2551 replies to this topic

[M Rose]

Nah, not a reference to anything, just being silly.

[JoeF]

Nah, not a reference to anything, just being silly.

 

Bob

[Trath]

No, you have slaughtered them all K11! The population needs time to recover. Perhaps puppies are a good substitute?

[Kablammo11]

Hm, I prefer felines. I guess, in a pinch, I could go for baby seals - if they are still white and fluffy.

[Kablammo11]

So, Karen... The first thing every new golf course needs is, of course, a logo. There we go...

 

 

And with that done, let's design this mother. Funniest part of the entire workflow: lay down some shapes and sculpt them into stuff. I've only managed 3 holes in today's session. Slow day. Here they are, from the top: 1, 2 and 3.

 

 

First I must apologise for the textures you are about to see. They are the "as is" version straight out of the most dusty cabinet of generic disasters - and they will remain thusly for quite some time, due to reasons too harrowing and infuriating to describe here. Suffice to say that all the textures will be vigorously blammotized at a later date.

Design principles for this one: large and generous fairways, truly bombastically wide, perhaps just a tad naughty at driving distance. How wide? Tara and sisters will gladly demonstrate: this wide:

 

 

Soft shapes, no ornamental frills, just very basic terrain contour adherence. As for the greens...

 

 

They will be nigh unmissable. Then again, half of their space will be furnished with bumps and hollow where planting a pin will be obviously reckless, so that the hole locations will be restricted to the other 50 percent of space, where there are quieter places.

 

1st hole, 360yds or so confidence builder. Downhill. Pick up you quick birdie or relaxed par and move on.

The hole is called "Yesterday Once More". Wonder why?

 

 

Hole 2. 470yds, slightly uphill. Called "Where Do I Go From Here?" - on account of the two line choices from the tee. Left of the rough island for cowards, right for the fools.

 

 

 

And finally the 3rd. 445yds down, then back up, with a downhill area tending to deflect the landing ball away from the hole. 

Name of this darling: "This Masquerade", because it is so bent that it will never fit into the top view of the game.

 

 

You can cut the corner if you are brave enough. But the fairway is sloping down and narrow. The only way to get a result would be to aim even further left, land your drive in the rough short of the fairway, escape the lurking bunkers and have it roll down onto the short grass.

 

(Tee shots coming in from 90 degrees left of shot)

 

Well? Okay! Did I mention that not a single, clumpy, wobbly jello-looking speedtree will be allowed on the premises? 

[Kablammo11]

Wow. though crowd! Not one comment? I know: It's the textures. They are... how to put it nicely.... um, there's no nice way of saying this. How is this thread supposed to reach 2K posts, huh? I won't rest until we're up to 11K.

But I get the message: You guys are mentally exhausted by less important things. Or your keyboards are all simultaneously broken. Sure, that can happen. No problem.

 

So for the time being I won't tell you anything any more.

For instance, I will not summarily mention the par 3 4th, 195yds, called "Goodbye To Love"

 

 

Nor will I point out that the suspiciously high Tri count of 2.7 M is due to the fact that this view is looking across the whole plot, about which we know that it is based an on height map of 2049 resolution, meaning 2049 x 2049 > +4 Mio vertices. Nor will I point out that upping the Pixel Error value in the terrain settings from 1 to 3 reduced this Tri count to 0.89 M - but at the expense of more Z-fighting across the board and occasional render errors in the Top View of the game. I would gladly have told you, but that would be very rude of me, so I won't!

 

Nor shall I waste any of your precious time with any images of the par 4 5th, 455yds, "Close To You", on account of the fact that water is added to the mix at this juncture. No way I would ever show you something like this now:

 

 

You might have wondered how it would be like to guide your golf ball through a dry bottleneck between tidal pools, but you refused to find out. I respect that completely and will henceforth withhold this from you:

 

 

You wish to remain ignorant about the 6th green out there on the sea shore. That is your prerogative and it would be amiss of me to infringe on your right of privacy. 

 

 

I've got your message: I will respectfully continue to not show and not tell you anything.

[MimicPS]

Sorry Kablam,

 

Couldn't hear you over the din of all the earthmovers you've had on site. The sculpting in the fairways and greens looks very nice indeed, as do your ideas for routing risk/reward shots.

