This is a bit of a frustrating bug because I can’t consistently replicate it, it seems to happen randomly.
Sometimes, when building a world, especially in the texturing phase, the build dialog box will get stuck at the “Preparing…” state on devices that should show up as “Current”. Attempting to cancel the build does not fix the issue, and the only recourse is to force the program to close from the Task Manager (and even that takes longer than is normal), and load up the most recent save (or hope that World Machine managed to save the most recent state before the build).
The program itself doesn’t crash, and never stops responding, it just never progresses past building/preparing those devices.
World resolution, node network complexity, and device type don’t seem to factor in. I’ve had it hang on a 3 node network, I’ve had it hang on colorizer devices, and I’ve had it hang at low resolutions that utilize less than 10% of available RAM that normally build in less than 30 seconds. It doesn’t happen every time, and it’s random and sporadic enough that I haven’t been able to notice a pattern (it seems to only crop up when I’ve forgotten about it). Windows doesn’t seem to react adversely to this issue, so I’m not sure it’s a Windows problem, though it could be. My best guess is some instruction somewhere is getting stuck in a loop for some reason. I’ve let the program sit for well over an hour on builds that should be a couple minutes at most to see if it would eventually resolve itself, and it never does.
Technical information:
World Machine build: 4017.2 (Professional Edition)
Windows Version: Windows 10 Home 20H2 (OS Build 19042.804)
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
RAM: 16GB