*FINAL EDIT* I'll leave the following monologue up and posted without editing my idiocy. Purely for comic relief. You never know when you may need a pick-me-up. You can rely on me to give you something to laugh at, at least, if nothing else. Is there a TG2 Darwin award? I'll beat you all hands-down! 
Read on...
Planetside staff: You may want to move this thread to the General Discussion forum, or, possibly, a brand new forum all on its own called, 'Numbc#*%ts Only!'This is ridiculous!
I posted the recent caustics image and said the .tgd I was sharing had really high GI values but, 'don't be alarmed, it's quick', and all that nonsense...
This was quite an old file that I originally made in Terragen 2 TP 3 or 4, I think but, that's the thing... opening this .tgd again, I was getting away with really ridiculously high GI detail and sample quality, that I had put down to there not being any sky/atmosphere being rendered.
I've since opened the recently shared .tgd(saved in TG2.1) to update it a little, and I really, really, REALLY could not have even possibly considered waiting on even one render bucket to complete its GI prepass. It was as you'd expect with GI settings of 3/12, really, really, REALLY long.
So, here's the thing. Will someone please download this old .tgd(the original one from way back), do not edit anything, visit the render tab directly, and input some really preposterous GI settings that you'd never use. I can crank it and crank it, no matter how high, it seems. (You'll see that all the newer features, RTO/RTE, pixel filters, supersampling, etc. are all unchecked or disabled because they weren't around when the file was made, doesn't matter, enable
anything new to do with GI and rendering, it all works as it should except 100 times faster).
When testing if this was a bug I took this snapshot of TG2's program and render window as it was rendering:
[attachimg=#]
LOOK AT THESE GI VALUES!
And look at the short amount of time it's taken.(the render window you see here is only drawing GI prepass, not actually rendering yet). The prepass is pretty much filling every pixel and yet, 3 minutes 22 seconds!
That might not be a lot for some of you running some of your supercomputers but, for me that is completely insane, and actually, if I'd put some more thought into it, unthinkable!
Just to be clear, it isn't keeping to the same speed for all prepasses at different levels of detail, raising settings is raising time but, by hardly anything at all.
So, I can reproduce this(not sure if it's with all old .tgd's but certainly with this one). Open it, crank GI, hit render and Terragen flies through the GI prepass, and it seems, at the correct quality, I have rendered about 5 or 6 1024px versions of this .tgd while editing the caustics shaders and I should never have been able to. I did not save and exit TG once since opening it during this time. When I was done with the shaders I obviously closed the program.
As is normal for me, I always update things so, when I opened TG2 again earlier and went with the recently saved(TG2.1) version of the scene. 'CRUNCH! NO WAY, SIR! WHAT AM I MEANT TO DO WITH THAT?' Said the computer.
Here's the file: [attachimg=#]
Tell me what's going on on your end... And, if it is as fast for you, join me in a petition to have Matt make it the normal prepass speed!
I am very confused by this.
