I agree with the possibility of custom user-made themes, as this would open up a lot of customization.
I second that notion.
To clarify:
2, Custom themes are only a good thing if they are done properly. It can be done in absolutely horrible manner, like it is case with Blender, where creating a custom theme takes roughly 8-12 hours. Most people only care about roughly 3 things:
1, Brightness/Darkness - Each person prefers different
2, Accent color - Some people like and dislike certain colors
3, Plasticity - some people like gradients and shadows while other prefer modern clean flat look
That’s it. Everything else should be handled under the hood to ensure consistent design language. There’s a proposal on UE4 forums about UE4 theme improvement which nails it perfectly I believe:
But I would much rather have no theme customization than something like the horrifying theme customization Blender has. There definitely should never ever be as granular theme settings as node specific settings regarding shapes and styles of nodes alone.
People generally feel a need to customize themes only if the default themes are ugly. Look at the substance painter for example. The theme is so nice and clean no one really ever requested theme customization for Substance Painter, because the out of the box one is just good.
For example, here is an UI concept Pablo Vasquez has made for new Blender geometry nodes:
If WM’s node look was at this level, I really doubt anyone would feel a need for a significant degree of customization.
(Just to prevent further debates, I am referring just to the visual style of the nodes, not to a mechanical functionality. I am aware that WM has different node mechanics where the inputs can be also at the top and bottom of the nodes. I am not proposing for that to change.)
Curved VS straight wires is certainly something that I expected to be a preference. I would definitely not suggest removing straight wires, just adding curved as an alternative option.
And clicking outside search box to dismiss it. Of course! I did not mean that adding ability to dismiss it with LMB click outside it would remove the ability to dismiss it with RMB click. Obviously 
4, This is not about location of the properties bar, but about the concept of floating window vs a docked sidebar. Since new WM UI system is customizable, there is absolutely no reason you should not be able to dock the properties bar anywhere you want, when you can already do that with the “Project sidebar” that is on the left.
6, It’s not that simple. The big buttons at the top make no sense because it is not immediately obvious which pane will they affect. Having per-pane content selector is also a standard in most other software out there. Each pane should have its own UI element, but the element should be very minimalistic and not distracting. Function keys to switch are not a solution either. They should remain, but they are not discoverable for the new users. And RMB works only half of the time only in half of the pane types.
9+10, Yes I agree this could remain an option. The issue is that this is only comfortable for people who have used WM for a long time, or it’s the only specialized software they use. That’s rather minority of people. Most people use WM alongside other software, in a pipeline, because it’s really tough to produce anything that pays the bills with just WM alone. And defaults should always accommodate as wide portion of the userbase as possible.
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Offt. Dat UI. Yes please.
There are many good suggestions here that I will take under advisement. A number of them, such as improved icons, better viewport management, etc, are all planned already.
Build 4015 is not the endpoint of World Machine evolution. It is, in fact, the start. Now that WM is targeting a better framework, GUI changes are actually possible. 4015’s primary goal was to reimplement in the new framework while picking up some easy wins along the way. Anything that didn’t specifically have to be rewritten was mostly left alone for this release - for example, the device workview.
With all that said, I do also believe a number of these suggestions are more individual taste than anything else. I’m happy to poll the userbase and see what the majority of users prefer, but with limited development resources I only really want to change matters of taste if an overwhelming majority prefers something a certain way.
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No, most of them are simply a matter of a proper UI design, not a taste.
Every single of those suggestion would be improvement for the better, not the worse. (If implemented the way I clarified in my subsequent posts).
WorldMachine has always had a reputation in the industry as that one software with incredibly poor UI and UX, and the “I only really want to change matters of taste if an overwhelming majority prefers something a certain way.” kind of attitude will ensure this stigma will continue for at least another decade.
What you are failing to realize is that these, what you may consider a “minor quirks” are additive, and add up to the overall horrible, dreadful experience.
Really, the only thing you have going for yourself is that up until recently, there was no proper alternative for WM. But I can’t remember a single time I was able to just use WorldMachine, and enjoy it, without the UI standing in my way and making it frustrating experience throughout.
At the same time, this is not any kind of anecdotal law - I mean that every software has to be a bad experience. I use many different pieces of software for my job, and WM is really an outlier in terms of the dread it causes to one when using it.
Lastly, if the aforementioned changes are difficult because limited development resources, then all hope is probably lost. Design aside (UI theme and Icons, which you should not be doing anyway if you are a programmer, but outsource to someone with proper skillset for those), majority of the proposed changes are minor UI/input behavior tweaks, which should be trivial to change, especially now, given that WM has migrated to Qt UI framework, which has more than sufficient infrastructure to accommodate for those. So if these relatively minor changes (which should not take more than a week of work) already become real struggle in terms of development resources, then I can’t really see how WM could ever sustain reasonable pace of development, especially for the actual important features.
I agree with Stephen that some of these are a matter of taste, not “proper UI design”. Some of these I do agree with and would help my own experience with World Machine, such as the shortcut to duplicate the last-placed node and eliminating the floating console window. Other things, such as updating the icons to look more “modern” are down to preference, and if the icons suddenly changed I would be immensely confused as to which is which.
