DEV Friday

Hi everyone! It’s a friday night and well past midnight but lots of progress is still being made. Things have been fiendishly busy as we gear up for another major feature release, as well as some other really exciting stuff coming up in the first half of this year.

This blog post is long overdue…

New Feature Release

The next major new feature build will be available in Q1 2019. That translates to within a week or two for the dev channel debut.

I’m really excited for this release – it incorporates some work and R&D dating back all the way to 2016ish, and I’m very happy to finally be able to pull some of the experiments from the lab into production. The next blog post will introduce build 3025… and I think you’ll be as excited to use it as I am.

But for now, what should we talk about? How about….

Better Docs!

Documentation has always been a weak spot for World Machine, there’s no bones about it. There’s only so many hours in the day, and consequently I’ve always prioritized putting time into product work over documentation. In retrospect, that’s… not a great idea. Even for power users, discovering how a new feature works from trial and error is time consuming and risks a lot of misconceptions. We need to do better.

As a result, we’re launching a new help center for the next release. I’m committing to having each new ‘Code Named’ build have full documentation for new features by the time it hits the release channel. Some of the upcoming changes will be very powerful, and I want to help people discover how to best use them. There’s also a high-priority effort to get the existing documentation for World Machine updated and put into a form that is easily searchable on the web. We’ll be slowly back-documenting the last releases as we go.

I was really aiming to make this a wiki, but couldn’t find a good solution… so we’re going with a more standard CMS. But I think there’s a lot of room for the community to help write about innovative ways to use devices, How-To’s, and flesh out best practices — I’m really interested in getting some help writing articles. If you love helping others, drop me a line at stephen@world-machine.com and let’s talk.

GDC 2019

We’re going to be at GDC this year with a booth in the expo! We’ll be demoing the features of the upcoming release, showing off some cool creations by WM users, and more.

If you’re attending, you should definitely stop by. Even better, drop me a line and let’s schedule a chat to talk about what you’re doing with WM, environments in general, or just to nerd out about terrain.

Also.. have YOU created an interested project that used WM? We’d be proud to show off your work to all the expo visitors stopping by (with full credits for you, of course!). Again, drop a line to stephen@world-machine.com.

Until next time,

Stephen