Usability versus Features

It’s always interesting as I develop World Machine, as there are always two distinct areas to add content in:

1. Usability. Things that make the interface cleaner, that allow you to do things quicker, that are less confusing, or that provide additional power. This makes the experience faster/better/more enjoyable for the content creator.
2. Output Quality. Things that provide a better result. These provide a better finished product, and are the ultimate judge of what a software program can produce. Doing a neat and clean job of producing some output isn’t much use if the output itself isn’t jaw-dropping.

I’ve always tried to put in new features in each of these categories. Since I’m taking a slight break from layout mode development for a little bit now that things are nearing feature-complete in that area. It’s always good to get some breathing room and a little bit of perspective — I’ve found that you can come up with some really interesting insights that you would otherwise miss if you stayed nose to the grindstone on that feature alone. In the meantime, the things that I’ve been looking at over the last few days and am currently researching, designing, or implementing are:

1. Tabbed Toolbars. Sort your parts toolbar by Device Function (Generator, Output, Filter..), or Data Type (IE, a page for all HF operators, a page for all RGB operators, for Parameter ops, etc). This is something that I REALLY want to implement at some point for Pro, as it cleans up the parts toolbar enormously. The number of icons is really starting to otherwise get unwieldy. Status: Researching. This is something I want to implement, but haven’t actually started mucking with yet.
2. Overlay Output. Not an output so much as an instrument or a view, it allows you to have one heightfield provide the geometry of the output, and another HF or a RGB image for the color. So in other words, you can superimpose a mask atop the terrain to see where everything fits into it, or drape your RGB texturing coverage map atop the terrain to easily see what types of terrain have gotten placed where. What’s really cool is that this works in Layout and Explorer mode too, letting you see your entire world with, for example, texturing placement maps put atop it, is incredibly useful. Status: Nearly Complete.
3. Tiled File Input. This device stands to provide for some terrific workflow enhancements for alot of projects. Essentially, after setting up the input file stream (SomeTileXXX_YYY.bmp or whatever it may be), the device will load tiles from disk as appropriate to create a heightfield in the current render area. This allows you to seamlessly work with extremely large worlds — not just for export, but to continuously refine them by being able to load back in your tiled output. You can assign each set of tiles to any region in world space, at which point it’s totally transparent to the WM system– you can “zoom in” on a smaller subregion that spans only a few tiles, combine multiple tile sets in any configuration in the world, etc. For those working with paged terrains, this feature along with the tiled output will be worth its weight in gold. Status: In Progress

There’s other things that are also recieving work time right now — hell, since very little of the Pro code is 100% yet except for the multithreaded building code, many things are. The above are just a smattering of the interesting features being worked on this week that will make their appearance.

Lots of exciting things are afoot.