World Machine Pro compatibility

[Aaron]

Hi Everyone,

I've uploaded a new plugin that can import the tiled heightfield output from Stephen Schmitt's marvellous World Machine Pro, which is currently in beta release. The plugin is available here, and brief instructions on using the plugin are over here.

Please note: This plugin requires L3DT Professional v2.5 beta build 7, which was uploaded a few minutes ago (on the 28th of Jan).

Cheers,
Aaron.

[Q-dad]

World Machine Pro

According to the information on that site, the Pro version is not available yet...

[Aaron]

...unless you're a beta tester.

[Q-dad]

Any idea when it will be released...? What would you say would favor WM compared to L3DT and vice versa...?

[Aaron]

Hi Q-dad,

Off the top of my head I don't know when the Pro version is released, but a very good Standard edition has been available for some years now.

A comparison of the two programs is probably better left for users of both programs (you know who you are!), who could offer a more objective opinion than myself. Nonetheless, in my biased opinion, the comparison looks like this:

The main advantages of WM are the brilliant and intuitive graph-based user-interface, and the outstanding erosion filters. Undoubtedly, World Machine can produce a much broader range of terrain types than L3DT. However, presently WM does not allow you to design your maps, although this is set to change in WM Pro. I don't think there is (or easily could be) a manual post-edit option in WM, but L3DT doesn't have that yet either (a plugin is in development). Overall though, the terrain generation pipeline in WM is less of a black-box than it is in L3DT, so it may be easier to get what you want from it.

However, WM is also still very much focused on terrain generation, and isn't particularly sophisticated in texture/alpha generation. L3DT is a bit more of a generalist insofar as it is intended to support the complete landscape generation pipeline (more work is required, I know). This is why I don't consider L3DT and WM to be direct competitors; WM is great for terrain, and L3DT does the rest (hence this importer plugin.)

WM does have a nice 3D preview and realtime explorer mode, which is sorely missing from L3DT (I'm working on it!)

Both WM and L3DT have plugin development kits. I don't know how complete or easy-to-use the WM PDK is (private reg required), but judging by the overall quality of WM I expect it is rather good. I do know that the plugin API in L3DT is rather powerful too, since that's where I do most of my development these days.

I can't directly compare the performance of the two apps, as I haven't used WM in quite a while. In any case, it's probably very difficult to compare speeds since the terrain generators are very different. As far as RAM goes; WM Pro introduces disk-paging and support for enormous map, whereas the current version is limited to 8k x 8k (at high RAM cost).

WM Pro will support multi-threaded generation, and L3DT Pro partially supports this now (with more multi-threading coming in v2.5a).

Support and documentation seems pretty good for WM. I like to think it's OK for L3DT.

And, at the bottom line, L3DT is cheaper, as WM Standard is $40 USD and WM Pro (price unannounced) will presumably be somewhat more than that. However, at some point in the future we'll probably see greater parity in the pricing as L3DT becomes more established, bug free, easy to use, feature rich, etc.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[monks]

Good man Aaron!

I'm testing WM atmo. I can't really talk about the Pro features but a good account is as Aaron said; L3DT does the post-terrain generation stuff more thoroughly. I think L3DT's recommendations are:

* sheer scale: I think L3DT is almost certainly the most capable in this regard.
* the climate approach: water tables, water heightmap, etc. Incidentally, I think L3DT could reap dividends/ find another niche if this whole area was developed more.

Just one look at the WM dev blog and you can see that (among other things) tiling and terrain-texture generation are in the works.

monks