Build 4043 ‘Hurricane Ridge’

This release brings the Flow Integrity device up to Hurricane Ridge standards, delivering substantial performance gains at high resolutions. It improves several other major areas of the program, including Create Water, Instance Scatter, and the handling of compositing throughout the app. We’ve also addressed numerous bugs and introduced a range of smaller but helpful refinements.

We anticipate this release to be the final development update before the official launch. The only expected further changes are bugfixes and new example content.

Read about all of the new features of Hurricane Ridge!

Full Changelist

Major Changes

Flow Integrity

• Introduced a new model with significantly enhanced performance.
• Achieves better quality basin fill with a spatially controllable hillslope.
• Unfortunately, ridge-breaking is temporarily disabled in the new model due to a few remaining corner cases.

Create Water

• Improved handling of existing water inputs and fixed bugs related to edge geometry.
• Added the ability to exaggerate depth and disable scaling of channel heads to zero, enabling special effects like canyon creation. A new example world (“Sweet Canyon”) demonstrating this feature is included.

Instance Scatter

• Finalized the over, under, add, and max compositing modes.
• Added Elevation scale variation, and Elevation fractal persistence.
• Changed the offset between fractal layers for better coverage.
• Streamlined some existing settings
• Added explicit input object mask handling choices for premultiplied alpha, as well as scenarios where only one of the two inputs is provided.
• Removed the background mask input which was only nichely useful, and replaced with a “instance at elevation” input, allowing you to control the base height of each instance.. which IS very useful.

Compositing Changes

• Improved usability and handling of associated (premultiplied) alpha with compositing-type devices such as Shapes, Layers, Scatter, and Masked View.

Other Changes

Device Enhancements

Erosion

• Enhanced uplift quality with soft-clipping.
• Fixed mask output issues and uplift at small feature scales.

Code Device

• Added support for color and range parameters.
• Included basic example files demonstrating how to create generators, filters, and more.

Chooser Device

• Introduced bias control for easier mix adjustments
• If no control input provided, defaults to constant mix, allowing for quicker simple blending.
• Hides parameters that are not applicable to the chosen mode

Clamp Device

• Added control over the soft clipping range.
• Adjusted what happens with clamp range of zero to produce more intuitive results.

Compare Maps

• Added a not-equal mode.

Composite Device

• Added ‘autodetect’ mode, which sets the type and direction when you first connect a composite wire to it

Select Wetness

• Enhanced performance with about a 30% improvement.

Thermal Erosion

• Implemented additional performance tuning, achieving approximately a 20% performance boost.

Integer Generator

• Introduced a range parameter.

View Masked

• Introduced associated or non-associated alpha toggle

Framework Enhancements

• Added a configuration option to choose what happens when creating a new project (select from: Blank, Example World, or startup.tmd).
• Finalized project versioning handling.
• Ensured that saving blueprints/macros now correctly saves the project version.
• Automatically provides a coarse preview when opening a macro for the first time.
• In Workview, hide the group title separator when it’s not needed.
• Made various small tweaks, including adding an extra notch to the project resolution slider.
• Added a “show only updateable” option in Project updates.
• Improved handling of example files for better updating.
• Introduced on-mouse-over previewing of lighting presets.
• Improved installer in various small ways (correctly discover previous install path, use 64bit folder now, etc)

Bugfixes

Crash Bugs

• Fixed crashes caused by the auto-hiding of floating parameters, especially when clicking in File Output.
• Resolved crash issues when saving worlds.

Device Bugs

• Macros and the Code device now retain port localspace status.
• OpenCL compute is now compatible with AMD GPU drivers.
• Corrected the inability to toggle the Shapes device to localspace.
• Fixed bug where Shapes device would sometimes incorrectly revert the falloff position and operation settings
• Addressed an issue where the River device set the version incorrectly and refused to update.
• Fixed bugs where inverting the spatial parameter led to unexpected results in some devices.
• Corrected an erosion masking bug where completely masked-out areas were not 100% pixel identical.
• Resolved a bug preventing device cancellation in certain instances.
• Removed the accidental inclusion of testbed devices.
• Fixed bug in Chooser when used with Materials that would cause blending artefacts

GUI Bugs

• Fixed an important bug that would sometimes cause the project state to become desynched and seemingly not accept new world changes when you cancel-click out of a dropbox box.
• Fixed the Group dialog not being removed when the underlying group becomes invalid.
• Fixed several bugs related to project modify flagging.
• Added a warning when attempting to open a removed or inaccessible file.

We appreciate your continued support and feedback as we approach the official launch. Enjoy the new features and improvements in Hurricane Ridge!