2551 replies to this topic

[NoPutt]

Enjoy a snack and beverage on the upper deck

as you contemplate the back nine.

[TimBoch]

Making progress on my first beta. I think the crash was caused by some of the Sketchup houses I had imported. I have been working to fix this and hope to replant the houses soon.  The course just won't look right without the houses around the perimeter. Still have some custom 3D to finish. Mainly the maintenance area and the original farm house area of the man that donated the property for the course. Still haven't figured out how to plant sounds or make the colliders work for the custom 3D. I had a physics mesh and assign a property, but everything goes right through.

Here is what the clubhouse area looks like.

[IanD]

Tim, untick the Baked GI option in lighting. During building the course CF will retick it and add the appropriate settings automatically.

 

But that is not the reason for your terrain vs mesh issues. I have the same issue, too, always had it. In the Unityverse it's just not possible for the very same image to be displayed identically as a mesh and as a terrain texture. One reason for that is that the CF mesh also has an added .tga layer for the fine details and grass blades, which tends to make it darker so that the colour texture needs to be brighter. Terrain textures don't have that.

There is no easy way, I'm afraid. No button to click - and all is well (There never is). The only solution I have found is to use the same image for both and then to manually adjust (darken) the terrain texture in Photoshop until a reasonable match is achieved. Takes a few tries to get it right and the terrain texture will look frighteningly dark as a result, but match the meshes in your view.

 

May as well get those words engraved somewhere upon a course K11... you'll be asked this many many times..... and it is great information for those who will encounter the same issues when CF is 'out there'. I hope many return to this thread and take the week or two to read everything in here... it has it all and more...

[Kablammo11]

Hehe, and once CF really gets out to the masses, which will be soon-ish (give and take a few years either way) I'll take a sudden one month leave of absence. I remember quite well the avalanche of PM's and private forum posts when the current team of beta testers was introduced.  This is going to get very messy and unbelievably painful, having to deal with questions like "How do I make a terrain?" or "Help, my project has disappeared..." or "Texture not working!!!! Do I need to load it? Where? How? Why?"

 

It's not that I don't want to help, but.... erm... seriously, folks... Do RTFM, watch Mike's excellent tutorials (all of them!), make notes, try and find solutions yourself, google for answers in the interwebs, then use the search function in this forum -  and above all resist the impulse to open a new thread 10 seconds after running into trouble. Because 10 others already have and your question, yes: yours! has already been answered many times over. And only then start a new topic!

 

But remember: No answer is as satisfying as the one you discover yourself. That's why I will ignore all basic questions that can easily be answered by doing a bit of learning on your own for five seconds.

Perhaps the private CF beta sub-forum could be made accessible to the public at large? Lots of answers in there.

[IanD]

Not a bad idea regarding that thread... they can all be moved. Just may need it vetting and all those Tara'esque images hidden in there removed. Can't have 'that' scandal exposed....

[NoPutt]

Let me know when the bug-out is K,

I plan on starting a new topic that day called, "Ask K11-24/7",

then when you return you'll have plenty to type.

It could easily make it to 3K in just a couple of months.

[DriverDivots]

oh come on, you should be thrilled there will be plenty of designers releasing tons of courses.  

[Kablammo11]

Totally thrilled, really. But I'm determined to weasel out of the chore of breast-feeding each one of them.

 

Meanwhile, back at the Agency for Tectonic Weirdness, this is how I presented to you the very special 18th hole and green a while ago:

 

 

Well, no more. During play-tests, this final obstacle felt a bit contrived and unnatural, lacking sync with the flow of the preceding holes. Nothing to be alarmed about, the same goes for 7 other holes that I have fixed, altered, rebuilt these past days. I'm now at the stage where I am making daily CF rounds of the course and commit myself to change, tweak, add a little something at each and every hole, every time. It's an ongoing process of constant refinement - design iteration.

And the 18th has accordingly been simplified, thusly:

 

 

Much more simple and much more in line with all the 17 holes that came before. I was a bit concerned that this one might be perceived as quoting my own work at Willows, being a suspiciously similar type of finishing hole, but that can't be helped. This had to be done like this, out of the inner, unfathomable momentum of whatever forces happen to be at work. I'm but a shaman, a conduit of forces I do not comprehend.

 

 

I'm now off to test my creation on fast ground conditions. This ought to give me amble feedback for yet further tweaks.

[NoPutt]

Liking the short fairway and bunker addition,

and the hole still seems to retain it's evil intention.

[LeazesNDR]

It's not that I don't want to help, but.... erm... seriously, folks... Do RTFM, watch Mike's excellent tutorials (all of them!), make notes, try and find solutions yourself, google for answers in the interwebs, then use the search function in this forum - and above all resist the impulse to open a new thread 10 seconds after running into trouble. Because 10 others already have and your question, yes: yours! has already been answered many times over. And only then start a new topic!

But remember: No answer is as satisfying as the one you discover yourself. That's why I will ignore all basic questions that can easily be answered by doing a bit of learning on your own for five seconds.
Perhaps the private CF beta sub-forum could be made accessible to the public at large? Lots of answers in there.

... should put Mike Jones course forge instructional videos at the top of the Course Forge section of the forum as a sticky so doughnuts like me can find them easily!

[NoPutt]

I'm sure it will be an easily accessible and 

highlighted part of the CF package.

