Price Changes, and More Features in Free and Creative

[Matt]

Hi everyone!

I want to let you know about some upcoming changes to features in Terragen 4 Free and Creative editions, price increases, and a discount voucher which is valid for the next 30 days.

Price changes

A few days ago we increased subscription prices by small percentages, after a long time without change. Existing subscriptions are not affected. If you have an active subscription and let it renew it will continue at whatever price you're already paying. For perpetual licenses the long-running $100 discount for Professional has ended, and the $30 discount for new Professional Maintenance subscriptions has ended. As with regular subscriptions, existing Maintenance subscription are not affected by the price change. If you have an active Maintenance subscription and let it renew it will continue at whatever price you're already paying.

If you're thinking about getting Terragen 4 Professional but missed the discount period, we've added a $100 discount code which is valid until the end of October. Use discount code 100offpro-p2b7gt on the Checkout page any time before the end of October 31st. This can be used once per customer, for a perpetual license of Terragen 4 Professional or an upgrade from another version.

More features in Free and Creative

Last year we made the Georeferencing capabilities available in all editions of Terragen 4. Before that time, they had been restricted to the Professional Edition. Continuing this idea, over the next few release versions we're going to enable some more features in the Creative Edition and Free Non-Commercial Edition that are Pro-only at the moment.

1) The RPC (Remote Procedure Call) system will soon be available in all editions, including the Free Non-Commercial Edition. RPC brings a lot of new power and flexibility to Terragen, and was introduced in the Professional Edition last year. Up to now it has mostly been used by visual effects companies to improve their in-house pipeline integrations with Terragen, but it can be used for so much more. We would love to see more widespread use of this feature and hope you will share some of the tools you're creating with it. To encourage this we're going to make the RPC system completely free for anyone to use, starting with Terragen 4.7. More information about the RPC system can be found in Kevin's post here: https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,30551.0.html

2) EXR and HDR render output will be available in the Creative Edition and the Professional Edition. Terragen has been able to output EXR files since Terragen 2, but only in the Professional Edition. Starting with Terragen 4.7 we will make this feature available in the Creative Edition as well. Terragen 4.7 will also let you save images in the Radiance HDR (.hdr) format in the Creative Edition and Professional Edition. Lots of applications that don't load EXR files can load Radiance HDR files, for example Unreal Engine. Even in applications that can load EXRs you may find that HDRs load faster, so give it a try.

3) We are carefully considering enabling some more features in the Creative Edition from the list of things that currently differentiate Pro from Creative, with a gradual roll-out over the next few versions. This will be in addition to other improvements and features that we are developing for these version. Our goal is to make Terragen Creative more broadly useful and to keep it affordable, while those who benefit the most financially from Terragen Professional still have reason to pay the full price. This is necessary because without those ongoing professional license fees we would find it much harder to keep developing this software. At the same time, we want more people to use Terragen Creative at its much lower price without being held back by unnecessary restrictions.

What do you think?

Please let us know what you think about any of this, whether it's about what features should fairly be included in Creative but are currently restricted to Professional, or the price changes, or anything else. Feel free to reply below or contact us directly. Even if we don't reply to everybody, we'll give some serious thought to every message.

There will be a similar post over on our Discord server too.

Thanks!

[Dune]

I can't say much constructively, but I think it's a good idea to accomodate the 'less professionally' working users - the hobby users if you will (who might be more prone to present their renders and questions here), with some more features. That hopefully will bring more of them on the path of this still terrific software. It's impossible to tell from the liveliness on the forum how many there are, but it's surely decreased, IMHO. Which is too bad.
I think especially those users need to say what they would like to be included.

And Matt, I do hope you will be able to continue working on TG! I'm not very present atm (writing), but it's my main software.

[Matt]

Thank you Dune! We are doing well enough for the time being (and there is a lot of long-haul development going on behind the scenes to ensure we have a bright future, but that's a topic for another day). There has been a significant shift towards purchases of Professional and a corresponding increase in recognizable company names using the software. These users tend to have less time to post in the forum, which is unfortunate but understandable. Recent improvements in our documentation, tutorials, and decades of information available in older posts here, may also be contributing to the downturn in forum activity, so I think this is to be expected to some extent. The existence of our Discord server could be a factor but not a major one.

I would like to attract more people here (and to Discord server), as well as broaden the user base so it's not so "top-heavy", but really the main changes have to come to Terragen itself. What we're announcing today with the expansion of features from Pro to Creative and Free is just the first step in an overall strategy we are working on to keep things on the up and up.

[Dune]

Thanks for your reply, Matt, and good to hear all is well. Keep at it!

[gao_jian11]

Good news. I've been sticking with my subscription, but the updates are too few and far between. Hopefully there will be more new features.