Thanks, latego. This wasn't meant to be sarcastic, I simply wouldn't have been surprised if there came a "I-could-have-told-you-so" answer and probably I even wouldn't have become angry at that statement. The thing is that all in all I was very content with Vue 7 which proved to be much more stable for me than any other version before (I started with Vue 5 Infinite). Sure, Vue 7 also crashed on me sometimes randomly which could make me furious as hell, but in the end the crashes were few, in most cases avoidable and related to very complex scenes or operations. I was hesitating whether I should upgrade to Vue 8 or not, because the features that were added didn't justify the upgrade price for me (I also posted this in the Renderosity cloud thread that you mentioned above), but ultimately I compared the prices of previous upgrades if you had skipped one version and if e-on continue their price policy I am sure I would have payed more next year for upgrading from Vue 7 Infinite to Vue 9 Infinite compared to what I have to pay for upgrading from Vue 7 to 8 and from 8 to 9. Having admired Terragen 2's displacement and overhangs for several years now I was sold with e-on's new and improved displacement engine. I think it's understandable that I am disappointed that particularly this feature doesn't work as promised. The sad thing is that it's not even a bug, because I have to admit that there are some neat new displacement options and that it works a lot faster and more precisely on lower resolution terrains and primitives. But with high resolution terrains the software is just so damn hungry for memory that it crashes my entire PC. That's not a bug, that's simply bad management of resources for heavily detailed terrains. And that's also what makes it useless for me, unless I find a workaround or can live with lower displacement quality. I mean, 12 GB of 1600 Mhz DDR3-RAM - how much more do I need to use this feature if that's still not enough?
The changes in the atmosphere editor lie in the render engine, so previous atmospheres should work without problems and -most importantly- roughly look the same. And they do, except for the clouds - they look a lot better now, the new lighting in Spectral Atmospheres 3 is incredible. I have to agree with Frank that the cloud lighting is far superior to TG2 now. If e-on finally allows us to change the noise that is used to produce the cloud details then also the clouds will be finaly on par with TG2, if not even better because Vue's function editor offers more nodes to use in this area. Either way Spectral 3 is a big step into the right direction.
My Vue 7 atmosphere was designed to expose a big, dramatic hole in the sky with extremely bright godrays peeking through, and in Vue 8 the godrays are completely gone, so now I can start from scratch. That's what made me angry, but I guess this happened indeed due to the new render engine. Ah well, I can't really blame e-on for this.
The population bug is very annoying, though. Maybe it's a scene dependent thing, I will have to check that.
So at the moment there is only one "real" bug - the dynamic population scale. The new terrain editor is beyond awesome I must admit, and apart from the displacement issue Vue 8 is running rock stable so far. My first post included a lot of frustration, but now after calming down I don't think anymore that this upgrade was really a mistake. E-on, fix the displacement and I am a happy customer, because everything else works as advertised.
