portable version of Terragen 3

[pyreflos]

This is perhaps an odd question, but has anyone ever run Terragen from a USB drive?

The scenario I'm looking at is owning a paid-for copy on a desktop for commercial work, but having the free version on a usb drive so it can be used, well, anywhere while traveling. Much like the software avbailable at portableapps.com

Why? Because powerful desktops are hard to haul around to work on while on the road. Low-power publicly available desktops, however, are abundant and easy to use, but typically do not allow software to be installed on them. So one could edit their files while traveling via usb drive powered software, then use their upgraded version to do the primary editing/rendering when they get home.

The potential problems? Well, the obvious technical: sometimes powerful software has too many dependencies on the system it is installed on to be made portable. Then there are the legal issues... Are the dependencies licensed in such a way as to be portable? Does Terragen's own license agreement allow for combined use of the free (non-commercial only) & paid-for (commercial work allow) version running in parallel this way by a single person? aka, does this adhere to or break the legal and/or spirit of the license agreement? Or, as an alternate to multiple copies, could the paid-for version be a single portable version?

Anyway, food for thought, discussion, etc.

[Matt]

You can have the software installed on more than one machine, as long as it's not running on more than one machine at a time. The license agreement does not allow you to run it on more than one machine simultaneously, but it can be installed there. Exception: Some of the paid-for editions allow a small number of additional computers to be "render nodes", i.e. run Terragen only to render images, as long as you are not using them to create or edit scenes simultaneously with another computer. The exact number depends on the product: http://planetside.co.uk/products/tg3-product-comparison

In most cases it should run from a USB drive. After installing on a computer, you can copy the Terragen 3 program folder to a USB drive and it should be able to run on another machine from the USB drive without running the installer. This may not always be the case in future, but with Terragen 3 it should work.

There might be some computers where this doesn't work if they don't have the right runtime libraries installed, but I would say this is probably a rare situation.

If you are running on a public computer that is shared by others, please do not use your license key, because that would automatically copy the license key to the computer and allow others to use it simultaneously without your knowledge. To allow that would be a violation of your license agreement. In other words, if running on a computer that's not yours, only use the Free Edition.

Matt

[PabloMack]

To me the obvious question is (Remember it is power-hungry Terragen we are talking about now!) that a portable low-powered computer isn't going to have the performance needed to be very productive. You might ask the question "Can I haul ten tons of dirt with a motor cycle instead of a dump truck?" I would answer with another question: "How much dirt can your pockets hold at one time?"