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.
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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