The terrain size has increased x10. In previous versions it was 28x28 yds - now it is 280x280yds.   

In reality, the only time you would leave the terrain size at 28yds would be for a detailed foreground area - so it does save having to size up the terrains for you background work.

If you really WANT your terrains to load in at the smaller size my suggestion would be to load a terrain, size it down to what you prefer and save it as a .VOB.  You can then load it into your scene but you would need to go into the terrain editor and reset then create a new seed otherwise all your terrains will be identical.  In my opinion, it is much easier to resize a terrain.

Material scale is hit and miss due to the resizing of the internal unit from 0.1m to 1.0m.  If using a material created in and older version you will probably need to scale it to fit - don't rely in Vue doing it automatically - especially on bitmap based materials.

It has always been a better option to use dynamic population on large scale terrains and vue 9 now handles it much better than previous versions. You may need to tweak the scale and density but that has always been the case.

As a vague, general guide, if you want to reproduce similar to older versions you need to SCALE UP by 10.  An example ecosystem 'Forests and Green Fields' - in vue 8.4 the scale is set to 0.228 and it vue 9 it is 0.024 - approx. 1 tenth of the scale.

The opposite of that rule applies to atmospheres.  The problem regarding atmospheres not appearing correctly can be resolved by dividing the aerial perspective by 10.  In the case of the example above, it was originally set to 10 so bring it down to 1 and it will appear as it should.

When Vue 9 first came out I saw posts suggesting resetting the internal unit back to 0.1 but this has little or no effect.

 

Gill