Build 4069 ‘Dragontail Peak’

What’s New in Dragontail Peak 4069

This new build significantly improves performance and UI workflows for everyone. It also restores the very useful ridge-carving behavior to the flow restructure device.

Highlights

• Flow Restructure overhaul. Ridge carving is back: channels are cut through ridges again, and basins drain through those cuts. Preserve Structure is much stronger and on VDM it also affects horizontal detail. A new Repair mode for only fixing targeted drainage problems leaves everything else alone.
• Some significant performance gains across the board. Memory bandwidth is better used on many-core and multi-CCD CPUs, and build system overhead is reduced. Many devices received performance work and some devices got much faster:
  • Strata is about 16x faster.
  • Expander is 13–16x faster.
  • Snow, Erosion, Thermal Weathering, Create Water carving, Chooser, Perlin and Advanced Perlin noise, and blurs are all faster.
  • Apple Silicon Macs get proper vectorized code paths.

Workview & Wiring

• Wire bars and cables: Wires that leave a group are bundled into cables that run through bars on the group’s edge. You can drag the bars and add route points to the cables. Wires now pass underneath groups they don’t connect to, and behind devices.
• Quick Connect dialog lets you find and connect to a port by search, instead of visually searching your graph.
• U connects or disconnects the port under the cursor.
• Ctrl+Tab cycles through open macros and groups.
• Space switches between Zoom to Fit and a close-up wiring zoom. If you hold Space while zoomed out, you get a magnifier for finding things on large graphs.
• Status bar hints always show what you can do with what’s under the cursor or in the current mode.
• Macro improvements. You can drag a wire onto a macro’s + port to add a new input, output or parameter. There’s a new “Connect as new macro parameter” command. Turning a selection into a macro now wires up its loose connections automatically. M enters and exits a macro.
• Paste keeps wires. Pasted devices reconnect to the devices that fed them, including route points. You can turn this on or off in Preferences, or hold Ctrl while placing to flip it. Hold Shift to place several copies. Pasting large selections is much faster.
• Color wires by now also offers Source Device Type.

Panels & Viewing

• Hover preview: The sidebar preview can follow the device under your mouse, with a smooth crossfade.
• Device list rows are tinted by group and ordered by data flow. Hovering a device in the list highlights it in the workview. Double-clicking behaves consistently, and a button jumps to the current selection.
• A|B Compare tool has a new viewport panel, and can compare against earlier history entries.
• A new viewer shows Text and Parameter packets. Composite channel lists grey out channels that aren’t present.
• Device search finds devices by related terms, not just by name.
• Pinned sections. Any sidebar section can be pinned so it stays put while the rest scrolls. The preview is again pinned by default.
• Color parameters can now be driven by a spatial input.
• Devices can now show warnings during a build.
• The rarely used low-resolution button and small-view resolution setting were removed from the 3D view.

Device Fixes

• Thermal Weathering (VDM): fixed output that was broken in 4067. Results match 4066 again, and it builds faster.
• Combiner: fixed Divide. Masked Difference and Absolute Difference now give correct results, so masked projects using them may look different.
• Erosion: fixed soil handling. Tooltips are back on the Dragontail version.
• Convexity Selector: Unified heightfield/VDM result paths to be consistent, and added a very useful spatial grain control that replaces the previous along/down contour toggle.
• Fixed a crash or bad output when rescaling very non-square worlds.
• Fixed Tap devices showing “(None)” after you connect them.

Builds, Memory & Files

• Memory conservation now works inside open macros. Large builds inside macros page to disk correctly instead of running out of memory.
• On new installs, the temporary file folder defaults to your system’s cache folder instead of your roaming or config folder.
• Route points are no longer lost when you load a project!
• Locked macros and Code devices are better protected from being opened or inspected.
• Fixed a failed or cancelled save at the “unsaved changes” prompt still going ahead with the action.

Stability

• Mac build now works on latest 27.2
• Crash reports are now sent the next time you start World Machine, which is more reliable. The crash dialog was redesigned.
• Fixed the long-standing “stuck keyboard” bug (huzzah!)
• Fixed several crashes:
  • after deactivating
  • when using “Write to disk”
  • while wiring
  • with macOS accessibility
  • when closing the layout view
• Blueprinting a drag-selection that includes Macro In/Out now skips those devices instead of failing silently. Other blueprint errors now show a notice.