Well, I wrote the documentation so many of my tips are in there.
But here are a few that seem to come up quite often still.
1: Well, the first one has to be to read the documentation that's available already. These forums are a tremendous resource, but you pick up information piecemeal, bit-by-bit, and it's not really designed to give you an overview of things to get you going quickly. That's exactly what the documentation is for. If you're just starting out, the documentation area should be your first visit. The documentation will be expanded and improved in the future as well, so that's something to look forward to.
2: The "Ray-traced Shadows" options in the Atmosphere and Cloud Quality tabs are very seldom necessary and add tremendous amounts of render time. You should only use them if you need shadows to be cast *from terrain* onto/into your clouds/atmosphere, respectively. In most cases this is not going to happen. Even in cases where it does happen it's often either not desirable or the render time increase simply isn't worth it. The only exception currently (which should be fixed for the final release anyway, making this workaround unnecessary) is the need to use Ray-traced Shadows for the atmosphere when the sun is behind terrain - the sun glow will show through the terrain due to a bug.
3: When in doubt, update your graphics card driver and/or all other system drivers. Make sure you're as up-to-date as possible before assuming a problem is in the software program you're using (TG2 or otherwise). If you do encounter a consistent problem try other similar applications to see if it is TG2 only, or if it is a more general problem. For example TG2 uses OpenGL for several display functions, so if you're having display issues try another OpenGL application such as Blender. If there are problems there too, it's probably an overall issue with your system or drivers, rather than a TG2-specific thing.
- Oshyan
