Hi Brian,
You have a lot of good questions, concerns and points. I'll address them one by one. But I'm pleased to say that at least a good number of these will be addressed for the coming "gold" release.
As far as a specific release date, we're steering clear of them at this point. We realize it's frustrating not knowing when it may come out, but it's even worse setting a date and then not making it. We've had to disappoint people before and its very frustrating and unpleasant for all. The previous timeline had the final release scheduled for about now, following approximately 1 month of a beta cycle open to registered users. We're still working on the beta at this point, mostly hammering out some persistent rendering issues unfortunately, and you can expect a similar 1 month beta cycle once it is ready.
In regards to the price and capabilities, TG2 is fundamentally a landscape generation and rendering application. It's in the market with MojoWorld, Bryce, World Builder, etc. Certainly these other applications have features not available in TG2 at this point, but if you compare the end product I think you'll find that TG2's output is simply more realistic than any of the others. We've concentrated on the difficult problems that others haven't already solved. At times that does mean that desirable features like more robust object support have to wait a bit to get improvements, but without the robust landscape rendering TG2 would be just another also-ran, so it ultimately does make sense to develop this way.
Price-wise it's a steal at $200 compared to the competition. That's a pre-release price which will be increased once it goes "gold". If you purchase now you get free updates all the way up to (but not including) a 3.0 release. Whether you purchase now or later the upgrade price to 3.0 will be the same, so you're not saving any money by waiting, provided you do expect to buy at some point in the 2.0 product cycle. If your purchase is dependent on implementation of certain features, I'll try to address those below.
Now to your questions:
1: Sun disc distortion is indeed necessary for absolute realism. It's not something we'll be implementing for the coming "gold" release, but as our ultimate aim is total realism, it ought to make it into a future release.
2: Transparency is an important part of the improvements we have made for the upcoming beta. Refraction will be supported.
3: Paint-style terrain manipulation is a feature we'd like to add, but it's not a focus of development before the 2.0 release. There are lots of other very good and reasonably affordable dedicated terrain editors and we're unlikely to ever eclipse them in features, but we to intend to provide at least basic painting functionality for terrain edits as well as direct mask creation (e.g. population and texture placement). These things will come in future releases.
4: The 16 shader limit is one we certainly acknowledge. For our intended market and use of the product it is not generally a huge issue - the vast majority of vegetation and other natural object models use less than 16 textures. But we do certainly intend to remove this limit and support a much larger number of textures. It is unlikely that the "gold" release will be able to include this, but it will be one of our earlier updates following that.
5: As Cyber-Angel somewhat explained, crashing waves are an extremely difficult problem to solve. You have probably noticed that no one else has done this properly yet. Even cutting-edge research - where things are often accomplished that don't make it into mainstream applications for years - still has little to show in this area as far as realistic results. We'd love to solve this problem before anyone else, but it's a small enough part of the total landscape rendering feature set that it doesn't currently justify significant development time.
6: As you've found terrain export is already provided in the LWO format. You can export a specific area of terrain with the Heightfield Export LWO node, or export what the camera sees with the LWO Microexporter.
7: Dockable windows are a good idea. We've already got some improvements in the unreleased alphas that allow for better multi-window and multi-view workflow. I'll see what can be done in this area.
8: As I mentioned above the internal alphas now allow multiple 3D previews and node networks. These can be arranged any way you like. We may include presets that emulate the standard 4-view approach. Your control ideas are not necessarily bad for 3 button mice, but we need to accomodate 1 and 2 button mice as well (in the default setup), which is partly why it's setup the way it is. Customization of the controls will be possible in the future.
9: Wireframe rendering is definitely an important improvement for working with objects. It's not likely to make it into the initial 2.0 release unfortunately, but again it should be a focus for the updates that will follow.
10: The issue you describe is something of a bug, but it has nothing to do with multiple populations, which do incidentally work just fine. What you're seeing usually happens when you move the source object rather than the population. When the source object position is altered the population distribution gets distorted. This also happens with some of the built-in objects like spheres and it's definitely a bug in that case.
11: DoF is a nice feature we'd like to include. It will probably come after the 2.0 release with some other improvements in built-in post-processing such as post-contrast adjustment, exposure controls, etc. It would be based on z-buffer output which will also be available as a separate image output in the future. For now you can create a z-buffer type image using a Depth Shader and do DoF in post processing manually (as a number of images here have shown).
12: While a built-in "star shader" is not available (and will not be included in the "gold" release), you can easily create stars either procedurally (there is a tutorial on this here in the forums - try the Advanced Search), or by using an image map of a starfield (many are available for free online). Again there are many images posted here showing examples of both techniques used to create effect. You can also create nebulae and other space effects using built-in functionality.
I hope that helps you evaluate TG2. In making your decision on whether to buy the product you should be asking yourself if a dedicated landscape modeling and rendering application is really what you want. That is TG2's primary focus and it handles this area of rendering quite well. Other programs naturally do rendering of complex 3D objects better, and this will always be the case, even when we improve the object and texture handling. If object rendering of the highest quality and greatest flexibility is of most importance, you may be better off looking at another application. However at the same time don't expect Truespace, or even Lightwave, to offer you equivalent landscape rendering results, even with a significant amount of work.
Your best bet if you need both is to create a workflow that allows you to combine the strengths of two or more applications. Use TG2 to create and render your landscape as an HDR for example, then use that as an environment map in your general purpose 3D app and you'll get realistic scenery, and realistically lit and rendered objects. This is the kind of workflow many effects industry production houses use and it is essentially what TG2 is tailored toward.
Let us know if you have any further questions or concerns.
- Oshyan
