World Creator Story

The Beginning - CLODDY

BiteTheBytes was founded in 2008 by three IT students as part of the EXIST funding program of the Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Germany.

The core of the company was a software called CLODDY (Continuous Level of Detail -DY), which was nothing more than a new terrain algorithm that could generate and display extremely powerful adaptive meshes at runtime. With this new technology, it was possible for the first time to display infinitely large landscapes, even real planets, on conventional computers. For example, for the first time it was possible to seamlessly fly from space to the surface of a planet without annoying load times or jumps - even flying from one planet surface to the next was no longer a problem.

BiteTheBytes' CLODDY technology was mainly used in planetariums and navigation systems.

First Contact - GeoControl by Johannes Rosenberg

During the first three years we met a lot of interesting people, one of them was Johannes Rosenberg. He had released a terrain generator called GeoControl on 22 April 2006, making him the only competitor to World Machine. GeoControl had been developed in Pure Basic and did not support multi-threading, which made the generation generally very slow. Nevertheless, the results GeoControl produced were very convincing.

At the time, Johannes was keen to combine our technology with his, as he lacked real-time 3D visualisation. However, almost two years had to pass before a twist of fate finally brought our paths together.

The Gathering

One day Johannes wrote to us asking if we would be interested in buying his software outright. The reason was that he had had a stroke and was now paralysed on one side, which made it impossible for him to continue developing and maintaining GeoControl. He was also no longer able to maintain his community.

At the time, however, BiteTheBytes was going downhill and we did not have the money to afford a software purchase of this magnitude. But we really wanted to help him, especially as we were also big fans of GeoControl and knew exactly what it could do.

That's why we proposed a partnership. We will take over the software and all that goes with it, and commit to further development, maintenance and support. The revenues would be shared accordingly.

World Creator 1

This was the birth of World Creator. GeoControl had already been neglected for months and its reputation was beyond repair. The community didn't know what was going on and had turned away from Johannes and his software. So we had to build a completely new brand and regain the trust of his customers. However, time was against us and we also had internal disputes with one of the shareholders, who then left us in 2011.

However, we found a great replacement in Timo Armbruster, who is now our CTO. Together we successfully launched World Creator 1 and started to win back old GeoControl customers.

World Creator 1 was also based on Pure Basic. We fixed a lot of bugs and added some small features. All in all it was a very stable and robust product. However, it was much too slow to generate for our liking.

We knew that in order to be successful with World Creator, we had to rebuild it from the ground up. At the time, we were quite experienced in GPU programming, having worked on bringing our own CLODDY technology to the GPU. But a terrain generator was a completely different matter, because it involved highly complex erosion models and more - it's not that easy to implement on a GPU, especially if you don't want to lose real-time capability.

In order to accomplish this extremely difficult task in the foreseeable future, we decided to use the Unity engine for the development of World Creator 2.

World Creator 2 - The Unity Version

The first version of World Creator 2 was World Creator for Unity (Standard and Professional). When we managed to rewrite the GeoControl algorithms to run entirely on the GPU, it opened up new possibilities for terrain creation. World Creator for Unity was released in the Unity Asset Store in 2017, making it the first GPU-based terrain generator ever - BiteTheBytes made history.

Success was not long in coming. World Creator for Unity was so incredibly successful that we had the eyes of the entire gaming industry on us.

But we wanted more. We knew that the Unity Asset Store would not be the end of the story. World Creator had to be available for purchase as a standalone application, outside of the Unity Asset Store. We had big plans, and still do.

World Creator 2 - The Standalone Version

After the success in the Unity Asset Store, we decided to launch World Creator for Windows and Mac as a standalone application. World Creator 2 was born and was first presented to the public in 2017. This new version was even more successful than the Unity Asset Store version. People practically snatched the licenses out of our hands and World Creator 2 sold like hot cakes.

But we still weren't satisfied. We wanted to go even higher and make World Creator even better.

World Creator 2 was based on the Unity Engine at its core. That means that the whole rendering, the user interface, everything was based on Unity. In principle, it was a computer game disguised as a terrain generator. And that was a problem for us, to be honest. We didn't want to have a dependency where we didn't know what would come next. In addition, we were dependent on the capabilities of the underlying engine, especially in the area of the GPU, which was a problem in terms of performance. The solution to this was quite simple: we had to develop everything, absolutely everything, from scratch again, but this time based on our own engine.

World Creator 3 - Formerly known as World Creator 2022

No sooner said than done. In the middle of 2009 we started the development of World Creator 3, based on C# and Vulkan. We started by developing our own engine, designed for performance in every way. Then we started developing our own render engine, followed by a high performance user interface framework. Once the foundation was in place, we ported the algorithms from World Creator 2 and even improved them. Once we had our first prototype, we started the first BETA tests. In early 2022, World Creator 3 saw the light of day. We renamed it World Creator 2022.1 so that the version number would better indicate how up to date it was.

Unfortunately, World Creator 2022 turned out to be a flop. The user interface was poorly designed and the controls were anything but intuitive and good. We had done just about everything wrong in that version. Users were really angry and didn't want to switch from World Creator 2 to this new version - understandably.

Maybe the Corona pandemic had put a spoke in our wheel. Maybe we were just burnt out. Maybe we wanted too much – it was not an easy time for anyone, the world was upside down.

But we at BiteTheBytes are total nerds. Totally broken programmers who like nothing better than to sit in front of a PC and pound away at the keys all day long (with a lot of coffee, mind you). Some of us have been coding since we were 8 years old. We have dedicated our lives to computers. Our life's work is World Creator. There are no alternatives for us. That's why we didn't care if we had to add another year to the project, turn everything upside down again, and then release a version that met our customers' needs.

World Creator 2023 and above

And then came World Creator 2023... a new user interface with a new workflow and even more features.

Today, we are already at World Creator 2024, which has become even more powerful and offers almost everything a landscape artist could wish for. And we're still not done, because World Creator 2025 is already on the horizon and adds a whole universe of features on top.

We won't stop until every GPU on the planet is generating landscapes or an AI can achieve world domination at the push of a button.

Until then, one World Creator version will follow the other. Terrains 4 ever!

Now, with World Creator 2024, development iterations are ultra-fast and the application is extremely stable and robust. The feature list is outstanding and the possibilities have been pushed to the limit. And we have so many more features and improvements we want to add in the next versions.

This journey began in 2011 and has not yet ended. World Creator is evolving faster than any of our competitors and we are doing our best to satisfy every request from our customers.

World Creator is not just a terrain tool, it is a life's work, a software with a story behind it, from nothing to everything.