2.2 Beta1 release, most of the time-eating devices will be internally multithreaded. This includes Erosion, Snow, Layout Generator, Advanced Perlin, Lightmap, and a couple others that may add to the list. Internal threading is very helpful when building worlds that are not very parallelizable. The other major device that is now receiving internal threading is the Macro device. This is important because in the existing release, moving chunks of your world into a macro will negatively effect performance as the devices inside macros cannot be processed in parallel. 2.2 fixes this by having the macro device build its internals with the threaded builder as well.
It’s high time to provide an update to the blog. Life has been busy lately, and I’m currently recovering from a nasty week-long bout with the flu (perhaps swine flu?).
So.. what’s been going on behind the scenes with World Machine?
Quite a bit, actually! I’m continuing to track down all manner of bugs large and small that get emailed to me. The bug fixes are very important, and are a reason that I’m having to continually force myself to scale down other enhancements so that the necessary bugfixes can get released sooner. Part of the problem here has to do with my workflow for a new release, which can only be described as “painful”. This makes me try to minimize the number of new builds pushed out to the end user, which is actually counter to what I desire.
So what are these new features that are occupying some of my time? On the completed list, there are three or four that are definitely worth mentioning here:
There are other improvements as well, such as new operators for RGB datatypes, and more devices supporting internal threading to speed up builds even further. There are a variety of other changes that are getting considerable amounts of time but that so far haven’t produced any fruit.
But with all that said, the most important goal right now is to get v2.2 out to the people soon. With that in mind, I’m going to be opening beta testing to the v2.2 candidates soon; you should email me if you’re interested.
Cheers!
I’ve been combing through all of the forum posts, emails, and other correspondence with folks about what will be most useful to them. A great number of the suggestions jive with my own sense of what features would benefit WM tremendously, and some of them even have fairly considerable amounts of work already implemented on them!
I’ll be announcing what features will be making it into the next update to WM2 as they happen. As a minor update release (2.x) these features will almost certainly be a free upgrade for existing WM2 users.
But before then, I have some more bugfixing to do. There are a number of issues still remaining in the 2.15 beta patch, including a couple known memory leaks, some flipping issues on file formats, and other things.
From previous experience, I want to get as bugfixed a platform together as I can before I start doing anything involving new features. The final 2.1x patch will be released within the next few weeks to the next month or so.
Hey folks,
I’m back from my trip to the Southwestern US. Talk about inspiring! I visited the Grand Canyon, Bryce, and Zion National Parks. Between those three is a great deal of stunning ( and varied) scenic beauty, and when combined with whats available to see here in the Pacific Northwest where I live, there’s a whole lot of inspiration available..
I’m including a few of the photos I took while I was there — so no, these are not renderings 
I’m spending the next couple of days catching up with everything I can, so if you’ve sent me an email that hasn’t been answered yet, you should be getting a reply soon!
More to come in a bit. I also want to provide some feedback to the ideas I’ve recieved about future WM direction — soon.
Just a brief aside before I get to my main focus here — the bugfixing is still on track and will be rolled out before next wednesday. Most all of what needs to be fixed has been fixed, now it just needs to be tested and packaged.
After the urgency of the bug hunt, the main question turns to future improvements to WM. There are endless features large and small that could be useful, and after the bugs have been released I plan on trying to get as much community feedback as possible on what people would like to see, what would make WM yet more useful for their (your) needs.
As far as the internals go, there are a number of changes that I want to make that will improve the core functioning of WM; they aren’t flashy, but they will help remove a number of somewhat irritating limitations that are here now because of early design decisions made back when WM’s scope was not nearly so expansive as it is now.
Perhaps the biggest one is eliminating the artificial vertical scale issues that WM has. Keeping all data internally between 0 and 1 made sense when everything was created in a sandbox-style creation, but it has no place now that WM has huge terrains spread across many virtual kilometers, and is especially problematic when the “0..1″ system produces results different from a “natural height” system that simply tracks meters alone. The change isn’t sexy, but it will result in a more cohesive product and eventually allow for some interesting changes to the erosion algorithm and other things.
There are many things that COULD appear in future WM editions; many are nearly production-ready already but didn’t make the cut for WM 2, others would be ground-up development. But before bringing the question to the general populace of WM users, I’ll ask the blog readers — What do YOU want to see next in WM?
I’m putting the finishing touches on a bugfix release for WM 2.1.
It fixes all of the large known outstanding issues. It will be available as a patch to the existing 2.1 release; there will be no need to re-install from scratch, as it should layer over the existing installation.
Along with the bug fix is a number of changes in progress for WM 2.2. Many of these were things that were intended for the release of 2.0 but that I ran out of time to perfect properly. After the bug release I will begin releasing more details on the new features, but the most important thing right now is obviously the current set of bugs.
ETA on the patch is approximately a week; I’m taking a weeklong trip to the American Southwest starting the 9th and it will be out before then for certain. The trip itself should be a very inspiring adventure through some of the most amazing scenery in this world!