Lots to answer here, I'll try to cover it all, but in brief.
Zionner, the major improvements to the renderer for the final release are going to be optimizations for speed and memory use, multithreading, bug fixing, and the addition of transparency for water, etc. There are going to be lots of other little bits, but those major categories cover pretty much everything of note.
As Reck said, the "little dots" are related to Global Illumination (GI) - they are the GI samples for the scene and their density is dependent on how high you set your GI detail. The higher the detail, the more samples are needed and the longer it takes. If you turn off GI you'll get less accurate lighting but it will render faster and the dots won't be calculated. We made the decision before release of the Technology Preview to default the GI to being on, but most renderers actually do not do this, so that's another reason that TG2 can be slower than other renders, but the results are often higher quality as because of this.
Reck, what you're talking about is called "progressive rendering". It *can* be in the context of an "unbiased renderer", although it does not have to be. In fact TG2's normal 3D preview is already "progressively rendered". If you watch it, it starts with low detail then gets progressively higher and higher quality. Normal rendering doesn't particularly benefit from this, except in the case where you might not know how much detail you need for a particular scene and so you could simply watch it until it looks "good enough". However there are several problems with this, not least of which is in a renderer that doesn't operate like an "unbiased renderer" I don't think the progressive approach is necessarily as efficient or at least easy to implement. Furthermore on the long time scales that these renders will inevitably still require (hours at least, for high quality and high resolution), you aren't necessarily going to be there to be able to say "OK, stop it there". Finally, in terms of unbiased renderers, I think you'll find they are invariably much slower than almost any other rendering approach for theoretically superior but often just "equivalent" results. They are in theory more "accurate", but in practice you can achieve similar or better results in less time with other implementations.
Finally, yes Dark Fire there will be a free version of the final release of TG 2. What features will be limited in it and how much is yet to be determined. TG 0.9 is essentially no longer being developed, although it is likely that we will continue to sell it as a low-end product.
- Oshyan
