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World Machine Pro Development

Happy Thanksgiving! A new development cycle… (1/2)

To readers in the US, I hope you’ve had a good thanksgiving!

There’s a LOT happening now, as a development cycle is ramping up into full swing. I’m still deciding what features are going into the next edition; what follows below are things that are certainly going in.

  1. Ability to have different resolutions in the same world file. You can finally create your textures at a higher resolution than your heightfield, for example..
  2. Along with the above, support for localspace sections of the network. Localspace settings are unaffected by world settings, allowing you to do things like create and load textures, etc that can be later placed into the world.
  3. (To enable the two above) Groups are becoming stronger more privileged entities. Groups will become the primary means of designating parts of the world to exist at a different resolution, for example.
  4. A yet-more-fluid UI. Workview improvements; the idea is to provide much more feedback about what effects your actions will have.
  5. Undo/Redo support (finally!) Some major architectural changes are going into place to enable this. A side effect of those changes is the next feature …
  6. Background Previews and Builds. You will be able to startup a build and then still work on the network as the build proceeds unobtrusively in the background.

There’s much more planned,  but thats the featureset that will be enabled by the changes I’m making right now. I’m going to make a few posts soon on the forums detailing some of the feedback I received from all of YOU (my customers!) during the 2.2 upgrade when you filled out the survey (thanks!) Many of those requests will be directly tageted.

I don’t have too much more solid information for you guys yet, but I will try to keep everyone up to date on whats going on, including when a new beta cycle begins!

By Stephen

Founder of World Machine