{"id":516,"date":"2017-02-07T06:17:16","date_gmt":"2017-02-07T06:17:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/?p=516"},"modified":"2017-02-18T10:23:08","modified_gmt":"2017-02-18T10:23:08","slug":"state-of-the-world-machine-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.world-machine.com\/blog\/2017\/02\/state-of-the-world-machine-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"State of the World (Machine) 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi folks,<\/p>\n

It’s been quite a long time since the last post here!<\/p>\n

The latest development build (3014) of World Machine is\u00a0available today, and that will be a whole topic of its own. Briefly, the two most notable and immediately useful new features are a major reworking of the River device to fully support multiple rivers and hierarchical river systems, and a usability improvement that lets you view the “before and after” of any device in the 3D View.<\/p>\n

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The next blog post will be about using the new modification to the River device.<\/p>\n

But this post is about\u00a0something else. The last post on this blog was about 14 months ago — what happened to 2016?<\/p>\n

Seemingly a little, actually a \u00a0lot, and many lessons learned the hard way.<\/p>\n

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The Bad, and What I Learned From It<\/h3>\n

Let\u2019s face facts \u2013 I, more than anyone else, am painfully aware that I seem to have disappeared off the grid in 2016. This manifested in two main ways. First, there were no new releases in 2016. Second, I wasn\u2019t active in the forums. To make matters worse, there was no public information as to why. Yeesh. I heard from a lot of folks via support tickets and emails during that time: some were concerned (are you ok?), some confused (does World Machine still exist?), some frustrated (dude, are you ignoring us?).<\/p>\n

The short version: I\u2019m OK (thankfully), World Machine absolutely still exists and is what I exclusively work on, and for that last part, I sincerely apologize, but am taking steps so that this sort of absence doesn\u2019t happen again, starting with this blog post.<\/p>\n

Everyone knows running a business is challenging, but what I didn\u2019t expect is that it continually becomes challenging in new ways I wasn\u2019t expecting. I started World Machine as a side project because I love mountains, computers, and the act of creation. Then I realized I had made something people could get a lot of use out of, and devoted myself entirely to running this business, quitting my corporate job. Since then, that\u2019s been World Machine – me at my computer and lots of coffee, exploring how to make this software I love ever better. I created the forums with the vision of having a community of people all passionate about creating worlds, that could support and inspire each other, and enjoyed being a part of that same community myself. I looked forward to interacting with any customer that came along, happily answering questions, even if they were just teaching new users the features. It was fun and I could run the whole thing while still having plenty of time for big sprints of development.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s what I never saw coming. All that was easily doable when there were a couple hundred users. But as World Machine continued to grow, the time devoted to handling the administrative and support side grew with it and sorely tested my ability to handle everything as a one-man shop. I\u2019m amazed and grateful at the success World Machine has seen, but its success greatly reduced the time available for each part of the business \u2013 development, customer support, forum engagement, and generally keeping users updated (like the website and this blog). And those last two were the first things to drop.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve finally realized this, and am looking to adapt to the new realities of World Machine’s growth. Here\u2019s a breakdown of what I\u2019ve learned and how things are changing.<\/p>\n

Let’s go back to that first most obvious disappearance. After a long cadence of multiple releases per year, there were zero releases in 2016. This left anyone who had purchased a license upgrade expecting to receive, well, upgrades, likely quite upset, and understandably so. In an ideal world, I would aim for quarterly releases, but it\u2019s not always that simple. For example, 2016\u00a0was a year with substantial time poured into speculative R&D projects, trying to do things that haven’t been done before. Some of that effort has yielded extremely promising early results; however, other efforts consumed month after month of work, ultimately never producing a viable product. To make matters worse, since much of that speculative R&D work was entangled with the changes to the River device, it impeded my ability to get any other features out that were production ready.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve learned and what\u2019s changing<\/h4>\n