As Stephen said, “4015’s primary goal was to reimplement in the new framework while picking up some easy wins along the way. Anything that didn’t specifically have to be rewritten was mostly left alone for this release - for example, the device workview.” This hints that many changes are going to come to World Machine, and I’m pretty excited for that. Stephen also explicitly said that some features that you suggested are already planned and will be released. I agree that a poll for some of these features would be good as again, some of these are down to preference.
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I think an overhaul of the UI/GUI could definitely improve WM. Maybe even to the point of getting more revenue. Bundle that up with a reworking of the website, official one at that. And you’d be looking at a whole new piece of software. I genuinely believe it would help WM…
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UI was OK before and now is even better, I really see no problem there. UI is the last thing I would think about when thinking about improvemets for WM. For professional user the most important feature is “productivity”, which can be translated how fast you can iterate (in this case render time), because you spend 2 percent of time in UI and 98 percent waiting for renders (you need to tweak small details in higher resolutions, which is usually 8k+). One of the last updates improved some devices and now my projects are rendered 30-50 percent faster, which brought tremendous value. So improvements should be mostly focused this way (gpu usage?), faster artist can iterate, the better. No matter how you can tune UI, you cant simply get there more value (there is no big space for improvement in that 2 percent of UI time…).
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You literally could not be more wrong. The poor UI is one of the main reason iteration times in WM are so abysmal.
@Rawalanche I agree with you that a poor UI is a very important factor when it comes to easing and speeding up a workflow. However, do mind we all have personal differences. I know enough people who still hold on to using the command line interface instead of windows explorer (or the file interface of linux for that matter), and in that case, it comes down to how much you are accustomed to the situation/given interface. And especially if 98% of your time is taken up by rendering, as @Demostenes mentions, I can see why someone would much more prefer performance updates over UI improvements.
Nonetheless, I agree with you on this subject, the UI of WM still has a lot left to be improved. However, not every user needs a smooth as butter UI, and that’s also important to keep in mind.
The bottom line is that never in my life have I seen more consensus that a specific computer graphics related software has a terrible user interface than in case of World Machine.
Sure, there are certain pieces of software with divisive UI design, be it Blender, Zbrush, etc… But in those cases, you can often see two relatively proportionally sized camps of people who either like it or dislike it.
In case of WM, the amount of people in the dislike camp is overwhelming, and it’s not just a “dislike” camp. In this case it’s flat out hate camp. I am talking mainly about professional community, where both efficiency/workflow speed as well as output quality matters to people a lot. I don’t have many ties to the hobbyist WM community, so I have no clue what the situation and mood is like over there.
The argument that it’s a matter of opinion is generally true, but WM in this case is an exception which proves the rule.
WM is node based tool. Unless you totally remake whole philosophy of this tool, there is nothing you can do. How do you want to connect nodes faster? Also this node based approach have its advantages, you can simply do anything you want unlike in tools, which have classical UI. Once you do more complex project, you will find out, that these classical UI tools are great for fast prototyping, but there se SO MUCH issues, once you want to do something specific a and tune small details for FPS/3rd person game.
WM take lots of time to learn, but once you manage it, you find out, that there is nothing on the market, which can substitute it (for example because of tiled build, current games have usually under 0,5m per pixel resolution, so you often need 32k+renders). And also you will have no problem to start using other node based tools, it is more or less the same.
My projects have usually hundreds of nodes and still UI time is absolute nothing in compare to waiting for render. In several days I have more or less everything done and than I spend several months to tune details (render wait).
Regarding better productivity, it would be nice to have some production quality presets library (complete bioms), this would help starting new projects. I would also welcome some dune device, but this has nothing to do with UI.
I never noticed any true hate towards WMs UI in the hobbyist community, and I don’t have many ties to the professional community.
Again, I do think WMs UI is in need for a big improvement, especially for those using WM as a small asset in their pipeline and without the luxury to invest hundreds of hours into it, WM is just not beginner friendly and has its quirks (we’ve come to handle/love).
I’m working on a dune macro, hopefully I can release that somewhere in the near feature. Regarding plug and play biomes, maybe this is something for you?
I heavily disagree. I have quite the beasty computer, and so i spend 98% of time in the UI, and 2% of the time waiting for renders to finish. Furthermore with WM’s new self-rendering mechanisms in the bg automatically, i spend even less time doing the final render. Please don’t speak for me, or on my behalf. It’s unbecoming.
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I have latest 16 core with 64GB ram…I cant go much further (for reasonable money). It really depends on the complexity of project. Simple projects with several devices, sure, render time is low. Also if you dont need to tune small details (under 1m), you dont need to do high res renders often, etc…2k renders are fast even for very complex projects, unfortunatelly for some cases 2k is too low. I am usually around 20 minutes for 8k build and 20 hours for final build…
It’s been a month and a half since this thread was created, and even the complete UX common sense basics like dismissing the node search after dragging the node connection into an empty space by left clicking anywhere outside it is not implemented. This is really embarrassing.
I’ve locked this thread. It is increasingly not serving either the community or the product.
Posts should be helpful, thoughtful, and civil. They should become more-so when disagreeing with other community members. Assume good faith on the part of the other participants.
To be explicit, the original post in this thread is fine and contains many helpful ideas. Critical/negative feedback is very welcome so long as it abides by the standards of our discourse, above.