Hi all,
I use Terragen 4 chiefly to render out skyboxes for old 3D shooters such as Doom (using enhanced source ports) and Quake. I've had a recurring problem where, when I perform renders, the render will hang, and if I click "Pause" and "Restart", the time for the render will cease displaying and it will just say, "Rendering...". To get the render to render out fully, I have to periodically click "Pause" and "Restart" to get it to render out up to three square blocks of the image at a time, and then, when it is eventually finished, click "Stop render" and save it out. When I get this problem, if I try to start a new render, I always get a "Preparing to render..." hang.
The only way around it that I've found is to close and restart Terragen, and when I do this, it tends to be only a short time before the problem strikes again. Usually restarting Windows helps, in that it then takes a lot longer before the problem strikes again. The problem does seem to be more likely to kick in if I am doing something else on my computer while the render is running, but it can strike even when I am not doing anything else but the render. It doesn't seem to be linked with maxing out my CPU or RAM, as I normally set Terragen to use just 2 or 3 of my 4 CPU cores.
Another request I have is that I would like to have the option to have Terragen remember my chosen layout when I open a new file (e.g. if I'm on Renderers, and I open a new file, keep it on Renderers). At present, it always takes me to the Terrain layout. I can appreciate that this is meant to be helpful, for the users who use Terragen 4 mainly for terrain generation, but I only spend around 5% of my Terragen time at most on sculpting terrain, so I get a sense of having to fight the interface. I know that I'm far from the only Terragen user who uses it more for rendering out skies than for its terrain, though there's the caveat that I don't know if there are many users in my kind of position who haven't just stuck with Terragen Classic as opposed to moving to a paid version of Terragen 4.
No doubt the above rendering issue is making it far more of an annoyance than it would otherwise be. I'm routinely having to close and re-open Terragen files where I have got part-way through a render before the above render problem sets in. Whenever I open a new file, it always takes me back to the Terrain layout, and I have to keep changing it back to Renderers every time, and I have to wait for the "Terrain" layout to load before I can switch to "Renderers", whereupon I then have to wait for the Renderers layout to load as well. It gets frustrating because of the regularity with which I have to keep re-opening files. Sometimes clicking "Renderers" repeatedly while loading the file works, but at other times it doesn't register my inputs and still sends me back to Terrain.
I have a Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz with 32 GB RAM and am currently running Terragen Creative build 4.6.31. I have had the same issue with all incarnations of Terragen 4, including the free version that I had several years ago before I upgraded to the paid Creative version, so I don't know if my render glitches are specific to my PC. If it was a Microsoft updates thing I would expect it to be affecting most Windows users.
