I was wondering. If there was a really low OpenGL preview instead of a higher renderer for the preview while you were editing your world. It would probably display it faster. I was using a program called MojoWorld and thier preview renders are always in realtime. I would like it if they had one similair to that one. But a tool that can "Quick Render" a rectangular selection in the window also would be a good Idea.
I think part of the problem is that the preview window is not threaded which obviously slows it down. Once this is added back in it should help a lot.
Saying that though sometimes, even with threading, it may be quite slow to draw some scenes especially when using clouds, water, soft shadows etc.
Depending on what you want to see when "editing your world" you could turn certain things off. For instance if you click the terrain tab the preview will draw a lot faster than say the render tab.
The only way to show the full displacement (terrain shape) is to compute the shape of the terrain. Using OpenGL or DirectX to display this isn't going to make it faster - it's fundamentally a CPU-bound process. MojoWorld's preview is notorious for innaccuracy since it does not fully compute 2nd or higher order displacements. TG2, on the other hand, fully computes displacements, so it is more accurate, but yes it is slower. When dealing with fine displacements, as is often the case in TG2, this is particularly important. As Reck mentioned turning off Atmosphere and Lighting can help, if you only want to see the terrain for positioning. The preview speed will indeed be improved in the future when multithreading is possible.
- Oshyan