Gah!

[Yoda Almighty]

I started a project with Terragen 2, and saved it. than I came back later, worked on it some more, but when I set it to render, the number of instances of the tree I was using caused the program to crash. (become unresponsive, had to force quit)

After I restarted, the file was gone! it was like it had never been. has anyone else ever had a problem like  this, and if they have, is there a way to recover the file? (I spent almost 7 hours on it)

[DeathTwister]

No and what a drag my friend.  But I have run into so many bugs it is not surprising that it did that.  This last build is a very unstable build.  It crashes every time I add a shader saying it has all kinds of errors, then restart and things are fine.  Nope things are not fine.  And very surprised they do not adopt a policy of fixing these these dam bugs right after a RELEASE.  But I guess that is to much to ask from professionals people right?

DT

[cyphyr]

Sorry its not working, but the latest build was released with a rider that it was unstable and that you realy should not use it for "mission critical" projects. I'm sure this is being worked on and the next release will fix some of these issues. Meantime you could try dissableing vairous nodes or think about which of your populations may be causing the problem. For example theres no point in having a massive population of high res, high detail objects dissapearing off into the distance. Realy you could use three (or more) populations of decreacing complexity the further away from the camera they get. I know this is delt with automaticaly within TG but theres no reason why you cant help the process along. Also make sure your populations dont extend too far beyond your camera's field of view.
Good luck
Richard

[Yoda Almighty]

thats another thing, is it possible to reduce the amount of instances that appear within a population? that would help greatly.

[cyphyr]

The number of instancies is related to the density (lower number = higher density, effectively your describing the space between objects) and the dimensions of your population. There was a thread somewhere about using the function nodes to create a mask that will only populate the area/cone visible from the camera.
Richard

[ZStar]

This may help.  It's a bit advanced and I have not tried it yet.  It is from nikita's blog.  I think it describes the masking technique you were referring to, Richard.

http://en.tgblog.de/?p=28

[Matt]

You can also reduce the number of instances by increasing the object spacing.

Matt

[gregsandor]

When you make a scene file, save a backup.

[Oshyan]

Is the file itself completely gone - i.e. no .tgd file in the location in which you had saved it - or does the file exist, but nothing comes up when you load it? Have you examined the file contents with a text editor?

- Oshyan

[Yoda Almighty]

the file no longer exists. there is no evidence of it anywhere.

also, I figured out that on the sliders, you can increase the number higher than the slider will go, and that seemed to work.

[JimB]

You haven't saved the file somehow without a .file extension? It's a really long shot, but I do it sometimes in other apps and get confused and a tad upset when I can't find what I just saved, and then feel an idiot. Or maybe I'm just hoping someone else can be as dumb as me 

[Yoda Almighty]

no, I had saved it once before, and later it opened fine, but the than I saved it again, and rendered, and when it crashed, it was complete;y gone. not in the open recent, not on the recent documents, not in the documents folder where I saved it, no in the trash...

[Matt]

Terragen usually saves .tgd_bak files before overwriting any exising .tgd file, so you might have some luck if you look for those. In the load dialog switch to "All Files (*.*)".

Matt

[mindsap]

This happed to me once.  I had same result your having.  I now save after making any modifications to the scene, and I monitor my ram with a second program and free up more if needed.  I also make 2 tgds just in case.

[peejay]

Yoda

yes exactly the same thing has happened to me. Just a hobbyist here so no harm done except that I found the COOLEST rock formation, and I've absolutely no idea now what I did to get it

No, the .bak file was blank, as in - it existed but nothing in it, (sorry have deleted it now so can't show anyone) the main file just vanished. Just to clarify this is TP3 I'm talking about - haven't downloaded the new one yet

and yes if I find anything I like now, I always resave under a different filename before going any further just in case

still, they did warn us....

oh Yoda, one tiny ray of hope (maybe) I have noticed that if I save a tgd that uses an imported texture, sometimes the tgd gets saved in the folder the texture is in, not my main Planetside folder - don't want to give you false hope, but I suppose there's a tiny chance...?