Hi folks,<\/p>\n
I realize things have been pretty slow\/uncommunicative lately, for which I do apologize. It’s probably well overdue for me to lift the veil a little bit and show what’s in progress.<\/p>\n
If there’s a theme to the next release of WM, it’s this:<\/p>\n
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Cryptic? Here’s what it means.<\/p>\n
All of the changes below are changes to the way World Machine works on the inside. These changes have been made to allow for new planned devices and features. Many of those new features have not been written yet,\u00a0<\/strong>but I will discuss them anyways to provide the context for why the change was made.<\/p>\n One of the major framework changes is allowing many more\u00a0“Layout-type devices”, not just the Layout Generator.\u00a0In WM 2.x the layout generator and the view are intimately linked.<\/p>\n No longer!<\/p>\n The Layout Generator will be renamed “Layout Shapes”, reflecting that many more Layout devices will be on the way. A new “Layout” tab<\/strong> will be added to the toolbar, and any device (including plugins by other authors!) can now potentially expose a layout UI.<\/p>\n This will immediately be useful in the River Generator device described later. But in the future, other exciting abilities would easily include:<\/p>\n I’m sure you can think of many more specialized layout devices that would be useful! And I’d love to hear your ideas. The main thing that has held this back in the past was that the layout interface was only available to the layout generator; that will no longer be true.<\/p>\n This is a simple but powerful extension — there are now a variety of devices that produce and manipulate 1D curves. More will appear with time. \u00a0Eventually the existing devices will be retrofitted to accept them — making the existing Curves device much more useful since it won’t just be hand-sketching curves anymore.<\/p>\n The macro device is also quite special in WM 2.x. It’s special-ness has been extracted, and can now be extended into new devices. Why would you want to do this?<\/p>\n I can already imagine the head scratching on this one — Not exactly the kind of headline that gets you racing out of bed to use World Machine. And yet, this is a really powerful framework feature, and I’ll explain why below.<\/p>\n There are lots of places within World Machine where you really need more than one piece of data to make sense of something.<\/p>\n Essentially, it’s now possible to\u00a0create custom datatypes that are a bunch of existing World Machine datatypes (heightfield, RGB, parameter, etc) glued together.<\/p>\n This is roughly equivalent to creating a “struct” in a regular programming language. What’s more, the same code allows for treating an arbitrary number \u00a0of the same datatype as one thing — roughly an”array” in a programming language.<\/p>\n What does this enable?<\/p>\n Common things you might want to specify that previously would take two or more wires can now be carried around as a single thing. Some examples include:<\/p>\n “Collections” \u00a0of heightfields\/textures\/etc that can be treated as a single entity. This lets you do things like:<\/p>\n How does a complex feature like this actually make your life\u00a0easier<\/strong>? In lots of ways. For example:<\/p>\n So far, I’ve talked about framework changes. I should emphasize again that at least half of what I’ve talked about here is still in the future<\/strong>. What’s been made so far is the framework to enable them.<\/p>\n The Loop Device doesn’t exist yet, for example, but with the new framework in place it is trivial to create. The focus so far has been in designing the generalizations that will allow better specialization in the future.<\/p>\n In the next post, I’ll talk about the major new feature that inspired and leverages these changes, the River Generator…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hi folks, I realize things have been pretty slow\/uncommunicative lately, for which I do apologize. It’s probably well overdue for me to lift the veil a little bit and show what’s in progress. If there’s a theme to the next release of WM, it’s this: Framework Changes:\u00a0Generalize to Specialize Cryptic? Here’s what it means. All […]<\/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-468","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\/468","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=468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":469,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468\/revisions\/469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Goodbye Layout Generator?<\/h2>\n
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Curve Datatype<\/h2>\n
More Macro-like things?<\/h2>\n
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User-defined Datatypes<\/h2>\n
Composite Things<\/h4>\n
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Collections of Things<\/h4>\n
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Simplication<\/h4>\n
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