Today, I haven't been feeling well. I've had a terrible migraine and really weak today. I started a really amazing project and had a great setup for a procedural river setup, suitable for mountainous areas or flats with it's masking/displacement setup. I spent 3 hours on it playing around with different methods of creating the river system based on a single SSS. When I got to beautification process I decided to use DK's Classic Erosion to really make the scene pop by eroding the Alpine mountains to the masking of the river valley... and, when alas, when I was playing with masking inputs, TG crashed to desktop... As it crashed I noticed something that made my heart sink in the status window "Terragen 4 *".
I hadn't saved that entire time, and I usually save so much it's ridiculous (an hour's work can yield 100+ series of XMLs).
So I decided I'd write a little program to remind me to save my projects! It's a simple task, only interrupts me momentarily and really can save from absolute disaster... However, because this was an external program, it popped up while I was working, and in this case, right as DK::CE was switching from Sampling to Erosion, and it caused TG to CTD anyway, so as TG froze, and CTD it was replaced with my lovely prompt window to save... Yeesh.
---- The Idea ----
My proposal is to add a "Save Handicap" feature.
What this feature does, is simply create a prompt window with simply two buttons "Save As..." and "OK". With a kind message about this project not being saved in X minutes (Configurable in TG settings). This little feature for some of us, can literally save us our sanity in my opinion. Being a simple setting. Those that have no issue with project management, and super computers, can simply not enable the feature.
This feature need only monitor time and reset when a save occurs (or clicking OK). The intervals value input in the settings could be minutes and configurable. 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30, and so one. Whatever the user wants. Beyond being a good method to ensure projects preserved in the event of crashes, it also can help create good habit to save your projects in general, coupled with incremental saving, a good history of your project (which is definitely invaluable in a lot of instances; like reverting to a seed you preferred earlier in development).
Edit: To prevent interference it may also probably "pause" when TG is doing any sort of processing, eg, heigtmap generation, erosion, object loading, populating, etc.
I would LOVE this feature in Terragen, Matt!
Thanks for taking the time to read about tonight's shenanigans and this idea.