World Machine LTE
‘Mt Rainier’ Final
Build 4013
Build 4013 is a release candidate for the new ‘LTE’ version of World Machine. This next-generation version modernizes World Machine and migrates from its original GUI platform. Build 4013 completes several months of bugfixing and testing and should work well for all users, including in production environments.
It is available immediately on the Dev Channel. The Release Channel version will follow shortly.
Build 4013 presents an excellent stable base for all future development!
What’s New in LTE?
Here’s a high-level overview of what’s new:
- Progressive, high-resolution background builds
- Complete, granular edit history retained; jump into the past in your edit history to compare changes
- Edit multiple non-modal parameter dialogs at once
- Multiple, resizable viewpanes
- Retain settings ‘snapshots’ of important builds
- Devices and macros have greatly improved presentation of parameters (styling, grouping, etc)
- Full-skin darkmode UI
- Hit TAB to quick-add a device or macro from search
- Greatly improved high-resolution terrain display
- Maya-style ALT navigation in all viewports
- Tiltable orthographic layout view
There are many hundreds of smaller changes and improvements beyond the above!
Changes since Build 4011
These are the changes introduced since the last available dev build:
New Features
- Alt-click on a port to freeze the preview on it
- Major expander performance enhancement - up to 50x faster(!)
- Significant erosion and thermal performance enhancement, from 20-60% faster!
- Checkpoint device now shows placeholder names for ports that have not been specifically named
- Macro icon displayed again in config params
- Project sidebar shows macro icons if macro was in library at program start. This eventually will be “always”
- Added back “Colorize from File” option in Colorizer
- Added some icons for View Arrangements in the toolbars/menu (side by side, 4-up, etc)
- Added back scene water override when viewing ONLY scene water, it always displays regardless of the “water” toggle
- Added back right-click context menus, delete command to River device. Ooops.
- Added +shift when drawing or redrawing an extent in explorer manager
- Library now does a “natural sort” so numbered items sort correctly (Basic Example 10 comes after 9 instead of 1…)
New Content
- 7 New example worlds
- New “Distortion” and “Ambient Overlay” macros
- Many new device presets
Tweaks
- Tab, D, and B are now workview-specific shortcuts, not global
- Bypass and Disable now work like in 3028 (on groups of devices, and also groups in disable’s case)
- Tweaked color of frozen device
- Improved drawing of layout path when view is tilted
- Improved status line help for 2D, 3D and Explorer views
- Tile build validator now considers partial tileset settings when calculating space required
- Added progress reporting and cancelability to Instance Scatter device
- Added normalize parameter to scalar inverter to preserve old 3028 behavior
- Restored “display proxy” behavior where non-displaying devices such as distortion or parameters will instead display their first visible output.
- Added “Viewable” option to Macro config to allow a macro to be flagged as non-displaying
- Added “brightness, contrast” search tags to bias/gian
Bugfixes
- Preserves port selection if dragging selected device
- Bugfix: Create Water, Ambient Occlusion masks now have mask tags
- Expander correctly adjusts when toggling from world to pixel specified size
- Rare ambient occlusion crash bug fixed
- layout shape paste settings now pastes extra settings (such as path width)
- Fixed autosave crash if temp folder is in error
- Added error dialog if any program paths are in error
- Fixed bug where copy-paste wouldn’t copy groups when <=1 devices were included too
- Fixed crash in library input device on load
- Fixed bug where interactive preview wouldn’t update when using A:B slider
- Fixed water surface issue where dots would appear below the surface
- Fixed minor issue where water viewed on its own was offset from its actual location
- Fixed handling of float values with a range outside the 0…1 range and how WM interprets them
- Copy/paste river settings didn’t work. Now they do.
- Fixed issue where preview wasn’t showing for some worlds in project library browser
- Fixed project setting weirdness with preview outputs when adjusting parameters
- Project Settings res slider no longer tries to rebuild whole world with every notch
- Fixed render extent name corruption bug in project settings
- Made RE Delete enable/disable correctly in project settings
- Fixed Layout view not showing contents on first file load
- Fixed bug where couldn’t ctrl-drag an extent in explorer when >1 RE was under the cursor
Known Issues / Remaining to Implement
There are a few minor features that have not yet been ported from 3028, listed below. They will be added in subsequent releases.
- Tiled File Input dialog is still 3028 version
- Layout view: minor features (vertex welding, gridsnap) missing
- Explorer view: “Fun” navigation modes missing
- River device GCS macro parameters are not exposed