LTE Feature #2

Development and Feature Requests Development Blog
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Originally published at: https://www.world-machine.com/blog/?p=843

The third post in a series describing the changes afoot for the Long Term Evolution of World Machine. Hi folks! This time around, let’s jump straight to one of the most impactful new features in LTE. From the very beginning of WM, the workflow has always gone something like this: Create/connect your devices, set the…

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:open_mouth: incredible

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Fabilus! Luve it. WTG

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This is excellent news! Well done! Look forward to get my hands on this too! :partying_face:

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:exploding_head::exploding_head::pleading_face::pleading_face:

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Nice update a few questions though.
So has building/rendering changed or is this just the preview? Is there still a build world function?
How does the interactive preview and refined preview act with resolution-dependence?
What happens with supermassive (50, 100 devices and more) graphs?

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Here’s a bit more detail:

  1. World Machine previously had two build results it maintained. A preview and final. LTE builds maintain results starting at the interactive res and going all the way up to the smaller of the final resolution and a limit you specify. Depending on your machine, you would usually set this this limit between 1k and 4k - enough to get a good look at the world. However,

  2. There’s still a build world command for creating the final output (if that final output res is greater than the preview limit). High resolution builds are something you’ll definitely want to still command intentionally. The goal is to drastically reduce the number of builds you need during the development process of your world.

  3. Do you mean resolution dependence in terms of getting different results at different resolutions for a given device? This is unchanged from before. However, resolution dependence is much more rapidly exposed when you get to see the entire update progression from low to high res – you’ll quickly get a sense of what is changing and what might need to be done to fix it. (For example: erosion masks are not automatically normalized, so they will change in magnitude at different resolutions which becomes obvious)

  4. Very large graphs build just like any other, although it certainly takes longer! The background previews prioritize the currently-viewed devices, so if you’re working on devices that don’t have a ton of dependencies they will update rapidly. Making a change in the start of the network and viewing the final output will be slow, as you might expect - but it no longer blocks the UI so your actual interactions are still snappy.