 

This looks a course which begs for the physics of fairway and green hardness to come into effect hopefully very soon, and with the wind up will surely be a much less beguiling prospect than the beautiful name of Karen suggests.

 

A quick question if I may, though understand if you don't wish to cogitate on it just at the moment and face the issue when the planting begins. With this being your Links bow and desiring a break from the issue of trees for a while, what sort of limits are placed on you as far as moving polygons of long grass around such a course? Does it reach a point where the number of moving objects begin to affect the CPU loads which would make the gameplay an issue? Is a grass-to-the-horizon approach possible or do you have to make those damned compromises I know you find so frustrating?

 

Also, on the subject of horizons, from a design point-of-view, is there guidance at present about at which point a vista which contained a larger expanse of water starts to run into the buffers of adverse CPU load, and if so, do you have a particular idea in mind about how much 'sea-horizon' you show from a point on the course?

[mcthommo]

Looking like a very nice start K11- being a fan of true links courses, I know you will do this justice just as long as you're not lazy and pull your finger out and give this some pot bunkers, damn it

Also, remember the old adages, "Silence is golden" and "An empty vessel makes most toast" or something

[Kablammo11]

A quick question if I may, though understand if you don't wish to cogitate on it just at the moment and face the issue when the planting begins. With this being your Links bow and desiring a break from the issue of trees for a while, what sort of limits are placed on you as far as moving polygons of long grass around such a course? Does it reach a point where the number of moving objects begin to affect the CPU loads which would make the gameplay an issue? Is a grass-to-the-horizon approach possible or do you have to make those damned compromises I know you find so frustrating?

 

Also, on the subject of horizons, from a design point-of-view, is there guidance at present about at which point a vista which contained a larger expanse of water starts to run into the buffers of adverse CPU load, and if so, do you have a particular idea in mind about how much 'sea-horizon' you show from a point on the course?

 

Mimic, I'm told by the Lords of Design that I have a tri budget of 3 millions. Anything over that will cause issues with lesser performant PC's and increase lag (or rather reduce FPS) across the board - some, depending on their gear will probably not notice. Others will.

With, say, an average of 1.2 M tris invested into the course and the meshes, I can spend the remainder on whatever I want. A single grass billboard has 2 tris, meaning I could place 900'000 grass billboards, assuming that I used nothing else for benches, fences, clubhouse etc.

Grass comes with selectable drawing distances, btw. At a certain distance it will simply stop showing. That makes sense, because your screen has a finite amount of pixels to display an image and grasses at a great distance become so slender that you don't have enough pixels to show them anyway. Grass-to-the-horizon can only work if that horizon is within 250m, I'm afraid. 

With Karen I will not go for the Elysian Fields type of complete grass coverage, but intermittent patches of sandy dunes, wet sand and grassy knolls in between. 

 

The water plane has the same amount of tris, no matter if it's a 2ft puddle or an endless ocean. And there is no guidance on this matter. It will demand some CPU work, yes, but should no be a huge factor - as long as it's not reflective or refractive or, worse, both.

I just quickly went to make a try count with water. And its's really not that expensive: 385K in the stats:

 

Staring at nothing but water lowers the tri count to 118K - but that is probably due to a sizeable portion of the terrain being a couple meter under water and covered up, yet costing tris nevertheless.

 

With Karen (as with the Swan), I don't need reflections. I might need refraction on this one to get a decent beach with sand banks going, I'm yet to cogitate on that one. Water's edge, ocean-style, will be very close to the course here and I do not have a clue how to go about making this look realistic. There's a few ideas I need to experiment on a bit more, but that will be for later.

[NoPutt]

My keyboard was not broken, but I do have plenty of less unimportant things

not to do. My excuses for not commenting and increasing your post count

are numerous and extremely truthful in a white lie sort of way. Don't get me

wrong, I love reading about high tri counts, z-fighting and pixel errors, but

watching Tara and her sisters stand out in the elements with not a tree in sight rents my

heartstrings and I can't bare to type. 

Love the layout K, and hoping for a little verdure, Karen

should have as least one bush.

[Kablammo11]

Oy!

I can let slide bawdy innuedos about Tara, but not about Karen! You being one of the most frequent acknowledger of my posts, I will forgive you. This time. Also, there will be lots of tiny pebbles on the beach, surely they should count as vajazzle.

