I remember Dec 15th (wavy screen effect...).
I was eagerly waiting for the "thing", anxious also for the download size (as I was still on a 4KB/s modem and I was expecting a 20 to 40 MB download).
Then came the announce and I jumped to the download URL.
I clicked it, and was about to go make myself a coffee (it cannot be less than one and half hour, can it be?)... but, instead of the expected size, it was a 2.8MB setup... HOW DID they manage to do THAT? I know NO C++ GUI library which allows you to create complex programs of such a tiny size!
After having installed the "thing" I immediately took out my devel tools to fathom which GUI library "they" had used... and I got a most crushing shock: "they" had built their own GUI layer! (just have a look at the Terragen_2.ucr subdirectory inside TG2TP installation where you can find UI-related configuration files).
Haha!!! (Blues Brothers like light-from-the-sky effect...) THIS is THE reason why they are taking YEARS to build the program! Instead of leveraging a GUI toolkit like Qt
http://www.trolltech.com/ or wxWidgets
http://www.trolltech.com/ they are wasting their time in non-TG related coding!
I stress WASTING; I am a C++ developer since 1991 and, given the fact that there are POWERFUL, PROVEN, TESTED and PORTABLE GUI toolkits for C++ there is NO reason whatsoever to start you own one (I have used OWL, MFC, wxWidgets and Qt, so I know something about this subject..).
One does not buy TG2 for its GUI toolkit: one buys it for its functionality, quality, workflow and performace. Using wxWidgets or Qt one single programmer could write TG2 current interface better and in not more than 6 months, leaving all the remaining time for TG2 real functionality development and testing.
If money was a problem, wxWidgets is ABSOLUTELY free also for closed source apps (if you don't believe it, just read its license), if money was not a problem, download Qt and get out your credit card... it's just that easy.
Just have a look at Vue6 Personal Learning Edition. It is written with MFC (mfc71u.dll gives this fact away). It has an almost Windows-standard GUI, I started to use it immediately and in a couple of hours I was tweeking complex shaders... with nothing more than a couple of tutorials on my experience. By the way, some time ago, on Renderosity Vue forum one person gave the URL of a very old Vue demo. I downloaded it and having a look at its innards, I saw OWL dlls...
The moral: I am waiting for Intels E6700's to become a bit cheaper in order to build a new computer in order to run Vue6Infinite... (and also for work
). Sorry, TG2 skies are still better than Vue6 ones, but everything else is a 1 minute point-and-click task (just compare a Vue ecosystem with TG2 populations). I estimate that Vue6 is 5/6 times faster for medium quality renders; I cannot assess the ratio for high quality ones because I did not end any of them (when, after 40 minutes, the startfield phase it not over, you can sense that something it not all right, don't you?).
One has to be realistic about development effort. If you are just two developers, you have four hand, 4 eyes and 4 brain hemispheres and NOTHING more: then you assess what you can do and decide what you can and CANNOT build. Dreams are beautiful, but then comes the sunrise and all that is left is the cold, merciless reality.
Sorry...
P.S.: Vue resource problems are almost all related to Poser imports: if you are not in the soft (or not so soft) porn business, you could not care less about Poser.