Hello verybody!
Some of you may be puzzled with the new features that WM1.2 brought along unexpectedly. Since these are not yet available in an help document form, I decided to write up a small review of them, as other people to for digital cameras and so on 
So, imagine Wonika-Minolta made this WM1.2 digital camera, that has 1.2 MegaPixels(MP) - an upgrade from your previous 1.0 MP camera you had before!..
[the Camera]
The first thing that comes up to mind is “where are those new features that I read in the changelist?”
(I’m not going to follow the same order as that of the new features list, instead I’m going to go in the order that I think you’ll find them)
[Snap to Grid]
Well, the first thing you notice once you run WM1.2 (right after the reg key messagebox 
) is that grid background! Don’t worry, it’s not squared paper to do math problems! it’s the visible portion of Snap-To-Grid feature. Now devices can be aligned without effort. If you’d like to turn it off, just go to World Commands -> Prefrences -> Workview Options and uncheck Devices snap to grid. This will also hide the grid.
[Wiring Knots]
The next obvious difference are those “knots” in the wires… Those are the Wiring Knots that the feature list mentions. Try them out! Let’s say you have a Perlin connected to a Terrace device and want to put a Splitter in between. In the old days you had to disconnect them, and connect the Splitter (too much trouble). Now you can simply place a Splitter on that Wiring Knot, and it will automatically be connected! This works with devices comming straight from the button bar, device from the menus, or even devices that are dragged in the work view. Fabulous!
[Snap To Port]
So by now you must be wanting to build some network, no? Ok, let’s do it! Let’s start by creating a Radial Gradient and a Height Selector… Now lets connect them! Do you remember how hard and tedious it was to wire devices together? Now the wire automatically snaps to the first available Port of the device under the mouse cursor! Go ahead, practice and you will like it!
[Device Display Hints]
So now we have a Radial Gradient connected to a Heigh Selector, but wait! What is that on the mini-preview ?? The radial Gradient had that nice green 3D landscape in the preview, now the Height-Selector has a Black Dot on a white square? What is going on?.. That is the “Device Display Hint”. Devices now can hint their purpose in the previews and in Explorer View (BTW don’t go into Explorer View yet ) A black and White image will correspond to hinting a mask, and the usual customizeable colored look to hinting a heighfield.
You can manually set it in the right click menu on a device, or Device Commands -> Set device display hint. You can choose between Normal (which is the device’s own default), Terrain, and Mask. If you set it to Terrain, you will have a green border arround the output Ports of that device. If you cchoose Mask, you will have a brown border. Inexistence of border, means “Normal”.
Devices as the Selector devices typically are to be used as masks later on, so that is why they now output the hint of Mask by default!
This hint will travel along the network and will be kept until you specify a new hint, or until the device overides it. Most often, the Mask hint will end up on the third input Port of a Chooser device… But the Chooser will propagate the hint information from the first input port, as most devices will.
Hints have absolutely no influence in the heightfield computation and device building. They are there just to help the user in reading the purpose of the devices.
[Local Coordinates]
Ok then, now select the radial gradient you created earlier and let’s take a look at explorer! What are you expecting to see? a lot of hills? Yeah… So was I!!.. Prepare to be amazed! …One?!? only?!?..
That’s it!.. How many times did you want to create a lonely island in the Pacific Ocean before, and then went to explorer and all you saw were an infinity of islands, which have nothing to do with “lonelyness”? A guy wants to be alone in his vacation (ok, maybe alone with his spetial girl) but not accompanied by other turists in other islands!!
Now you can finally create a single island just for you (and your mate)… But… err… what if you really wanted the old behaviour? Let’s go back and define the Radial Gradient’s Properties.
The properties box was also changed. a lot of devices (typically in the Generator familly) allow you to specify a location in the world! In the top left corner, you can see a “Transformation” area that allows you to specify the coordinates of the center of that device’s effect. You can specify it to be relative to the World’s coordinates, or to local coordinates. WM1.0 worked in local coordinates, that means each tile had this radial gradient centered in them, so you would have a lot of gradients tiled toghether in explorer. Now, if you choose “World”, you only have one gradient in this world :). Doing this will also enable you to specify a radius grater than 1 :-o! This will allow you to get a larger lonely island for your vacations
[Auto selection of pasted devices]
Some time in the future you will also like to Copy&Paste large networks. Previous versions had a problem here. you copied the entire network, but when you pasted it, you had to select every single device again to move them to their final place. Now when you paste anything, it is already selected for you, so you can move it right ahead!
[new file input features]
Now, the File Input device suffered some improvements too. I’m not going to go into great detail with them, as I feel I haven’t practiced enough… But they give you more control on the scaling of the terrain, and behaviour at the borders.
There is a bunch more of features in WM1.2 but I won’t spoil you the fun to discover them! I’ll give you some clues: it comes with two new macros! I haven’t had much time to play with them, So I can’t comment on them, but you may like to take a look at them
[Drawbacks]
No review is a review if you don’t say something in the end like “This camera sux” or “this camera is excellent!”.
But ofcourse, to look realistic and convincing you need to point out some drawbacks too If you point drawbacks, you get to be regarded as someone with greeeeaaaat guru experience in the matter and be venerated for the rest of your life!.. (No harm in trying :P)
World Machine 1.2 is rather recent, and so it doesn’t yet have a completely available documentation. Also you can’t run plugins from v1.0 without getting the recompiled versions to match v1.2… But the only plugin that I know of is my LEGO filter, that very few people seem to have used… So unless you are building LEGO blocks in WM you really don’t need WM 1.0 as much…
[Veredict ?]
Now for the thumbs up/down part!
I recomend WM 1.2, as it solves some issues with saving files in the limits of memory usage, deals better with memory problems and that stuff. And that is why I recomend it. Ok it has new features, ok, the features really improve WM… But I think the key aspect is that a lot of the troubles you guys had to go trhough in WM 1.0, are now fixed in 1.2. And I espetially like the way things are moving! It is a pleasure to see this program, this community, and this spirit grow healthy every day.
Have a great, decent, lot of fun with this WorldMachine, everyone!
Any quesitons? keep’em comming!
PS - I bet noone could pack this many features in a 1.2 MP digital camera as Stephen did
