The old days of World Machine

Take a look at this…

http://www.flipcode.com/cgi-bin/fcarticles.cgi?show=63050

Gosh, how things have come along. :slight_smile:

He-hey! That was precisely where I first knew of the existance of World Machine! (which, at the time, wasn’t a general-public terrain editor yet)… And it was then when I contacted Stephen for the first time, asking a bunch of questions about fluvial erosion, how it worked, and how come he had better results than my attempts :P… It’s been almost five years! Geez…

So, Stephen, have you finished implementing that Perlin noise thing? :smiley:

Oooh, that “basic terrain modification dialog box” looks very complex, and sligtly far from “basic”… Are you sure someone is ever going to use it? :slight_smile:
Though, iIt’s curious to see that some ideas were already there! Namely the always visible “preview”… That one is on the dialog box, though…

Yup… it’s amazing to me to realize that that was indeed almost 5 years ago now! Time flies…

The first versions of World Machine grew out of that tool.

It’s always interesting to take a look on how people thought of inventions shortly after they’ve been made. Or in this case - software.

Different rocks types: Actually, this is already implemented. :) You can optionally specify a 2nd heightfield that gives the normalized soil hardness at that spot. Thus the artist/whoever is making the terrain can play with the amount of erosion at any given spot.
That reminded me of [url=http://world-machine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=386&highlight=Hardness+Maps]another thread[/url] :).

Like some of the guys who replied there, I have also thought of programming such an algorithm.
(without gui, just a simple console program - looks more important anyway!)

I wonder if I’ll ever have the time to do so :mrgreen:

Hehe, wow that’s pretty cool. Almost 5 years? Yeek! I think I first saw WM on the Terragen Yahoo list and I too immediately contacted Stephen about it. Fil, I didn’t know you’d been in touch with him that long ago. Cool. :slight_smile:

  • Oshyan