Terragen 2 Release Announcement Discussion

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

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joshbakr

Quote from: Harvey Birdman on February 07, 2008, 11:52:23 AM
Not to rain on the parade, but...

Frankly, I have a real problem believing any of this. My trust dissipated when I read here in the forum that an entire new rendering system was being incorporated 6 weeks (IIRC) before the widely publicized planned release. Let's be real, shall we? You don't completely replace a critical (indeed, central) component of a complex system with a new, completely untested version if you have any intention of releasing it within 6 weeks. The fact that Planetside did just that, while publicly maintaining the release would happen on schedule, says to me that there is a disconnect between information released here and their real intentions/evaluations. It's nice the latest 'status report' has given some of you the warm fuzzies; personally, I'm a little dubious.


Well I'm glad someone broke the ice speaking their true feelings. Thank You!  All one has to do is read Matt's post about the delay on Jan. 4 and this reply by Oshyan. I assume somewhere in there is the truth?  I will say I am in awe of what TGTP is sometimes capable of yet on the other hand I can't help but think back at how TG9 was dropped like a lead balloon and not completed as we were told. I'm referring to the Multiple water levels, Cloud Layers and  boulders.  To me this lack of communication with paying customers is total disrespect. Believe me, I own Small Business and Good Customer Relations/Support is of utmost importance. I wish someone would get some conscience. I'm feeling like a Mushroom, You keep me in the Dark and once in a great while you feed me some Horse Shit.

nikita

Huh? As far as I know the change from the original renderer to the new improved multithreaded version started in september last year and it was planned since the start of development. Also when they say something about a "new renderer", they don't mean designing a new one from scratch. Significant changes requiring a new iteration of alpha-testing maybe, but it's not like they're rewriting everything.

"This may sound very harsh but I think Planetside should get feedback from all sorts of users"
Those users exist and they're called alpha testers ;)

Harvey Birdman

I believe something like the term 'completely new renderer' has been used repeatedly here by PS staff.

And if a redesign is extensive enough as to invalidate all previous alpha testing, it's completely new as far as production quality code is concerned.

Whatever. Josh has been on this train before. You keep believing what you like.

sjefen

I'm pretty sure Matt said not to long ago that he was going to rip out the current render engine so he could write a new one. I'll bet that the reason for this is very simple. I belive Matt want to re-write the render engine from start and this time make it right and clean instead of trying to fix all the bugs in the current one.

This is something I ofen do with the images I make. When I'm working on something I realize that there is a lot of things I can improve, but it's just better and easyer to do it from the beginning. I already know what I need to do.
ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/royalt

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rcallicotte

#259
So...Planetside (Oshyan or someone on the Planetside team who wants to answer and has official credibility), please clarify for all of us -

1.  Did you implement a brand new renderer from scratch before announcing the Beta release?  If so, did this mean a complete new build and an Alpha Testing Madness scenario to bring TGTP up to speed?

2.  Are you going to definitely finish TG2 to a 1.0 state, before pursuing TG3?

These two questions, if answered truthfully and diplomatically, could potentially squelch a lot of the present negative press.  It could also give us something to really look forward to.  After all, the world has enough cynicism.  I'm ready for a change.
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Seth

huhuhu
we thought TG2 was about to get finished and we all hope for final version... but it seems that we gonna have a new beta, guys ;)
But... how can the new render engine be more stable than the current one... ? without testing ?
anyway... I'll wait !
good luck to you all Planetside staff !!!

dimeolas

Some years back Terragen was the first graphics program I used. It has always been incredible. The fine results and ease of use got me hooked into digital graphics for good. Of course I would love to have a finished product. But things are what they are and I cant change them. Just do what you guys need to do and when its done i`ll be waiting.
:)

Matt

#262
Quote from: calico on February 07, 2008, 02:04:38 PM
1.  Did you implement a brand new renderer from scratch before announcing the Beta release?  If so, did this mean a complete new build and an Alpha Testing Madness scenario to bring TGTP up to speed?

No, this is not correct. Oshyan's choice of words was unfortunate - important parts of the renderer have undergone significant changes but we have not rewritten the entire renderer. That would of course take many man-years.

