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Advance information on new Terragen for Windows release A new version of Terragen for Windows will be released in approximately 3 weeks, around the third week of August. The new version features some important bugfixes, such as the problem with black triangles where the water meets the land. There are also some minor enhancements. However, the major new feature in the new release is the 3D Preview. The 3D Preview has been available in the Mac version for a long time. Its main purpose is to provide a much better view of the terrain than is possible with the 2D terrain previews alone. You can move around the 3D Preview in realtime, checking out the shape of the terrain and looking for interesting vantage points. The 3D Preview uses OpenGL, but it doesn't require a powerful graphics card. The 3D Preview is highly configurable and will work acceptably in low quality mode even on older computers with no graphics card or limited integrated graphics. As mentioned above, the 3D Preview is mainly intended to help you get a better idea of shape of the terrain. As such it uses simple textures for the terrain and water, which just help to better indicate the shape of the terrain. Ideally a more accurate representation would be used, but Terragen's surface map system is a bit slow to be used for this. The 3D Preview uses an accurate skydome which can be of great of help in avoiding the "black edge of the world" problem before rendering. The skydome also gives an indication of shape of the clouds and cloud cover, as well as a pretty accurate preview of the atmosphere. The 3D Preview is also useful because it will adapt its size to match the aspect ratio of the final rendered image. The render preview in Terragen has a fixed aspect ratio, and if you are using a non 4:3 aspect ratio it can be tricky to establish what will be seen in the final render. The 3D Preview can show you exactly what you'll see. Screenshots This is the main 3D Preview preferences dialog. This is the 3D Preview Settings dialog, which lets you customise all the 3D Preview settings according to terrain size. The following images allow you to compare the rendered image with what you see in the 3d Preview. The renders were done using sample surface maps and atmospheres, so please forgive them not being foremost examples of Terragen use. Click the images to seem them at full size. The 3D Preview in this image also has the frames per second counter and mini map turned on. These images show how the 3D Preview adapts its aspect ratio to match that of the render size. This screenshot shows how the 3D Preview can be useful for detecting the "black hole at the edge of the world", which can appear if the sky cover size is not set to a large enough amount.