Hiya.

I 'just' (a week ago?) upgraded my TGEA to T3D for their intro price of about $505 (don't tell my wife! ). I was almost off the fence (on the not gonna' buy it side). Last day of the intro price I decided to take another look and see what they were doing with it...

Road editor, river editor, physics...I was VERY impressed! The native COLLADA as the file format of choice placed me firmly on the fence again. Then I found one example/demo that pretty much kicked my ass over the fence: it was the rain/weather demo ("Weather and Precipitation" I think it's called). How it automagicaly clips the rain-drop textures when they hit the ground if the ripples go 'over' and edge, and the general quality...and this is in Beta!...well, I whipped it out, stuck it in and blew my wad (re: got out my credit card, put my card number into the online order page and spent my wad of money).

So far, I'm not regretting it. I'm waiting for more documentation and tutorials to come out for it, obviously, but it's still fun to just push random buttons and see what happens. The biggest problem I have right now, is there is an alpha-clipp problem for those with ATI cards, specifically dealing with the leaves of trees. The grass is fine, so is everything else...but I think they "hard coded" a limitation thingie into a rendering doohicky because NVidia cards can't display some whatchamacallit bit-depth somethingorother...but ATI can, and so this confuses the ATI cards.

(Can you tell I'm not a programmer? ).