Terragen 2 Release Announcement Discussion

Started by Oshyan, December 12, 2007, 07:10:04 PM

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PG

Quote from: Tangled-Universe on April 18, 2008, 04:48:29 AM
Or a bunch of awesome tgd's ;D

Yeah, maybe convince Luc to relinquish some ;D

I got Deep+Animation a few weeks back, best thing I've bought since Abe's Exoddus came out. and yes I am a total geek. :D
Figured out how to do clicky signatures

rcallicotte

It's an awesome image, really.  Good enough for a tutorial.  On lighting.   :P

Quote from: seth93 on April 18, 2008, 02:31:15 PM
I'll give up my title for an update :D
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

SilverCity

Thanks to all who responded to my post. I got really excited when TG2 was first announced last year. However, I started to get worried when I saw the release dates starting to slip by. Some of you seem to think that we are getting close to a final version being released. I hope you are right.

Will notice be given for a pre-purchase pricing deadline? Previously, that date was February 15, 2008.

Mohawk20

Quote from: SilverCity on April 18, 2008, 05:14:05 PM
Will notice be given for a pre-purchase pricing deadline? Previously, that date was February 15, 2008.

I guess when they have the next release date...
But I suggest you purchase as soon as possible, so Matt and Jo can pay the rent and the electrical bills for the next month  ;)
Howgh!

Oshyan

Pre-release pricing will continue until the final release is available.

The Image of the Week delay is due to the same moving issues, I'm afraid. I'll update it very soon. :)

- Oshyan

Matt

#575
Hi all,

I'm sorry that regular information has been thin on the ground recently. Any failings are my responsibility. I'm aware that we need to do more to keep you in the loop, especially when we go through lengthy and delayed development stages as we are now. It appears that there is a danger of Oshyan being unfairly exposed to people's frustrations and blamed for the lack of information we've been able to provide. Regarding release schedules and development progress Oshyan can only work with whatever information comes from myself and from internal discussions, so I hope you'll give him the understanding he deserves while he's helping Jo and myself concentrate on other tasks.

I think most of the rest of what I want to say at the moment has already been said by Jo and Oshyan, but there a few points I'd like to reiterate or elaborate on.

For the last 6 months at least it hasn't been feasible to release incremental updates because of the nature of the changes being made to the software. It took a couple of months to restructure some important parts of the renderer for multi-threading (multi-core support) and to lay the foundation for the improved ray tracing engine. It was impossible to break this work into individual improvements to be released as minor updates. The "nightly builds" or even monthly builds would have been unable to render shadows and many of the other things which you would expect from the software, no matter how many disclaimers we were to attach. Since then it has taken another 4 months to make it all work well enough for the alpha testers to successfully render the images you've seen. We have no desire to hold back these new features from you - regular updates make us feel good too - but unfortunately we made some big mistakes in our estimate of how long all this would take. Regular software updates are something we are striving for as we move forward, but there will probably always be some development phases along the way that will prevent this occasionally.

I'm sorry that some of you have felt insulted by our decision to release (or allow to be released) some of the water transparency images. This is something that many had asked for. As soon as it became possible to render these kinds of images we thought it was one way that we could be open about the progress we had made while we were uncertain about the actual time to completion. It was never our intention to tease, only to respond to a clear and direct request from many of you and to demonstrate some progress in a way that seemed best at the time.

A few weeks I ago I promised that I would regularly report here on the feedback we got from the alpha testers. Since then there were quite a number of crashes which I had attempted to fix and I was waiting on confirmation from the alpha testers. I wanted to avoid yet more vague posts saying that there were new problems to be solved without knowing whether or not they had been solved. Well, the feedback from the last couple of alpha builds has been much more positive. We now (at last!) have alpha builds that we think many of you will benefit from, and we will make something available to licensed pre-purchasers within the next 7 days. You should consider it "unstable" - we wouldn't recommend using it in production or using it if you are concerned about new crashes and render problems - but it is ready for those who would like to test the new features and fixes we've made while the application is still a little unstable.

Thanks,

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

cyphyr

#576
 Well I wont hold you to the 7 Days but, "WooHoo, Way to Go Matt", Great news looking forward to it.

Richard

ps: just a thought, if the soon to be released update is "unstable" could we have an idea what sort of things are liable to make it fall over with the release notes? Save us the hassle of discovering that our long held back master work is just one of those things :)
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nikita

Yeah! 7 days!  :D
So this unstable release, will there be an additional beta release afterwards?

Mohawk20

Not even thinking about the new release, I think it's great that you could tear yourself away from the work to give us an update.

I'm sure we can all handle the instability until the next update. I háve to have that transparency to finish all those projects, albeit it low resolution or something...
Howgh!

Matt

Nikita, yes there will be a separate Beta release at a later date. We're not quite ready for Beta (i.e. feature-frozen for final release), but we are very close. The unstable release is essentially an alpha build that we're making available to those who really want to get their hands dirty or get a glimpse of what's new.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

Matt

Quote from: cyphyr on April 22, 2008, 12:37:36 PM
ps: just a thought, if the soon to be released update is "unstable" could we have an idea what sort of things are liable to make it fall over with the release notes? Save us the hassle of discovering that our long held back master work is just one of those things :)

I think we can include some notes about known problems, yes.

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

choronr

Hi Matt,

I think it would be a good idea to list the potential issues prior to releasing the program in the next several days. This way, we could decide whether or not to download the program; and, hold off until the final release.

Bob

Matt

#582
Hi Bob,

OK, I'll do that.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

choronr


moodflow

Many thanks for the update.  I am looking forward to working this release, even if its got stability issues.
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