Worldsynth 0.10.0 released
Worldsynth version 0.10.0 is released and can be found on github. This is our first “official” release in which the result should work, out of the box, with a usable and familiar GUI instead of the pygame environment. This is provided by Qt4 via PySide. We have even tested Worldsynth on Windows XP to validate that it is indeed cross platform.
As for 0.11.0, we are looking to unlock size of terrain to be of any variable width and height instead of the basic power of two. We are also investigating fluvial erosion.
Introducing worldsynth for your world generation and building needs
After many years of development in my spare time, I’ve decided to release Worldsynth as a Free and Open Source Software. As a world generator, it fills the roll and can also be rapidly extended to support additional features. The source might not be of top quality, but the main purpose of creating it has been fulfilled and I want to share it. I only hope that others will find it useful and want to build upon it.
There is still much more functionality that I would like add and additional polishing to the user interface. Midway through I switched from pygame to pyside or Qt4 for the GUI. I consider it ready for “Alpha” at this point, meaning there might be bugs and few experimental features that may break but otherwise usable.
threading.Thread vs. multiprocessing.Process
The Feather or the Anvil? 
First a bit of background: I was tasked with created a high level tester for my company’s system. The idea is create 1 or more monkeys to pound away at the company’s product for a very long time. A concurrent parallel programming project with the requirement that it needed to be compatible with 2.6.2 version of Python.
With threading, you get real posix threads (pthread) which works pretty well. They implicitly share state with the parent thread and do not use IPC or messaging. They have low latency and low overall resource footprint.
However there are drawbacks that made further development using threads a real problem. that is the use of signals. Such as threads not handling signals, working with the global interpreter lock (GIL, only one thread allowed to run at a time), and more. Read more
