The free edition of Terragen 2.0 is now available through Planetside’s new wobsite:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/content/view/21/36/

and finally, the new prices have been announced. The current prices will be valid till 30 days from today on. From then, Deep and Deep Animation will cost $100 more. That is $299 for the Deep version and $399 for the animation version.  Further information can be found in the forum: 
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5978.msg65130#msg65130

Greenworks now offers Terragen 2 Animation bundled with 1320 of their plants at only $699! This offer is valid through May 30.

TG2 Animation alone costs $299, so you essentially get models of 440 different species for $400. A pretty good price. If you buy the plants through Greenworks’ online shop, you will only get about 54 species for the same money!

If you already own TG2, you will get a discount “equivalent to their original purchase price.”

Source: http://www.xfrogdownloads.com/greenwebNew/news/Terragen2_XfrogPlants_EarthDay.html

The beta has just been released to the purchasers of the deep editions. As usual, you can download it using the link in the e-mail that you got or via the update function.

Though well behind schedule, Planetside included some new features like an unlimited undo history, more anti-aliasing algorithms (including some sort of blooming) and the new painted shader. Fortunately, they all work and didn’t seem to introduce any new bugs. Plus they are really useful!

Especially the painted shader will come in handy in countless situations. Combined with the right nodes, you can paint holes into clouds to get rays pointing exactly to the place you want. You can draw populations, displacement, textures where you need them.

As usual, a number of known problems with the renderer and ui have been fixed, some improving perfomance a bit – but there are still several bugs to be fixed. A complete change list can be found in the Planetside Forum.

It seems a release this year might be possible.

Stephen has released an update for World Machine 2 fixing various problems that occurred with WM2 and improving support for vista.

The new Free Edition can be downloaded from the website. Instructions for owners of a standard or professional license as well as a change log can be found at the WM forums.

Finally, users of the free version can benefit from all the improvements made since TP2! You can get the fifth tech preview on the website.

Have fun!

Planetside just released the fifth tech preview! You can get it by following the link in the e-mail you were sent.

The new build contains multple bugfixes and changes to the surface and distribution shader. You can at last mask the surface shader with a blending shader of your choice without having to use the fractal breakup workaround. The distribution shader has options for altitude and slope key now.
The planet surface shader has been removed and will not be developed further in the future.

edit: The update is for pre-purchasers only, the announcement can be found over in the planetside forums.

World Machine 2, the successor of the popular terrain tool has been released this friday. If you want to try the new version yourself, you can get the free basic edition on the new website. Unlike in WM1, it includes all of the creative tools, even those that were restricted to the standard edition before. The catch is that the terrains from the basic edition are still limited to 512³ in size and you can’t use them commercially. more…

That last two updates (tech preview 3 and 4) have been available to pre-purchasers only, everybody else had to work with the now nine-month-old second tech preview (v1.9.04.1) that doesn’t have multithreading, transparent water etc.

This wait might be over “soon”!

[...] Having said that, there are some user interface bugs in 1.9.04.1 that have been addressed in recent updates which were available to Deep pre-purchasers. We will bring the free non-commercial edition up to date with these bug fixes soon.

Matt

(source: Matt at the Planetside forum)

TG2 alpha has just been released! Pre-purchasers were sent an e-mail including a link to the download page. According to Matt, “All the emails have been sent but they can take a few hours to be processed by mail servers”. Experience shows that some of those mails will not arrive at all. So far there has been no announcement on how users who have chosen not to receive any e-mail will get the update.

The Alpha fixes a long list of bugs and comes with some new features. In particular, transparency and multithreading are finally implemented! The complete changelog has already been announced last week and can be found in the planetside forum.

During the next few weeks, we’ll take a closer look at the release. What is the speed-up of multithreading? Do single-core systems benefit from the new engine too? How do the new features work?

Do you have any questions yourself? Let us know in the comments and we’ll try to answer them in our next article!

Matt posted an exhaustive list of changes and known bugs in the alpha that will be released next week. Take a look at the official announcement!

Thanks to some Italian Anonymous for pointing me at the thread.