{"id":439,"date":"2014-07-01T03:55:34","date_gmt":"2014-07-01T03:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/?p=439"},"modified":"2014-07-01T04:13:51","modified_gmt":"2014-07-01T04:13:51","slug":"progress-report-now-with-images","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/progress-report-now-with-images\/","title":{"rendered":"Progress Report, now with images!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some folks on the forums were asking the other day about how development progress is going. Things are getting very close now for the next Dev Channel Release<\/strong>. I’m doing a final methodical trek through each new feature, and writing example files to help folks learn how to use them.<\/p>\n

Something to whet your appetite<\/h2>\n

Here’s an example image from within World Machine itself demonstrating the “Instance Scattering” device, that takes a single impact crater (defined in localspace), and scatters it across the terrain.<\/p>\n

\"Fractally<\/a>
Fractally scattered craters<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Most powerfully, the instance scatter device lets you treat the local object to be scattered as the basis function for a fractal; in the image above you can see that the craters exist at many scales throughout the terrain, as you’d expect from impact with space debris.<\/p>\n

Why it takes so darn long<\/h3>\n

I hoped to have Localspace support out about 3 months ago. There are many reasons why this release has been delayed, but part of it is the following process:<\/p>\n

Each device slowly accumulates a wishlist as I both play around with it myself, \u00a0and also while I write example worlds using it. Oft times, the wishlist items would be nice to have but are not fundamental, so they go on the backburner. Other times, I’ve realized that I’ve missed a required fundamental ability. When I realize that, instead of putting it on the wishlist I dig in and add it to the feature \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

For example, \u00a0what I noticed while building example files showing how to use the Instance Scatterer is that for many uses, it is extremely important to be able to specify an elevation offset for the placement object; This offset lets you control what parts of the object will be considered above the destination terrain level, and what is below. Without offset, the instance scatterer could\u00a0either build up or cut away terrain, but not both at once. In the crater example above, we’re building up the crater rim but also carving away the inside impact area. You can do that now; but a week ago, not so.<\/p>\n

That’s it for now. just wanted to write\u00a0to show that things are still happening!<\/p>\n

Cheers,<\/p>\n

Stephen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some folks on the forums were asking the other day about how development progress is going. Things are getting very close now for the next Dev Channel Release. I’m doing a final methodical trek through each new feature, and writing example files to help folks learn how to use them. Something to whet your appetite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"publish_to_discourse":"","publish_post_category":"","wpdc_auto_publish_overridden":"","wpdc_topic_tags":"","wpdc_pin_topic":"","wpdc_pin_until":"","discourse_post_id":"","discourse_permalink":"","wpdc_publishing_response":"","wpdc_publishing_error":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-machine-development-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":446,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439\/revisions\/446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}