Good news, everyone!

As many of you landscapers out there already know, the TG2 Technology Preview (aka TGD) is finally out, as a free package for everyone to download! Those of you that didn't know are now probably going: "Oh, so that's why opening Planetside's site takes forever". I couldn't get to the download page at all, let alone download the darned thing, however, as luck would have it, I stumbled upon a message in Terragen's Yahoo! list which contained a couple of links to a neatly packed 2.2MB installer, which as it turned out, really was TGD (=

Impressions.

Someone on the mailing list said it looked "very alien". He was kinda right, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Remember all those small windows with all the settings? Thankfully, they're gone. They've been replaced with tabs, located at the top of a neatly organized work environment. Miss that small preview window? Don't, as it's been replaced with a preview section which takes up roughly 1/5th of your screen. Have you noticed that grayed out button in the Clouds window? You can now add as many cloud layers as you want (just don't overdo it).. lots of new and improved stuff, that will most definitely take some time to get used to. Then again, that was (to be) expected.

So far, so good.

After following the Quick Start tutorial provided with the manual, I was presented with a pretty basic scene. But I didn't need anything fancy for a test render, so I set the target resolution to 640x480 and clicked the Render button. Then, I waited. And waited.. and waited.. and waited. And then waited some more. Finally, 24 minutes and 39 seconds later, there it was. Nothing worth submitting, but a good test render nonetheless. However, 24:39 for a 640x480 image, with only a single heightfield, a couple of surface layers, and a single cloud layer? A bit too much, compared to 4:52 it took to render a 640x480 scene with similar settings in TG. Used the same machine for both renders:

AMD Barton 2600+
768MB DDR333
GF5200 128MB

100% CPU usage, 250MB+ RAM used while rendering.. looks like rendering a TG2 scene is a job best suited for that dual-core machine I was planning on buying.

And again - good news, everyone! There are no more "end of the world" scenarios in TG.. that is, you can just point your render camera at whichever direction you want, as high as you want, and you won't see that your world is actually a square plate with mountains on it. Now, there are mountains as far in the horizon as possible/visible. Good news, indeed.

Bottom line - me likey very much



NEWS:

TG2 baby, TG2..
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