patch notes for those who might want to just browse through them until official release.
--------------------------------------------------
Rendering:
No more 16-texture limit: OBJ Readers now create a "Parts Shader" containing nodes corresponding to the shader groups found in the OBJ. There is no fixed limit to the number of parts.
Some of the built-in objects have an adjustable displacement tolerance parameter. This can be used if you find that large displacements or spikey surfaces are causing errors at tile/bucket boundaries or gaps in ray-traced shadows. Be careful not to touch this setting unless you need to, because it can dramatically increase render times. The default value for most objects is 1, but lower values can be used to render relatively flat surfaces more quickly.
Improved quality of GI in clouds and atmospheres by adjusting an internal compression threshold.
Two new render settings on the Advanced tab which control the region in which ray traced polygons are fully subdivided. Outside of this region the ray traced polygons are only coarsely subdivided. Previously this region was the frustum seen by the rendered image or crop region, but now you can also choose to have no detail or to have detail everywhere within the camera frustum regardless of crop settings. "Ray detail region padding" can be used to enlarge (or shrink) the region. A value of 0 means no padding. A value of 1 adds a border to each side of the frustum which is equivalent to the width or height of the image or crop region, which makes the frustum 3 times as wide and 3 times as tall.
A small improvement to the performance of multi-threaded rendering.
A performance warning is displayed if Terragen is set up to use more than 4 processor cores. You can disable this warning if you wish.
Reduced the amount of memory used by the LWO Micro Exporter during rendering.
The visible sun sphere now aligns correctly with its glow in atmospheres and specular highlights when the camera is at large distances from the origin.
Precision of values in .tgd and .tgc files increased to 10 signficicant figures (was 6).
Terrain and shaders:
Greyscale 32-bit floating point images are now readable via FreeImage. This includes TIFF and GEOTIFF (tested) and EXR (untested).
Georeferencing features:
* Heightfield Load reads associated .tfw "world file" when reading .tif images. The correct X and Y scaling is calculated depending on the latitude/longitude of the file.
* Heightfield Load has georeferencing settings. Latitude/longitude coordinates can be specified for the 4 corners of the heightfield. These are also read automatically from the associated .tfw "world file" when reading .tif images.
* Heightfield Shader uses georeferencing settings provided by Heightfield Load, if set.
* Planet has "lat long at apex" parameter so that georeferenced heightfields can be remapped to (0,0,0) in world space. If one of your heightfields is georeferenced to (39, -106), for example, enter (39, -106) in the Planet's apex to bring the heightfield back to home.
Heightfield Shader's bounding box and handle are correctly vertically scaled/positioned when height multiplier is not 1.
Heightfield Resize no longer automatically rescales vertically; it is now optional.
Power Fractal Shader V3 works with negative displacement amplitudes again.
Merge Shader: The "Lowest (cut away)" mode of "Choose by altitude" now works.
Painted Shader improvements:
Painted Shader brush strokes are now continuous, to a point. If you moved the brush too fast you could previously get a stroke which looked like a series of dots, it now looks like a proper continuous stroke. You might still get dots if you try to paint a really long distance in one stroke, there are limits due to performance. Paint more slowly :-).
Painted Shader now paints if you just click. Previously you had to move the mouse before it started painting.
Made some optimisations and improvements to the Painted Shader. Unfortunately there are still situations where it will crash, but the chances of that are reduced.
Undo improvements:
Fixed some problems with undoing group, ungroup and delete nodes.
Node name undo now works.
Making node connections using the context menu in the Network View is now undoable.
Added a "This cannot be undone" warning dialog for the 3D Preview reset.
Fixed a bug where the Purge Undo dialog only had an "OK" button.
Other User Interface improvements:
Fixed problems with some tooltips on Vista and potentially Windows 2000. These are the "special" tooltips, used in the node network and 3D Preview. Previously these could cause crashes on Vista and W2k. It's now safe to turn on the "Show special tooltips" setting in the General preferences panel.
Special tooltips are now shown by default on all OSes (see General prefs panel).
Main window is hidden correctly when running from the command line with -hide.
Splash screen.
New About Box.
Added some new button icons, tweaked some old ones.
In some situations '\' and '/' characters in file paths and filenames are automatically replaced by the correct path separator for the OS. This means that '\' cannot be safely used in filenames in this version. It is still OK as a path separator. We may change this in future.
New "File Saving" preferences panel.
Creation of backup files when you save projects can be controlled from the File Saving prefs panel. This is also available on the Mac now, if you wish to use it.
Added incremental saving for project files. This adds a version number to the project filename which can be incremented using the new "Save Incremental" item in the File menu. You can set project saving to always be incremental (i.e. increments when you save using the "Save" item or ctrl/cmd-S shortcut) in the File Saving prefs panel.
New "Open Online Documentation in Browser" item in Help menu, will link to TG2 documentation.
Added help buttons to param views. These will eventually open the documention for the node in a browser.
The 3D Preview now has an exposure slider. Click the "+/-" button in the bottom left to show it. This lets you experiment with exposure more easily, as if you were using a camera.
Added measuring tools. You can turn on measure mode in 3D Previews using a key ('m' by default) or by clicking the measure button in the top panel of the preview. Starting a measure session opens a floating measure window which gives various dimensions of the measurement line. Measurement can be locked to x, y or z axes using the buttons at the bottom of the window. Exit measure mode by pressing the key, button or closing the measure window.