Two major changes have happened to the render over the last 6 months:

A. Part of the rendering pipeline was reorganised so that rendering could be multi-threaded for efficient support of multi-core computers. That work is essentially complete, although testing may still discover some bugs that will need to be fixed. It was not possible to release that work as an incremental update because the ray-tracing functions in the renderer were deliberately disabled during multi-threading development. They were deliberately disabled because we also planned to make changes to the ray-tracing functions (see the next point) and did not want to waste time multi-threading parts of the renderer which were going to be changed very soon.

B. The ray-tracing functions (which are responsible for shadows, reflections, transparency and global illumination capture) have been significantly improved so that (i) transparency can be rendered to a high quality, (ii) reflection and shadow quality are improved, (iii) crashes no longer occur from rendering reflections at higher resolutions. Much of the existing code has been reused, but some of the old functions which were buggy and responsible for mysterious crashes have been rewritten using experience gained from the earlier implementation and avoiding many of the mistakes made the first time around. Getting some of the details right in this new implementation has delayed the release of the Beta. I would say this is now 90% complete. I believe that is an accurate estimate.

Quote
2.  Are you going to definitely finish TG2 to a 1.0 state, before pursuing TG3?

Absolutely, although the final Terragen 2 will be released with the version number 2.0, not 1.0. The upcoming Beta will be a feature-complete beta version of the final Terragen version 2.0, and most of the differences between the Beta and the final Terragen 2.0 will be bug fixes or minor tweaks.

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

Matt

Quote from: Harvey Birdman on February 07, 2008, 11:52:23 AM
Not to rain on the parade, but...

Frankly, I have a real problem believing any of this. My trust dissipated when I read here in the forum that an entire new rendering system was being incorporated 6 weeks (IIRC) before the widely publicized planned release. Let's be real, shall we? You don't completely replace a critical (indeed, central) component of a complex system with a new, completely untested version if you have any intention of releasing it within 6 weeks. The fact that Planetside did just that, while publicly maintaining the release would happen on schedule, says to me that there is a disconnect between information released here and their real intentions/evaluations. It's nice the latest 'status report' has given some of you the warm fuzzies; personally, I'm a little dubious.

Hi Harvey,

That work had already been ongoing for about 4 months, which we'd talked about openly, before we finally made the decision to announce that release date. Obviously that turned out to be a very bad decision, but it did appear to be very close to completion at that point. I don't intend to make the mistake of announcing release dates in advance ever again, unless the product is already sitting in my hands (figuratively).

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

Cyber-Angel

Its good to here that work is on going to make TG2 a stable product, however there is a caveat to this (as with all software) and that is even after release of the final release there may still be some issues that may come up but these can be reported here in the usual manner. There is a technique which is many used to find security related bugs though it dose have other uses called Fuzz Testing and I was wondering weather that method would be applicable to the testing of TG2 to find bugs that cannot be found by other methods?

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel       

rcallicotte

Matt,

Thank you very much.  You've helped restore my hope that people can be good.  I appreciate your thorough explanations. 

Now, I can rest at night.   :D

I don't care if it takes until June.  I'll wait.
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Will

Thats all well and good but I'm still advocating for the re-implementation of Button #9.
The world is round... so you have to use spherical projection.


Harvey Birdman

Quote from: Matt on February 07, 2008, 07:28:19 PM
Hi Harvey,

That work had already been ongoing for about 4 months, which we'd talked about openly, before we finally made the decision to announce that release date. Obviously that turned out to be a very bad decision, but it did appear to be very close to completion at that point. I don't intend to make the mistake of announcing release dates in advance ever again, unless the product is already sitting in my hands (figuratively).

Matt


Hi, Matt -

Perhaps I've misunderstood, then. I admit I'm disappointed.

Re release date -  I always thought you were exposing yourself to unnecessary pressure with the hard-wired release date so far in advance. It's the business model you chose to work with, though, for better or worse.

Well, good luck. I suppose I don't have much option but to wait. I may grouse on occasion, though.   ;)

rcallicotte

So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?