The original World Machine found a home with both the Game Development industry and serious artists. Now for the first time, an edition of World Machine is available that has features specifically targeted to be most useful to those in a professional environment.

All of the Professional Edition features have been highly requested by those in the Game and Visualization industries, and implemented with their feedback. All of these features are designed for a single purpose: to save content creators massive amounts of time. Be it by reducing the wait times caused by terrain builds, or by automating the incredibly labor-intensive process of dealing with multiple terrain tiles.

In addition, the Professional Edition is available in an unlimited site-license form to simplify license management and eliminate per-seat licensing worries.

Tiled Terrain

As worlds get larger and more detailed, it becomes impractical to store the entire space in memory at once. Tiled (Paged) Terrains have become very popular as a way to manage extremely large terrains. By reducing the enormous world as a whole into a set of smaller tiles, only those areas currently needed can be kept in memory at once, enabling massive, richly detailed worlds.

The Professional Edition eases the workload of creating and maintaining these tilesets. Any World Machine world can be output in a tiled fashion, at any resolution you desire. Multiple-Gigabyte datasets can easily be created. Any data type supported for export by World Machine can be exported in tiles (this includes Heightfields, Bitmaps, and Text)

Tiling is not limited to only exporting. The Tiled File Input device allows you to import and use tiled sets of data as seamlessly as if it was a single file. The dataset is managed by a multi-resolution caching system that ensures that even with the largest worlds, working with your tiled terrains and textures remains as easy as a non-tiled system.

Massive Multithreading

There is a definite trend in the computing industry: Instead of raising clockspeeds, the future of performance lies in increasing the number of CPUs. Dual-core machines are commonplace, and 4 and 8-core designs are on the way in -- and that's just on the desktop!

World Machine Professional has been designed from the ground up to support massive multithreading. World Machine Professional is able to utilize up to 16 cores at once to provide the fastest views and builds possible. There are three massively-multithreaded areas in World Machine Pro:

• Normal Builds:Independent devices in the network are built simultaneously. In addition, individual computationally heavy devices such as Erosion have been parallelized. The speed-up from this device-level parallelism varies depending upon the device, but can be quite substantial.
• Tiled Builds: All tiles are built in parallel, resulting in nearly linear overall performance increase per additional processor!
• Layout/Explorer View: All terrain in the view is refined in parallel!

64bit Support

Increasing fidelity demands higher and higher resolution maps and textures, and 32bit computing is frequently the biggest roadblock to creating highly detailed worlds. In WM 1.x, many users routinely hit the 2GB address space limit imposed by a 32bit operating system.

64Bit Benefits

• Virtually unlimited address space -- use as much RAM you can throw at the problem!
• Up to 10% higher performance due to CPU architecture improvements

You must have a 64bit-capable CPU and run Windows XP64 or Windows Vista x64. The Professional Edition ships with both 32 and 64bit binaries.

Scripting & Automation

<automation version="WMP2.0A">
 <echo text="Beginning Example Script"/>
 <section name="Normal Build">
  <load file="example_script.tmd"/>
  <build mode="normal"/>
 </section>
</automation>

World Machine Professional Edition includes scripting ability. WM Pro script files are XML files that allow you to build a world or sequence of worlds from the commandline. This lets you include World Machine in overnight content builds, or other automated processes.

In addition, you have some limited control over output from within the script (choosing the resolution, world extents, etc)