Terragen 2

What works

- Multicore processing while rendering (I was registering 50-80% on both my cores while rendering)
- Adding items and all respective dialogs (i.e. terrains, shaders, water, light sources, atmosphere, clouds. . . )
- Dragging and dropping items for terrain priority and parent/child rules
- Renders just fine, no problems with any objects added to rendering
- Creating and rendering built-in object populations likes rocks and grass clumps
- The "Populating..." windows act a little funky, but they still populate correctly
- Creating and rendering other planets with there own terrain, shaders, and atmosphere
- Rendering both 3D and 2D clouds
- All rendering options work, including supersampling, GI surface detail rendering, bloom and ray-tracing, the different pixel filters, etc.
- Ray-trace shadow rendering works properly
- Rotating the camera in the render preview window, even though you can't actually see where it's being moved
- Setting the moved camera's coordinates as the render camera's coordinates
- Properly saved 3 of 4 available file formats (bmp, tiff, and sgi), and all saved files were readable by other programs
- Saving and loading Terragen 2 project files
- Zooming in and out on rendered images and moving them using the left mouse button
- Copying and pasting coordinates and altitudes from the invisible render preview window to the object dialogs
- Pausing the render preview (cuts down on processor usage)
- Centering on objects by right-clicking the preview window and selecting an item to center (useful since you can't actually see the preview window)

What does not

- The render preview window and the node window, the two most important functions of the program
- The shader preview window between the item list and render preview window
- Icon graphics (such as save, open, etc) are not displayed, though some icons will show alternate text boxes when you mouse-over them
- Tabs don't align properly in object properties windows, sometimes clicking on one tab will take you to the tab next to it, so you have to click the right side of the tab that you want (gets worse the further to the right you get)
- Doesn't save exr files properly. The files are readable and have the correct image but do not have contrast and gamma correction like the other 3 file formats (
- Moving the camera using Alt+MMB since this combo is already used to resize windows in Ubunutu
- At some random point the preview and node windows shrunk to about 20% the screen height and the bottom part of the dialogs disappeared. After changing to another item, the dialog worked again. After switching to the Node Network view and back, the preview and network windows were also fine. Random.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Importing LWO and TGO files for object populations and animation.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

If I didn't previously know the interface and other information from working with this program in Windows, I would have had no clue what was going on, especially since the render preview and node network windows don't work, which is the basis for doing anything besides messing around. IMO, to do anything that's actually productive in the program, you need these two windows, neither of which worked for me. However, if you're familiar with the program, you can use it to some small extent. Really, for this case there should be a rating between bronze and garbage, like plastic or stainless or something. The program works and renders, but the two biggest parts of the interface do not. As a side-note, the node network is necessary for mapping shaders properly, especially for adding a terrain shader network to a second planet. If necessary, nodes can be imported and exported and assigned via dialog boxes, but this would still require Windows, thus the program is still not independent.