Hi Mario,
We made the decision to release our current work on Terragen 2 nearly a year ago as a "Technology Preview" knowing that the community was eager to see what the product could be capable of and to start learning its new, powerful functionality and way of working. We have always tried to be clear that the product is in a pre-release state, not yet completed and still needing work, especially in the area of render time optimization and user interface. Over the months since that release we have worked on many areas and made a number of improvements and we are now working on some very significant improvements to the renderer which should improve speed and reduce render errors, as well as introduce several important new features. This is all part of the regular product development cycle that we have always envisioned.
As part of this development process the documentation has necessarily been incomplete. After all if the product is not yet finished, how can you fully document its workings? Many changes have been made in functionality since the original Technology Preview release that would have necessitated changes to any existing documentation. We do intend to provide both a complete Node Reference (explaining all the functionality and settings for every node) as well as a User Guide.
What we are not intending to do is provide "tutorials" on creating every type of feature or scene you might want to create. TG2 is enormously flexible and covering even a fraction of its capabilities as realized in an end product would take more time than we can possibly give. Our approach to enabling our users is to provide complete information on the functioning of the program itself and guidance on the actual process of scene creation in TG2, after which we hope the user will be equipped to experiment, discover and share their own methods for creating particular features and scene types. This is simply an issue of practicality in that we can only cover so much of the very broad topic of natural landscape generation and rendering in our own documentation.
We are currently working on completing the Node Reference and it will be made publicly available as soon as possible. We will then complete and expand the existing "tutorial-style" documentation. We hope that some of the more profficient users will continue to share their techniques with others, possibly documenting them formally in their own tutorials.
As TG2 grows in popularity we should see greater availability of resources, both free and commercial (e.g. terrain or texture packs for sale), and hopefully one day we'll even see books on working with TG2 just as there are for many other applications. That level of specific user-oriented writing is quite simply outside of realistic time and resource commitments for most companies, Planetside included.
I hope that the forthcoming documentation will provide you the information you need to really enjoy TG2.
- Oshyan
