Thanks for the reports folks, and sorry for the instability you're experiencing.
Regarding the population-related problems, we have become aware of a possible intermittent crash in that code and we're looking into it, but it's tough to pin down so far. If you can narrow it down to specific actions, etc. that's very helpful. The possibility that it may be related to "not having the 3D preview paused" is interesting and makes me wonder if it means the 3D preview is always in an updating process (i.e. still rendering) when you start the full render. Can anyone clarify that or provide any further details?
Fleetfoot, your experience does not sound normal, that's the good news. So hopefully we can resolve it. Most of the time frequent stability issues come down either to hardware issues, i.e. memory, CPU heat, etc. (most people think it's not their hardware, of course, but it still sometimes is
) OR graphics card driver problems.
To my recollection we have not heard of any instances of Terragen taking down the entire system that were *not* related to underlying hardware or driver issues, and this makes sense because modern versions of Windows (Vista and newer, but especially Win7 or 8 ) are really quite robust and applications basically aren't allowed to do things that fundamentally break the OS, except in rare circumstances. So the fact that a hard crash occurred does indicate to me that something outside of TG is not working quite right. It's worth doing a test of your memory (Memtest86+ if possible) and a basic burn-in for an hour or two (e.g. Prime95) while monitoring temperature of the CPU. I realize that this may sound ridiculous as it's quite likely no other apps are causing problems, but from long experience it seems that this is one of the best places to start looking when things like this come up.
Now, it could be graphics related; that can cause some pretty hard crashes if the drivers aren't setup to handle problematic situations gracefully. These issues are quite frustrating as we're not really using any terribly demanding or complex OpenGL functions in Terragen, it just seems to be that the graphics card manufacturers are more focused on game performance and DirectX than stability, OpenGL, and 3D graphics baselines. Sometimes updating the graphics card drivers helps, but unfortunately sometimes *older* drivers actually work better. It's worth trying an update to start though. You can also try closing the 3D preview for a while as a test and see if it appears to be more stable (you can even start TG with the -no3dpreview option to disable it by default).
Hopefully that helps. Let us know if you find out anything further. We'll certainly do our best to make Terragen stable on your machine!
- Oshyan