Distance from the camera to the cursor in 3D Previews is now displayed in the 3D Preview Location window.
"Navigation Panel" prefs panel renamed to "Navigation".
Added compass to 3D Previews to show heading. Can be toggled on and off, see the Mouse and Key Settings window for the binding. Can also be shown in heightfield/shader previews. See Navigation prefs panel to control visibility.
Added key navigation/camera movement to the 3D Preview. See the Mouse and Key Settings window for the bindings. These can be customised as well, of course.
The altitude, coordinates and slope angle under the mouse in the 3D Preview can be copied using the context menu. These can also be pasted into text files, forum posts etc. in other applications.
Vector params (e.g. object positions) can now be copied and pasted using the menu panel button to the right of the last edit field for the param. The button has a clipboard icon. These can also be pasted into text files, forum posts etc. in other applications.
You can drag and drop from colour buttons in TG2 to text files, forum posts etc. in other applications.
A render hotkey has been added, which opens the Render window and starts rendering the current render node. See the Project menu for the hotkey/shortcut.
The Assign node submenus are now hierarchic/multi-level and sorted alphabetically.
There are now checks to stop circular paths being made in the node network. These could previously cause a crash.
Windows only: Added a View menu to the secondary view window menu bar.
Windows only: Windows now have TG2 titlebar icons.
Mac only: URL static text (as in the About Box) now responds to clicks.
Mac only: Added an icon and application information for TGO files.
Mac only: Finally sorted out the mac_command_line.txt CLI document.
Windows only: The view window Edit menu now has the Duplicate/Group/Ungroup commands.
Mac only: Abort buttons now work in progress dialogs.
Mac only: The main window now has a proxy icon for the project file and no longer displays the project file path.
Fixed a crash when deleting nodes.
Made some changes to prevent crashes when the last camera node was deleted.
Windows only: Fixed an event processing problem which made operations which used progress dialogs go faster if you wiggled the mouse.
Windows only: Improved list cell width calculation, fixes problem with list item text clipping.
Windows only: Improved and optimised list behaviour.
Mac only: Fixed a problem where TG2 wouldn't open files dropped on the application icon before the application was running. The application would start up but it wouldn't open the file.
Mac only: Fixed a problem with the text size in certain windows such as the Measure window and 3D Preview Location window.
Mac only: Fixed some problems with floating window backgrounds, as previously exhibited by 3D Preview Location and Measure windows.
Menus can now enable/disable their items according to the context. For example when the 3D Preview is focused the Edit menu Cut/Copy/Paste/Delete etc. items aren't enabled because it doesn't support those commands.
Project modification tracking is now handled in what should be a more accurate manner. There have been changes to some other aspects to go along with this, for example if you go to exit TG2 and there are no unsaved changes then you don't see the "Exit/Cancel/Save and Exit" dialog anymore, TG2 just exits.
It's no longer possible to resize group nodes in such a way, for example, that the left edge moves past the right edge.
Close button now shows again in the top panel of 3D/shader previews opened in view windows.
Fixed some mouse interaction problems in the navigation panel and navigation window.
The Delete item in the Edit menu now deletes items from project view lists.
Windows only: Changed some behaviour for floating windows.
Windows only: Fixed some resize problems with the separator line, this will be mainly evident in windows like the 3D Preview Location and Measure windows.
Windows only: Fixed a problem where part of the OpenGL part of the 3D Preview could be hidden in a certain situation.
Windows only: Menus are now always drawn themed on Vista. Previously menus that had menu items with icons were drawn unthemed.
Windows only: Fixed the problem where elements in OpenGL views, such as the navigation panel in the 3D Preview, would sometimes just draw as solid coloured rectangles.
Fixed a problem where starting or opening a new project while rendering could cause a crash.
Fixed a problem with bitmap caching which caused the Navigation Window to draw incorrectly on Windows in certain situations.
Windows only: Fixed a problem where clicking on a file param button would not open the appropriate dialog when certain file paths were used.
Mac only: Save dialogs now display default names better in some situations.
Mac only: Fixed issue which lead to the Pause button in the Render window having an extraneous ampersand.
Split panes now update in realtime on Vista. This improves their drawing with OpenGL views (3D Preview/network view) but it could still be better.
Split pane splitter bars now look better on Vista both in Vista and Classic themes.
Optimised list performance.
Optimised bitmap/image usage.
Optimised project view updating.
If a camera's position is animated, its path is displayed in all previews which show the camera. You can change the colour in the Interface Colours prefs panel.
Groups are now shown in the Node Network project view list. Nodes in the internal networks of groups are also now shown, as children of the group items.
Groups now have icons in node lists.
Windows only: The mechanism behind the "Explore Temporary Files" menu item has been changed. It no longer opens a command window and should give a much better user experience.
Windows only: Improved key navigation in alerts/message boxes.
Improved the Errors and Warnings window behaviour. If you uncheck the "Show warnings" check box then this setting will still apply next time you open the window. The window also doesn't get shown again for subsequent warnings.
Main window is slightly wider on startup so that the toolbars at the top of the window are all in one row.
