Originally published at: Mac World Machine? – World Machine Development Blog
I can roughly sketch out the changes for the next version of World Machine, code named “Dragontail Peak” into three categories of focus. Let’s call the first category by the really boring name of “framework changes”… What does that mean? Available for Mac and Linux. That’s right! For the first time in its history, WM…
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I simply can’t express how excited I am for this!!! Really looking forward to running WM on my MacBook, I really miss playing around in this software ever since I switched. And also a massive thumbs up for the Linux support, that is so huge! Do you expect this to make it easier to run WM on servers as well?
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For sure. In fact, the next “framework” change blog post is going to talk about the console/scripting/cli changes, but the short story there is that it’s much easier to run WM headless now, and also still drive it either from the terminal or with a script.
So for example, in Dragontail on linux you’ll be able to say
./WorldMachine --headless
and then be able to programmatically load/build/export stuff via the console. Full headless support is not in place yet, but that’s the goal. It also will be a Pro-level feature.
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In regards to the Linux build of WM, will there be a beta before release, and if so how would one sign up for the beta?
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Very excited to give the native Linux version a spin when it comes around. One more Windows dependency off the list.
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Mac and linux builds will be available on the dev channel at the Update Center as well as the regular Windows builds. It likely will not be immediately available with the Windows version at first - I have to get better build and deployment infrastructure up and running for those platforms, and I don’t want that to delay the Windows availability for the other features that will be present – but it will be arriving.
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I know questions about software dev timescales score 10 on the annoy-ometer but… are you planning a release in the first half of 2026?
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Very soon! I’m hoping for the first preview builds to drop within the “next week or two” timeframe. They will be stable and tested but not necessarily representative of all of the features to be available in the final release, nor inclusive of all the resources (examples, macros, etc).
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PLEASE don’t leave Intel Macs behind. I spent a fortune on the last top-of-the-line Intel MBP right when the M1 chips came out because of work-related reasons (M1 was way too risky for us at that time) and now can’t possibly afford to replace this thing. FWIW, I can still compile latest Blender on Mac, just (sadly) no GPU support (that’s a whole other story… 
). I’d really love to have a tool like this, but it seems I’m currently completely out of luck and I wish I could figure out why. 
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I hear you. I can’t promise for sure that a universal binary will be supported for the mac - I haven’t started the packaging process for it - but WM obviously already supports x86 semantics, and so as long as the dual compile process is not too complicated it’s a no brainer to add it.
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I’ve been using Linux for many years, and, generally, the package maintainers of a distribution will help ship things out to different distributions. However, commercial applications are generally not included in most official repositories. More and more packages are being distributed to unified solutions like Flatpak or Snap, but I would highly advise against this personally, especially since WorldMachine is a commercial product.
I think just shipping out the raw binary and its associated libraries (.so) inside a .tar.xz will be best for most users. Blender does it this way. Just unpack and run. DaVinci Resolve, IDA Pro and Houdini (legacy installer) do this too but provide a custom installer which just unpacks everything into /opt. The biggest downside with this is that the package won’t be updated automatically when new releases are available. For production – I think that’s best anyway.
Just my 2 cents.
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It’s posted elsewhere - but 4065 now supports Mac/Linux and is available!
A few specific notes:
- Mac: I was able to get universal binaries up and running. They seem to work, but I don’t actually have access to an intel mac and so have to test through Rosetta. If you run into any issues, please let me know.
- Linux: I decided to go with an AppImage, which matches well with how WM operates on Mac and PC. The appimage can update itself and has built-in desktop integration that can self-heal if you move the image around your filesystem.
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literally made an account just to say thanks for doing this! i moved to linux last year and i will be purchasing this soon. I previously used worldcreator which is fancy with its live updates and all but i found it cumbersome and the devs seemed to know nothing about game dev and it showed in the workflows. I tried the demo of world-machine and i was sold
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Welcome! and I’m glad to hear that! 
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