New Features in World Machine 2
World Machine 2 is the successor to the original World Machine.
All of the power and functionality of the original that you've become accustomed to is retained. However, almost every facet of the World Machine experience has been enhanced, and many completely new areas have been opened up to use and explore!
This page is graphically intensive, so please be patient as it loads!
Layout Mode
A brand new way of viewing, shaping, and editing the world
When you design a terrain with WM, you're making more than a small box with terrain in it - you're defining a world. Layout Mode gives you a God's Eye view of the vast geographical extents of any device in World Machine. Layout Mode is a whole new way of exploring, managing, and creating in the larger world.
Layout Mode calculates and displays all of the terrain on the fly. It will create as much detail as your CPU and graphics system can handle, and update the view as you change the world! And in the Professional Edition, massive multithreading is brought to bear to provide extremely rapid detail generation on multiple-core systems.
View and Manage the World
- Explore the World
Much like WM 1.x's Explorer Mode, you can freely pan across the vast expanses of fractal space. All of World Machine's internal fractal generators operate across the whole region. Find the feature that you want to export by exploring!
- Incredible Zooming
With the flick of the mousewheel, you can zoom out to a distance of many kilometers, or zoom in to inspect small scale details at a range of a few meters. The total zoom scale is over 10,000:1!
- Render Extent Management
You can store and manipulator multiple Render Extents within a World Machine world. Save the Render Extents at particularily interesting locations, or to produce more detailed subsections of a larger area.
- Manipulate Device Locations
Devices that place their output into a certain position in the world, such as File Input devices or Gradient devices, can now be visually manipulated in Layout Mode. Precise numerical editing of location is still available for accuracy.
Create Your Terrain!
If improved viewing and scene management were all that Layout Mode brought to the table, it would already be noteworthy. But that's just the tip of the iceberg...
The Layout Generator device uniquely ties in with Layout Mode to enable one of the most sought-after features yet!
Bridge the gap between artistically hand-crafted and fully artificial terrains.
You can now seamlessly use vector-based drawing tools to modify and affect your terrain in many ways.
- Draw rough outlines to use as a base for further terrain synthesis.
- Create roads that can realistically carve and fill the surrounding terrain.
- Adjust the height of the terrain to achieve a particular look you want, or to fix a height to a given value for mapping.
There's space here to show only the briefest glimpse of the power of Layouts. Because as useful as they are, there are many more new improvements waiting for you...
RGB Bitmap Support
One of the most visible aspects of the new World Machine is the support for RGB color images.
The device network concept has now been expanded to work with Bitmaps as well as Heightfields. This ability is featured in most of the images in this tour!
Whether your goal is to create high resolution texture maps for your external renderer or simulation engine, or to simply visualize the terrain better by overlaying selection masks atop the surface, there is a set of tools available for you.
To help deal with the complexity of crafting textures, World Machine 2 ships with a variety of pre-built macros that make assembling fantastic looking texture maps quite easy. In fact, most of the images you see here have had their texture maps created with one of these default macros!
RGB data is manipulated in full 32bit floating point accuracy, and can be exported to 8 and 16bit/channel formats.
Improved Synthetic Terrain Creation
One of World Machine's strengths has always been the creation of high quality artificial basic terrain shapes. The new Advanced Perlin Noise device allows you to create fantastic new custom fractal terrains to suite your own taste.
Both of these images have been created from a device network containing only a single advanced perlin device!
New Natural Terrain Effects
The Erosion device that made World Machine famous is still there. But now there are several new Natural terrain effect devices:
-
Coastal Erosion: Create beaches near the water level, and export beach and underwater maps.
Oh, and we DID mention that you can now set a global transparent water plane, right?
-
Snow Device: Simulate the effect of snowfall. You can vary the intensity, drift amount, and evaporation rates -- Whether it's a light dusting or glacial accumulation is up to you!
Improved Workflow
Just as important as what you can create, is how smooth the process is to create it.
Almost every aspect of World Machine that you interact with has been modified, polished, or upgraded.
A Few of the User Experience Improvements:
- Groups: You can now group device together. Groups can be assigned a color, title, and descriptive text. This seemingly simple change serves to make device networks many times more understandable!
- Multiple Output Wires: You no longer need use a Splitter device; Device output ports now natively support being multiply-wired to many different devices.
- Real World Units: All distance values are now displayed in metric units, which most will find more intuitive.
- Tabbed Device Toolbar:
Devices are now tabbed, and sortable. You can define Favorite devices and macros that will appear together on the toolbar for quick use.
- Tabbed Macro Worlds: Macros are now easier to use than ever, with a tabbed world interface and shortcuts that allows you to quickly move back and forther between the main world and any number of macro worlds.
New Output Options
There are new output options available as well.
- Export Mesh Objects! For the first time, World Machine can directly export mesh objects for rendering applications that may not support high quality heightfields.
- Raytrace Lightmaps for your game or other realtime applications.
- Export normal maps by using the Normal Map Maker to create the RGB normal encoding.
- New High Bit-depth formats available for export, including 16bit TIFF and PNG for greyscale and RGB.
Full Resolution View
A small but important ability for those who work with very high resolution worlds. Now you can view the full-resolution results of any build that are beyond the normal OpenGL resolution limits!
Simply press the Camera button in the 3D View to create a snapshot of the current view. When you next move the camera, the snapshot seamlessly reverts to the normal realtime resolution.
And Much More...
There are many other changes that don't have space to mention here:
- New devices such as the Convexity Selector or Checkpoint utility device
- Enhancements such as Macro Presets
- Performance increases in select optimized devices and in Explorer mode
- And many more...
The best way to discover them all will be simply to use World Machine! And of course, the User's Manual and Device Reference are updated with documentation on all of the new functionality, as well.
World Machine Professional Edition
Designed for Game Developers and Serious Artists
World Machine 1.x 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 professionals in the Game Industry, and implemented with their feedback. All of them are designed to save content creators massive amounts of time. Whether in reducing the wait times caused by terrain builds, or by automating the incredibly labor-intensive process of dealing with multiple terrain tiles.
Tiled Input and Output
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 approximately 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
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 and 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)
Release Date and Upgrading
When will it be Available? And How Much will it Cost?
Release Date
The release date of World Machine 2 is July 4th, 2008!. You can stay up to date with the latest development details at the World Machine Development Blog.
Questions or Comments about World Machine 2? Discuss them at the community forum!
Upgrade Discounts
World Machine has come a long way since its first public release as WM 0.85! As a "Thank You" for your purchase and loyalty over the years, existing customers will recieve a significant discount to the price of the new edition.
You may also at any time upgrade a WM 2.0 Standard to WM 2.0 Professional License. Details will be available upon release.