Aye, I do see your point, Jritchie777, it isn't ideal at all.
I don't think I've ever crashed TG myself because of any extreme inputs, though. And I really do use some ridiculous settings sometimes. What parameters do you find these problems mostly occurring?
I could imagine some really extreme settings that might cause crashes, if you were to input, say, 1,000,000,000m as a displacement multiplier on a near-to-camera terrain then, yes, the renderer would most likely crash the program due to impossibility of rendering such extremes, if the 3D preview doesn't crash it beforehand, that is. I couldn't really see anyone using such extreme settings as this, though.
In another thread yesterday, as an example on extreme inputs, Seth wrote a post on using, I think it was a value of 10,000 for transparency, on a water shader applied to a sphere. The transparency slider's limits here are '1', this doesn't mean you can't input higher.
I've experimented on this myself since then, and it appears that if you raise transparency above '1'(the logical maximum) then, sure, it isn't physically correct but, Terragen will do as you tell it, most of the time. This results in a physically impossible calculation, of course, how can you possibly go beyond 100%('1') in the real world? But, TG doesn't really discriminate in this way, it'll take that value and do the mathematical sum of your inputs, in this case, some new way to create luminosity that will cast off from the given surface onto surrounding elements.
'10,000% Pffffft! No problem. What else have you got?' Says Terragen.
