It's been roughly a month since WM1 hit beta. In that time, 57 bugs have been solved, and double handful of new features added. We're still a decent ways out from the public release. Almost every feature is in place, but there is still a lot of testing and fixing to be done.
There are too many things new or changed for WM1.0; creating a complete list would take too long. Instead, here's an illustrated guide through the most eye-opening changes.
This is the new look of World Machine. The crusty old 8bit icons are gone, and everything has been refined more.
Here's a closer look at one of the new devices, Voroni Noise. Things to notice: Presets for each device that contain your favorite settings; tooltips for the parameters; the voroni noise itself
A closer look at the new macro parameters available. Macros are as priveledged as a device -- they can create listboxes, have tooltip help, etc. The macro library is now also hierarchical so that you can organize your macros.
How about non-square terrain? It's supported at almost any aspect you want. Maximum terrain size has also increased to 8192x8192. I hope you have a couple gigs of RAM if you want to work at that size!
Here's a look at one of the significant advances made: the erosion device is vastly improved, and is both far more powerful, and more flexible -- you can create some very distincive erosion types.
The first image is a before-and-after with the "Geological-time enhancement" set to full blast. It's now possible to literally wear mountains away to nothing.
Last up on the tour is a view from Explorer mode. Explorer mode lets you walk/fly/drive/etc around your virtual world and find a piece of terrain that you want create. It's also a great deal of fun on its own.
It is very scalable with your machine's power -- a high end machine can have the quality of that screenshot or above, a low end machine can find a detail setting that will be workable -- I've even tested on an ancient Voodoo3 system, and gotten almost-usable framerates. Most machines will be able to find a setting that gets them 20-30fps (what's required for fluid navigation)
So that's it for now. Still no promises on the release date, but I WILL say I would be very surprised if it was not available within the next two months. Hopefully I've given you all something to look forward to!
