Terragen 2 Release Announcement Discussion

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

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Will

#30
So there is hope that #9 shall be resurrected!


actual question now that I think of it: I'm finding that if I change a setting in a shader thats applied to an object that the object has to be reloaded, will this be fixed?
The world is round... so you have to use spherical projection.

Lucio

Quote from: zionner on December 13, 2007, 04:33:47 PM
Quote from: Oshyan on December 13, 2007, 02:20:06 PM
Generally a "beta" release is "feature complete" but still needs work in stability and general polish. That is essentially how we will be treating our beta release as well - significant new features will not be added after that release. There may be further UI polish and other small things, but most of our efforts will be concentrated on ensuring stability and compatibility.

- Oshyan

Thanks Oshyan, One more question.

In the beta, how much has render times improved? Cause as everyone knows, TG 2's render times are really....well...time consuming! lol

So any guess on how much improvement we will see?

Yes, it would be great to know some more detail over the multicore support and other new optimizations.

Matt

schmeerlap, the Node Reference will be completed, and some of the other documentation will be improved. We still need to decide on other details such as the download format for the documentation and exactly what will be in it, but we recognise the need for downloadable documentation.

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

Matt

#33
zionner, Lucio,

I don't want to release any benchmarks at this stage, but early testing shows that the multi-threading gives speedups on 2 cores and on 4 cores that are very reasonable for some scenes. It remains to be seen how well this applies to a wide range of scenes, especially more complex ones, so it would be foolish to give any figures just yet. Global illumination and other parts of the renderer have also been optimised and now render more quickly, especially at higher detail or resolution. Work is still being completed on the ray tracer (which is a big factor in render times with reflections or detailed GI), so I can't give any more information about that just yet.

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

Matt

Quote from: Will on December 13, 2007, 06:47:25 PM
actual question now that I think of it: I'm finding that if I change a setting in a shader thats applied to an object that the object has to be reloaded, will this be fixed?

I can't make any promises about that, as other problems may take priority, but it should be improved in some future update.

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

Cyber-Angel

Will single processor machines see increases in performance and decreased render time, as well as multi-core/ processor ones?

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel     

Matt

Yes. I should have been more clear in my previous post that the optimisations to Global Illumination and some other parts of the renderer apply to single core, single proc machines as well as multi-core/multi-proc.

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

Costaud

Quote from: Cyber-Angel on December 13, 2007, 08:01:10 PM
Will single processor machines see increases in performance and decreased render time, as well as multi-core/ processor ones?

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel     

Yeah because poor guys have single processor machine  :(

NWsenior07

Well done Planetside. Well done indeed. The amount of effort and dedication put forth by you guys is awesome and I believe that the sense of community that seems to be so prevelant amoung TG users is greatly fostered by the dedication that all of you have shown. I look forward to many more hours spent playing with the software.


Seth


Inscrutable

Just one quick question - how stable are you expecting the beta version to be? I appreciate that it's not easy to answer as the whole point of a beta is to test the stability, but will significant internal/closed-beta testing have been undertaken before the beta is released?

I also just want to say how excited I am about the release!  Planetside have done a really excellent job with this software and so I want to say thanks to all involved in its development so far.

P.S. I wasn't quite clear about the water transparency so thanks to previous posters in this thread for asking the pertinent question.  Transparency is actually the thing I've been looking forward to most, though I'm now concerned that even with optimisation, my single core machine will run at a snail's pace with transparency effects turned on  :-\


Harvey Birdman

Quote from: Sethren on December 14, 2007, 04:10:47 AM

Ditto!     ::)

2.8 Ghz P4

... with 512M of RAM.   :-\

We should have a contest to see who is running TG2 on the lamest box. I think I've seen mention of P3's a few times. Then there's that Commodore 64...   :)

zionner

Thanks for the Info matt!

*Begins countdown to the long awaited transparent shader!*

Oh! a question about that shader: Will there be a seprate shader for transparency, which you would be able to use on any surface?

rcallicotte

So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?