Just casual reading of the Planetside forum will reveal a lot of requests for Terragen documentation. In those discussions over the last several years it's clear that the staff of Planetside is very aware of the need for documentation and has been addressing that need with a wiki-based node reference. While a node reference is a good place to start, I'm finding it difficult to translate text descriptions of settings into practical application when working in Terragen. I'm sure I'm not alone in this particular challenge.
The demands of a business require that priorities be established which, in the case of Planetside, is clearly to create powerful software for terrains, which it is doing remarkably well. But that priority, and limited staff, leaves documentation (and I'm sure many other projects Planetside would like to do) on a lower priority, but nonetheless important. While we (myself included) have been pressuring Planetside to give us more documentation, there may be something the Terragen community can do to help.
I've constructed a settings reference example to illustrate a way to publish visually oriented Terragen reference material quickly. For discussion purposes, I'll call it "Terragen Visual Reference Sheets" (TVRS). I've simply taken screenshots of low resolution renders along with the applicable settings window, and show them side-by-side to allow a quick visual comparison. I chose lower, middle and higher settings to illustrate the effect of the setting. Note that I didn't take a minimum, mid or maximum setting – rather just enough to show the effect of the setting. This provides a visual of how a setting affects the image. Such TVRS's could be placed in a wiki to be indexed by the upper left title and the descriptive text. My example TVRS image is below, which is not intended to be technically accurate, just as example of a TVRS.
A couple benefits come to mind of this type of visual reference:
a) Persons from the community can easily make these, even with the non-commercial version of Terragen 2 because the render size is low. In this case I used Image Width=450, Image Height=300, Detail=.85, AA=3. These are well within the TG2 non-commercial version's rendering capabilities (and they render more quickly). I don't feel the preview image would work for TVRS's.
b) Other than Terragen itself, no special software is needed. I used Photoshop, but there are many alternatives including such low power apps as Window's Paint. In most cases, a TVRS author could have a zero monetary investment.
c) Provides a very fast visual, good for when an author just wants to know the affect of a settings with minimum technical description and much less experimentation in a real Terragen project.
d) This approach isolates the setting from relationships with other settings to aid understanding what the specific setting does.
e) Since the intention is not to create a specific landscape image, TVRSs need only focus on a specific setting and do not need to be tutorials. In fact, the actual TVRS image can be anything that illustrates the target setting's effect.
f) When a future Terragen release affects published TVRS's, only those TVRS's need be revised/republished.
This is clearly a project for the Terragen community on the whole, since there are potentially hundreds of such TVRS's. One person would take months or years to produce a usable TVRS collection. What I'm thinking is that a wiki be constructed (or Planetside makes its wiki available) where persons could publish their own visual reference sheets into the wiki assuming that a TVRS didn't already exist for that setting. Anyone could tackle any VRS they chose, whenever they like. The *original* author would get attribution on the TVRS page.
A couple key success factors of this project are; a) isolate as much as possible - avoid setting relationships as much as possible, b) keep technical text to a minimum to not slow down publishing new TVRS's – detailed text can come later. Keep the TVRS's highly visual to help them make it to the wiki quickly with minimum author pain. A consistent structure will also be important so that the reader doesn't encounter variations of the TVRS layouts. In summary; keep TVRS's very specific, highly visual, consistent in layout, easy to make, fast to publish and even fun to create.
Anyway, that's the idea for all to consider and comment on.
-Pat
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