Re: WS3.0 Philosophy and Status

Thank you for this. Some practical info on how the keen-but-SVN-averse user
can give back to a project I have enjoyed for years on and off.

Regards
Willie Fleming

On Thu, 28 May 2026, 21:51 Stuart Buchanan, <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Alex,
>
> On Thu, May 28, 2026 at 10:05 AM Alex Barrett wrote:
>
>> Great, Stuart. Thank you for the clarity.
>>
>> The big question I'd like to ask, I suppose, is how can we best help with
>> the effort? There's, I would imagine, a lot of people who'd really love to
>> see WS3.0 come to fruition and enjoy the benefits. How can we mobilise the
>> curious casual user to benefit the project?
>>
>
> I think there are a couple of areas that folks can really help:  Testing
> the scenery quality, benchlining performance and using the scenery
> generation tools.
>
> However, while WS3.0 is available on 2024.1,  I would not recommend using
> it for testing purposes as it is quite far behind "next" in terms of
> development.  So that means either using "next" (e.g. build from source or
> a nightly build), or waiting for the upcoming Tech Preview 1 release.  I
> would recommend the latter for the "curious casual user", as I think
> running "next" for most users is just going to lead to frustration right
> now.
>
> (Of course, if you're already running "next" then you're already seeing
> WS3.0).
>
> In terms of helping:
>
> Scenery Quality: There would be a lot of value in folks checking out their
> favourite or local area and providing feedback on the scenery quality.
>  While WS3.0 uses regional textures, it has a single shader for all land,
> as opposed to the multiple different shaders in WS2.0, so rendering is
> quite different.
>
> Performance benchmarking:  I'd like to get a better handle on performance
> on different platforms.  This is also going to be impacted by the HDR/PBR
> pipeline as well as Core Profile support, so it's difficult to make an
> apples-to-apples comparison. However,  our hope/expectation is that
> performance will be better than 2024.1, particularly on lower-end hardware
> and systems with integrated graphics.  It would be really useful to
> understand if that is the case or not.
>
> Scenery Generating Tools:  Probably going a bit beyond the curious casual
> user, but one big improvement compared with WS2.0 is the ease with which
> new scenery can be generated.  Scenery developers can use standard tools
> such as QGIS to generate landcover rasters, then a docker image to generate
> scenery.  In the future we may have a database that will allow the scenery
> to be updated as easily as updating objects in Terrasync. Wayne has already
> been using these tools and uncovering lots of bugs and assumptions in
> them.  Having more people try it out would be great.
>
> -Stuart
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