Our customers made these suggestions for improving World Machine. Suggestions for improving World Machine.
Additional Curve Types
While some waveforms would have extremely niche (if any) use, I think it could be helpful to have more options for curves than the current sinusoidal/cnoid/perlin ...
Under consideration
Switch Toolbar Tabs During Click+Drag
Clicking and dragging across tabs within a toolbar switches to each tab as your mouse reaches it so long as the mouse is held down. Once the mouse is released the ...
Under consideration
Visually Distinguish Currently Selected Node’s Properties Panel
Whichever device is currently selected in the node editor should have its properites panel / window shaded differently than all other currently-open properties ...
Under consideration
Wind Simulation
The ability to simulate directional wind as a form of erosion. This could, for example, be used to create sand dunes in a more realistic and direct way than is ...
Under consideration
Local space width and height in km instead of a ratio
Currently, the local space's width and height are represented as a float, with 1.0 being the default, meaning the space's width and height are analogous to the ...
Under consideration
Copying with wires attached when pressing down Shift and draggin the device
When pressing down the Shift key, and dragging the target device, a copy of said device will be created and it will have its wires connected just like the target ...
Under consideration
Copying and pasting waypoints and allowing for bypassing default copy/paste behaviour.
It would be great if waypoints would be copied and pasted as well, when copying and pasting a selection of nodes. However, I can think of situations this behaviour is ...
Under consideration
Zoom Availability in 2D View
Being able to zoom in and out on 2D views of a project could be useful, especially when inspecting masks or working on textures.
Under consideration
Direct control of instance scale, rotation, etc
Artist Point added "variation" controls to the Scatter device, that lets you randomize orientations, scale, etc of the instances.
Sometimes you don't want ...
Under consideration
Background builds
Allow builds to proceed in the background for a particular history state of the world; this would allow you to build a high res version while still iterating on a ...
Under consideration
support for keeping geotiff header from being removed
If you make professional level video games and want to use industry standard pipelines to populate your map, geotiff with projection header is one way to do it. Going ...
Under consideration
Layout View customisable grid overlay
In previous versions of WM we had a grid system to our availability in the Layout View. In WM 4, this sadly has been removed (except for the area outside of the ...
Under consideration
Add disable/bypass parameter ports to devices
Devices should be able to be disabled or bypassed programmatically, by wiring a Bool value to a port controlling the disable/bypass state. This is especially useful ...
Under consideration
Adjust FOV of Camera in 3D View or Explorer View
The FOV of the 3D View/Explorer View camera is quite narrow, an option to be able to adjust it freely would be very useful for getting a better first-person ...
Planned
Explicit data cache node
It would be nice to be able to manually optimize build process, by inserting a data cache node.
You would simply drop such node on any wire and it would cache data ...
Under consideration
GPU acceleration of compute-heavy nodes
GPU accelerated Erosion node would be a life changer :)
I wouldn't mind if firs version would have map size limitations to something like 4k - 8k terrain grids
Under consideration
Getting curve data/selecte curve property
Just like for heightmaps, curves would greatly benefit from selector devices. Would it be possible to get devices like "select curve slope", "select curve amplitude". ...
Under consideration
Braided rivers and distributaries/river deltas
It would be nice if the River and Create Water devices could create additional types of river channels:
* Braided rivers, where multiple channels interweave in a ...
Under consideration
Layout Device Improvements
This is a general vote for feature and quality of life improvements to the Layout Device. Some of the potential items include:
* Grouping shapes together / csg
* ...
Under consideration
UI/UX suggestion for range (and spatial) parameters.
Right now, I think range parameters are a bit tedious to work with. It is not possible to move the whole range at once, instead, you must slide both ends separately. ...
Not planned
Render All Tiles for specific devices during Tiled Builds
Certain devices, like blur, would greatly benefit from the option of being able to render all tiles at once, for each tile, during tiled builds - especially if you ...
Under consideration
Drag existing connections to a new device
A popular suggestion, in the device workview, this feature idea would let you hold down ctrl and drag an existing connection to a different port. If it is an output, ...
Under consideration
Add "portal" devices
Add a new 'portal' or 'wireless' device that takes a wire and broadcasts it; you can then connect to that wireless signal from anywhere else in the network without ...
