Integer logic devices

Some really important parameter logic is missing, especially the integers are lacking devices.

Much needed devices are:

  • Integer arithmetic (doing addition, subtraction and multiplication).
  • Integer smaller than.
  • Integer greater than.
  • Scalar by integer division.
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This would be extremely useful in a lot of cases, and if these come to fruition, I can bet a person will try making a computer within World Machine.

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I agree that this is generally useful and desired!

Post Mt Rainier, I have strong hopes to include some greatly improved parameter-based control for power users. This takes the form of 3 improvements:

  1. Rounding out the complement of general arithmetic/control flow devices like requested here

  2. Introducing the concept of “Reports”. A report is a parameter output that can be wired from. Reports are visible in the parameter settings for the device. This replaces legacy WM’s “read-only” parameters; they don’t fit well in LTE’s immutable parameter paradigm. All existing device parameters will have report outputs with their values. One example of things you can do with this is chain together multiple generators so when you change the feature scale of one of them, all of them change scale in unison.

  3. Introducing a new set of report-producing devices called “Analyzers”. These will generally scan an input map and give you data on things like the min/max/avg elevation of a terrain, min/max slope present, etc. Combined with the improved control flow in #1,and the data from #2, this lets you do some really neat stuff, as it effectively gives you feedback on what your data actually looks like. For example, a terrain macro could look at the existing terrain present in the world and adjust its elevations or feature size to match.

None of these are hard to implement. There are some UI complications regarding adding report-ports that will take some thought. They are also definitely power-user features, so they need to be balanced against more generally-targeted features, but I really like them and want to include them.

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I would also like to have a random number generator in the parameter tab. Just set the range in which the number should be, and the generator gives a random value as output. This would be really helpful to make terrains even more interesting.

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That’s a great idea!

That sounds really great!

Some important stuff that would be insanely helpful regarding those analyser parameters:

  • Project max elevation
  • Extent dimensions
  • Render resolution
  • Resolution in m/pixel

This will benefit a map overview macro for example, as you can accurately ‘place’ height lines at a constant interval, or choose not to render features that would be smaller than 5 m when the world’s resolution is 10 m/px. This is something I really miss in WM right now.

The parameter readout functionality sounds nice, but is already kind of implemented by using an external scalar device, so I wonder what it will bring to the table to be better than the current implementation.

Glad to hear you’re excited about all this stuff as we are! :slight_smile:

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Another very helpful parameter would be the Extent Coordinates. This will allow macros to always place certain objects in, for example, the centre of the map.

And being able to limit the macro’s distance scalar to (a multiple/division of) the Extent’s dimension would also be a very helpful feature. This would allow for someone to create a displacement macro that would never shift the terrain around more than ½ the world’s width for example.

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