[Kablammo11]

And it happened again (Back at the Research Institute for Solipsistic Segues...)!

With 18th being cleared of all stony buttresses, focus immediately shifted onto the 4th, similarly equipped:

 

 

A nice hole (par 3, 219y), with a clean transition from playable surface to utter aquatic disaster. Alas...

This one, too, had to fall in line with the programme. The main reason for changing this was not design, but technical. You see, dearest readers, those containing walls all had the PP physics material "concrete" attached to them, and it would have been nice if those outer walls could have behaved conrete-y or stony whenever a ball rolled against them. But they didn't - as explained earlier, rolling balls roll through concrete unhindered. A known flaw, but not even remotely listed in the top nine tenth of the official priority list. As a result, those nice, clear walls gave me a false sense of security where there was none - intended to work like an emergency parachute, they would not unfold to their job in reality.  So they had to go.

 

 

Now it's just downhill and you better not be an inch too long. Sorry, but at least this way golfers will have an honest impression of what they are up to. Note the detached portion of green in the fairway further back...

 

 

That's a winter green - and it will hold one easy pin. I like the idea of including a few more winter greens, btw... There are two separate green areas with 3 pins each on 3 and 14 already, a couple more winter greens could be fun...

 

Other than that, to my own amazement, I caught myself actually having fun on today's test round. The course is feeling alpine and the change of elevations will be epic at times. I enjoyed the golfing and often you could have seen me cackle with sinister delight thinking about the traps I had laid out for unsuspecting and unprepared golfers. Never came across such a vast array of both easy scoring opportunities and scorecard-obliterating dangers.

[NoPutt]

.....and the walls came tumbling down.

I really hate that Unity doesn't allow rolling

collisions at the bottom of objects, even the 

trees allow rolling balls to pass right through if I'm

not mistaken. Nice recovery K, and I suppose 

you gained some tris with the transition.

[Acrilix]

I really hate that Unity doesn't allow rolling

collisions at the bottom of objects, even the 

trees allow rolling balls to pass right through if I'm

not mistaken. 

 

Wouldn't that result in the possibility of you getting stuck inside them? Or does the collision not occur from the inside out?

[Kablammo11]

.....and the walls came tumbling down.

I really hate that Unity doesn't allow rolling

collisions at the bottom of objects, even the 

trees allow rolling balls to pass right through if I'm

not mistaken. Nice recovery K, and I suppose 

you gained some tris with the transition.

 

Nope, those walls were very low-poly. Had to add grasses to the bank, considerably more tris overall (still inside the budget). 

 

 

Tree collisions or non-collisions are out of our responsibility, these are handled by the game. And for my own trees, I happen to know for a fact that I bring that collider all the way down to ground level and also lower the trunks quite a bit down so I can plant them on slopes without their low edge sticking out. I have come across some PP trees where the cylindric collider did not reach all the way down, but I don't know if that was intentional.

 

 

Wouldn't that result in the possibility of you getting stuck inside them? Or does the collision not occur from the inside out?

 

 

How can you ever get stuck inside something that should repel all attempts at ever getting inside from the outside?

It either works or it doesn't. It doesn't.

Collisions can occur from the inside out, in theory, the computer has now way of telling what the inside and the outside of an object is, it only reacts to the mesh, the fine layer of the wireframe. That's why there should be physics colliders to prevent golf balls from ever ending up inside an object an get stuck there.

[Kablammo11]

Well, what have I been up to lately? As if you care, but I'll tell anyway.

 

Five Sisters is almost finished - or rather: Ready for beta-testing.

 

 

And that is a huge problem, because PG wants us designers to stop designing and instead start worrying about salesmanship - where to post and publish your course, organise our own testers.

So I finally went and registered at OGT, which has offered to test and host courses.

 

http://onlinegolftour.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=99

 

They even gave me my own little subforum. How nice is that. And I'll be the Mod on top of that... Can't wait to delete my first thread and ban my first victim... Mwah-ha-haaa!

Those among you wishing to beta-test Five Sisters, please register at OGT and apply as a tester 

 

http://onlinegolftour.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=87&t=857

 

OGT has their own rules about who may test what and why, so I'm not in control of the process.

 

 

Now, returning to the craft, I did a few more things about the Raised Fringes and made them a bit better-looking, and by that I mean less klutzy:

 

 

And having finished with that sooner than expected I also created and imported a new texture with bumps for the greens and fairway and then

 

 

Raised a tall mountain out of nothing to visually seal off of the lower end of the valley. There was naught there before, 2 minutes later it looked like this.

[NoPutt]

Ooooo, that's some exquisite frosty, fringe, finagling, for Five Sisters.

I to have moved my beta offices to OGT and will be gathering

testers for Millstone Golf Club in the coming weeks.

[pingzing]

Just happy and glad we have you as an asset

will enjoy 5 sisters very much, tremendous skills you have developed of  time

 

The views, sounds will make this course a memeroable experience

 

cheers for ogt info on courses, better head over there

 

Thanks for all your hard work 

[mebby]

Man... You're course designs are polar (pun intended) opposite of what I typically lookfor when finding a new track to play BUT... I can't help trying them out and I'm typically a huge fan!

Can't wait to try it out.

[Trath]

What do you typically look for in a new golf course mebby?