 

Now then, where were we? Right, Hole Nr. 6, first of only two par 5's. 550 yds. "For All We Know" it's reachable in 2.

 

 

That's another hole that will not fit into the top view of the game - not as long as they don't calculate it's framing based on tee, green AND shot points.

 

 

Karen will be spectacular in parts, I hope. Such as on the 7th par 3, 120yds, called "Solitaire". Notice that small outcrop jutting out behind the green?

 

 

It sure looks a good place for some monument of sorts... 7th green is the only double green, joined with the 16th green. Hm, monument.... hm...

 

 

But no rest for the wicked. Meet Shorty, 8th hole, drivable par 4 at 285 yds. "Jumbalaya". (6th fairways in the back)

 

 

Everybody should go for that one. There will always be a drivable 4 on my courses. Some will get punished. Others will get eagles. Karen is not a tough course. Shouldn't be. At least most of the time.

 

 

Hole 9, 445yds üar 4, makes me wish that there were a Carpenters song titled "Dirty, filthy son-of-a-whore!" I checked, there isn't. Meet the 3rd hole on the front nine that will not fit into the top view: "Hurting Each Other" . Drive downhill into a bottleneck, there's a bit of water down there also, and from there 190 or so yds uphill to a high green.

 

 

You can cut the corner on this one, of course. But you shouldn't. You could also try a short cut through the 1st fairway nearby - I might have to build a wall or a high chainlink fence to prevent that.

 

 

And there we are: The front nine is done. Look at them from the top: wide fairways like fat maggots! The F.I.R. stats will be very good on this course. The wholes near water do not have a rough mesh yet, I have to try something there, but I will not be able to do that with the current version of CF... They said soon...

 

 

Toodles!

[jcolton31]

Just pushed Chop Hills to Beta...

[Kablammo11]

A brief moment of silence to remember the Lost One:

 

 

 

[J.H.Buchanan]

All of the holes look like they have a lot of risk reward choices that the golfer can make this is great and very replayable - according to the internet replayable is not a word but it's good to see this and to be alive. 

[Kablammo11]

Thanks JHB. I'm not sure replayability can be finagled into a design - players will tend to frequent courses which, for any reasons of their own, they happen to like. I have no idea what they like, so I'm just pleasing myself and doing what I like.

 

Let's quickly rush through the back nine, shall we.

10th, par 4, 465y. "Love Me For What I Am"

 

 

11. Par 4, 350yds. Blind second shot into a small valley nestled inside the dunes. "Top Of The World"

 

 

12th. Second and last par 5, 565 yds. "Bless the Beasts and Children"

 

 

13th. 390yds par 4. No wooden clubs recommended out here, at "The End Of The World"

 

 

14th, par 3, 195yds. "Please Mister Postman"

 

 

15th, par 4, 500yds. Top monster! "I Won't Last A Day Without You."

 

 

16th, par 3, 250yds, back to the "Lost One" monument. "Sing A Song".

 

 

17th, par 4, 400yds. "Sweet, Sweet Smile"

 

 

18th. 350y par 4, steeply uphill towards clubhouse (Karen Cottage (with a thatch roof))

"We've Only Just Begun"

 

 

Continued in next post due to image posting cap of 9

[Kablammo11]

And this is how we stand today. All these golf holes have been laid out, as a matter of principle, while listening to the music of The Carpenters and being inspired by the magic of "The Voice".

 

 

Thank you

[BladeUK]

Will there be numerous wooden objects on the course seeing as it is going to be sponsored by The Carpenters?

 

Dave.

[NoPutt]

Love the monument, the layout looks tricky, should be 

with no trees I imagine. Hope the intro starts with

a song instead of the surprising, jump out of my seat

intro of the Swan.

[Kablammo11]

Not sure I want to commit a copyright infringement. But I might place a short bit near the Lostument, in an almost imperceptible, windswept ghost voice kind of way. 

And yes, no trees. But bushes.

 

Wooden objects might show up. Metallic ones courtesy of The Smiths, stony ones graciously offered by the Flintstones.

[NoPutt]

Not sure I want to commit a copyright infringement. But I might place a short bit near the Lostument, in an almost imperceptible, windswept ghost voice kind of way. 

And yes, no trees. But bushes.

 

Wooden objects might show up. Metallic ones courtesy of The Smiths, stony ones graciously offered by the Flintstones.

Hmmm, ....