Running two instances of World Machine with the same license

[xrattus]

Hello,

I intend to run some of my World Machine workloads in an AWS instance (AWS has instances with far more processors and memory than I could ever afford, so I want to use them to run my builds faster). However, I am apparently only able to use World Machine in a single computer at any given time. So, at any time my workloads are running I am unable to continue working on my terrain.

Is there any option to be able to run two instances of the same license at the same time on different computers? A lot of 3D software packages allow two installs to run at the same time in order to cater to similar scenarios. Maybe add something to the terms of use allowing the second instance to only be used in cloud services or server farms or something like that?

Maybe not even the full editor is needed: just a command line tool. Actually it would be better if it was a command line tool, as it would be easier to port to Linux as well which would allow people to use cheaper cloud instances.

[HYLK]

@xrattus

Actually it would be better if it was a command line tool, as it would be easier to port to Linux as well which would allow people to use cheaper cloud instances.

Not sure about that, as it is written for windows only iirc, so having a command line tool doesn’t change the underlying architecture.

Aside from that, I agree with you, it would be nice if you could have a render and editor instance running at the same time! Here you can submit feature requests.

[xrattus]

I read @Stephen saying somewhere that the core algorithms of World Machine are platform agnostic, the only Windows-specific code is the GUI code. On the same discussion he mentioned that moving the UI code to Qt would help with making World Machine easier to port to other operating systems. So in view of that, I think creating a command-line application just for rendering could be doable…

A command line Linux renderer would be most useful for those who have cloud-enabled pipelines: it would be great to a studio workflow to just be able to push our .tmd files to version control and then CI automatically builds it on AWS and sends the technical artists a notification with a link to download the outputs once everything is done.

I know there’s already a World Machine command line (and it still uses the same license of the editor, so I can’t use both at the same time) but it’s Windows only at the moment, and cloud instances running Linux are so. much. cheaper.

[xrattus]

It’s a cost optimization measure really: the most powerful compute-optimized AWS instance is the c6a.metal running Linux, with 192 CPUs and 384 GiB of memory: that would cost me 7 dollars an hour and run any job I throw at it much faster than my development machine. $7/hr is peanuts compared to the cost of keeping me doing nothing while my local PC finishes rendering my terrain.

Or I could just buy another World Machine license , it would be cost effective just as well… but my point stands about having the Linux command line renderer, people would buy a new license just for it if there was one. A cheaper one, without the editor, just for the Linux renderer.