Planned
"Zoom in" to a render extent
Currently, you can create multiple render extents, one useful purpose of which is being able to examine smaller areas of a large world in greater detail.
However, ...
Under consideration
Ability to create repeating (tiling) textures
I want World Machine to be able to create textures and worlds that repeat in one or two dimensions:
* The right and left sides should match seamlessly
* The top ...
Under consideration
Convert Tributaries and Lakes to Splines and Polygons
Honestly, this is probably a bigger ask than I can imagine. I don't know enough about how tributaries and lakes are defined in the Create Water device. What I do know ...
Under consideration
Restore UI workspace on startup
World Machine should remember and restore the last used arrangement of view panes and additional windows.
Perhaps also allow a "workspaces" system that allows you ...
Under consideration
Support for Very Large (Continental) and Very Small (Extent in Meters) Terrains
The fractal nature of terrain makes it possible to use the same basic processes to create very large or very small extents, but you really can't work with them in the ...
Under consideration
Display splatmap textures in World Machine
World Machine is often used to create splatmaps to guide the placement of tiled material textures on the terrain, instead-of / in-addition-to creating a single unique ...
Under consideration
"Save port output" command
Add an "impromptu" save command that will save the data from the currently selected port to disk as a one-off.
For quick experiments, it can be easier to simply ...
Under consideration
A Materials Library
This one hit me the moment I examined the materials featured in the Artist Point Example Worlds. Once you start making materials, you really want a place to save them ...
Under consideration
Savable Presets for Viewport Lighting
The title really says it all, but I'll give a little background. One of the Example Worlds that came with the Artist Point preview really caught my attention and upon ...
A Combiner for Water
I got the idea for this from the fact that Coastal Erosion can have a sea level set independently from the sea level defined in the Project Sidebar. Combined with ...
Under consideration
Parameter: Integer Math & Integer Clamp
I'm kind of surprised there isn't one of each already, but I've run into situations, building macros, where I want to be able to do something like perform a fraction ...
Under consideration
Macros to only rebuild affected devices upon parameter change
Right now, a macro will fully rebuild its internal state upon every parameter change. Macros would greatly benefit from a different behaviour, where they only rebuild ...
Planned
Add more example worlds
Please add more natural example worlds so we learn to produce different looking terrains with natural erosion and stuff. It's very hard to learn world machine right ...
Under consideration
UI redesign (revised)
(Ref. attached image.)
The drop-down options across the very top have been spaced out/enlarged to help improve clarity and selection speed.
The action buttons ...
Under consideration
Minimalist UI mode or redesign
The icons that run across the top of the screen (above the tab list) from my experience take longer to comprehend than abbreviations of their nature; that is, once ...
Under consideration
Support GLTF scene export
Support the glTF format to export all components of your created terrain in one easy to view and import package.
Python scripting support
Add an embedded python interpreter to be able to script actions. This would serve as a replacement for the current automation scripting system, but also be accessible ...
Under consideration
Loop Device
Add a macro variant that would allow the result of the internal devices to be looped and re-run through a configurable number of times.
Under consideration
A sculpting device for rough shape sketching
This would be a device that would enable someone to sculpt rough shapes for their terrain in real-time, and would offer a lot of control over the base shape of their ...
Planned
'Layer' device
Add a new device that can take an arbitrary number of input data & masks, and blends them in order.
This does not add any new fundamental functionality compared to ...
Add OpenVDB library for "Water" data type
OpenVDB is a well documented and actively developed open format for volumetrics. It'll be a very efficient format for all water tools in World Machine imo. ...
Under consideration
Parameter Editor: Add randomize button next to seeds
Integer seed parameters should surface a randomize button that lets you assign a random value to that parameter.
Under consideration
Support tangent-space normal maps
To do this, the Normalmap maker needs to accept a mesh as input to reference the normals against.
This requires the extension discussed in the feature "Import a ...
Add rotation variation to Scatter device
The scatter device should be able to randomly rotate the input shapes, helping to provide more variety.
Workview: Add device parameter editor that follows selection
Add a side-panel or floating dialog that always contains the parameters of the currently selected device.
Planned
Workview: Improve device UI graphics
Modernize the display of the devices within the workview with a clean, modern/flat UI style.
Comment here how you would like to see the devices presented!
Long term