-Normal suns can slow down your system.  This is because a sun heats the water, and the water evaporates, causing a chain reaction of environmental effects.  Some graphics cards cannot handle this, so you can use a Fake Sun, which emits no heat.  Fake Suns still give light and shadows.
-While an object is selected, use the View Target button, or double click it, to see and edit its properties.
-Try turning on the Mouse View in the Selection menu to view properties of objects by moving the mouse cursor over top of them.
-The Populations form shows you the numbers of each kind of object on your planet. You can speed it up by unchecking the 3D graph option.  The crop feature trims any value older than 1000, so you must disable it if you want to view the full history of your planet.
-The Temperature view shows an unwrapped Heightfield, that represents hot areas with red/orange colors, and cold areas with blue.
-The Construction form shows the internal workings of the engine as it starts up.  If any textures or models are missing, this form will let you know.
-Lists form has many useful features.  You can view all the objects in the system, filter out some kinds of objects, and open a view window.  You can also click the "Track" button to zoom to that object in the 3D space window.  The Lists form also includes buttons to view many internal data structures that make up the engine.
-The Maximums form allows you to set capacity limits for each kind of object. You can access this form from the top menu by selecting Set.
-You can start and stop your planet at any time.  You can also adjust the speed of the world, the default is 20 milliseconds.  To run the world as fast as possible, set the time to 1 millisecond, and close the 3D Space window.  You can also set the time mode to ticking or flowing.
-You can view tracking and prediction trails from the Tools menu. With these enabled, you can see a visual trail of any object you are viewing. The prediction trail works by calculating the position with velocity and acceleration over time.  It does not predict AI code.
-To use shadows you must have at least one sun on your world and you must enable Shadows by checking the Shadows checkbox on the main Time window.  From the Visuals toolbar, you can also enabled multicasting shadows, so that objects cast shadows onto other objects.  You can also optionally view shadow volumes to see the heights of objects.
-You can edit the DNA of any genetic creature, or of any evolving plant, by first viewing the object in an object window.  From there, select the Modify drop-down menu and select Edit DNA. You can save and load DNA values to and from any INI file. So you can save a tree type and load it into another planet, or copy DNA from one creature to another. You can also set the Mutation value to 0 to stop the creature from evolving.
-You can edit the Position of any object, by first viewing the object in an object window, and selecting the Edit Position item from the Modify drop down menu.  You can copy the position of another object in the system if you know the handle of that object.  You can also use the Move tool to change the velocity of any object by dragging it with the mouse.  There is also a Jump button from the Selection menu.  With the Select tool, the first mouse button changes the velocity, much like the Move tool.
-You can ask any object to Perform an action, from the Selection menu.  For example if you ask a ball to Perform 0, it will inflate, or it will deflate if asked to Perform 1.  Trees, bots, beacons, suns and moons, all have support for performing actions.  Creatures can also internally ask another object to perform an action, for example a bot could pick up another bot and ask it to pick up the nearest object.
-AI Planet is known by a number of names: Artificial Planet, ai.planet, aiplanet, AI Planet, etc.  It was created by David Kerr (dave@aiplanet.org), and developed by Dave, Aaron Hochwimmer, Dushan Tcholich, and many others.  You can learn much more at the homepage: http://aiplanet.sourceforge.net
-ai.planet is built with GLScene graphics library (http://www.glscene.org).  GLScene is the best OpenGL graphics library for Delphi.  Special GLScene components were built for aiplanet including the TGLColorProxyObject.
-Be sure to check out Aaron Hochwimmer's glData project (http://gldata.sourceforge.net)
-You can restore the Time and Manager windows by clicking on the status bar on the 3D View.  This is useful when you lose focus of the application.  You can also press Restore from the Audio menu.
-To use the AVI recorder, start by pressing the AVI Start button.  Your movie will begin recording to the file "photos/aimovie.avi", and an AVI frame will be captured every time the AIPlanet clock ticks.  You can pause recording with the AVIDirect button, and you can add extra frames using the AVIFrame button.  You will be unable to resize the space window after you start, so make sure you size your window properly before starting the recording.  You may want to set up shadows and high detail mode beforehand.
-There is a user manual included with AI Planet.  It is also available online here: http://aiplanet.sourceforge.net/manual/index.html.  The manual was written by Dennis Murczak (dennis@aiplanet.org)