2551 replies to this topic

[Kablammo11]

I posed that same question somewhere else but silence was the only answer I got.. Maybe you will have better luck?

 

I can only add my inofficial view on this subject; of course the game is a very important design tool as well - and it makes perfect sense that course designers should have access to it to test-drive and fine-tune their creations. The gents at PP strike me as being a sensible lot and I'm absolutely certain that they do understand this basic correlation of the chicken-and-egg variety.

 

Having said that, the purpose of the current CF private beta is NOT to churn out new courses - and also NOT for course designers to happily go about doing their thing from A to Z - but to thouroughly investigate and test the current iteration of CourseForge in all its intricacies, to find out which parts are useful and which ones could do with improvements. We do not need a working game for that yet. It would be nice to have it, but it's not essential at the moment.

With CF being in private beta and hopefully soon in public beta - and the game still in it's alpha build, I would estimate that we need to wait for the game to progress into beta as well for it to become a viable option for designers to use.

Waiting is hard and we all wish progress were quicker, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Testing course designs with the game will happen, simply because it makes no sense at all that it shouldn't. It's just that we are not quite there yet. Rome wasn't built in a… aw, you know...

[highfade]

Holes 1 to 3 laid out. I might still switch the 2 nines around.

 

The course is turning out to be a bit eclectic due to the testing of different aspects. I'm busy with hole 4 which will feature an island green in a bunker if I can get it right.

 

Hole 1 par 5

 

 

Hole 2 long par 3

 

 

Hole 3  shortish par 4 with a narrowing fairway

 

 

All 3 hole in one pic

 

[IanD]

Very nice Adriaan... you're starting to be a real tease with these images. I love the colours and feel... there is almost a heat coming off the course, such are the delightful mixes of grass and planting...

[Dazmaniac]

Adriaan,

 

Did you sort out your grassy 'bald patch' issue?

[highfade]

Thanks Ian, planting is all trial & error, use to be a pain but must say I'm starting to enjoy it more.

 

Daz, yes,  think so by lowering the target strength of the brush does the trick. I sometimes still run into it but just thin it out a bit. 

[Kablammo11]

Well, I suppose I could now, being the jolly 'raconteur' I can be at times, tell you about Tara deliciously building a catapult to lovingly project a truckload of teddy bears at the nearest orphanage (without the truck, of course), only to discover that she mistakenly had loaded it with grade A "Grow-a-lot" fertilizer instead of the intended plushy toys - and that she sweetly mistook the target coordinates of the orphanage with the hill hollow sheltering the Willow Heath Golf and Country Club.

And that as a result stuff started to grow on the Heath, which is almost better news than 52 orphans suffering a toxic shock from synthetic and carcinogenic teddies produced by child workers in an Asian sweat shop.

 

Well, no. I shan't. This has been a week of nuance and chromatic struggles. A week of color concepts, laid-out plans failing and of questioning every pixel: because everything is connected to everything else and what looks okay-ish one day starts feeling smelly the next. So I went and changed a lot: The green, fairway and rough textures, the grasses, the deep grass textures, the forest mulch. And now I am fighting my way through from hole 1 to hole 18, planting grasses and drawing in new textures.

 

Note how I added a bit of irregularity to the fairway, and a bit more brightness and color noise to semi and rough to create the impression of a golf course that is not perfect for televised coverage, but a bit rough around the edges, made by humans for humans without any artificial colorizer.

 

 

And yes, I still need to do the forest floor. Once this general grass and colosization update is done, I will turn my attention to bushes and undergrowth and rocky detail meshes.

 

 

But for now I am approaching to what will and should be the final "feel" of this invented place: Dry, grassy, rugged and rolling. The grasses I am using currently are all self-made by me. Observe closely and you will see that they are really basic, lacking details and looking quite artificial individually. One of the blessings of Unity, though, is that I can drag a drop an new and better grass design into the place of the exisiting one and everything will get updated in the picture. In other words, I can still change a lot of things.

 

 

As for my last picture, I lowered the light and went for cheap, superficial and stupid beauty… sorry about that. golf shouldn't be that nice..

 

[IanD]

Like the feel of your colours K11... it looks mighty good. Can't easily comment regarding the fairway, it's a tad difficult to see closely from the images. It does suit the rest of the colours well though.

[garynorman]

I really like it

 

I liked the elevation changes from the course tour video, and now the grass really adds to the overall fell of the place...

 

Looking forward to getting the opportunity to play it one day

[Kablammo11]

Can't easily comment regarding the fairway, it's a tad difficult to see closely from the images.

 

You'r right, Ian. I wonder why I keep making fullscreen captures when first Photobucket and then this forum engine reduce them in size and kill all the details. No matter. Hope that you will be able to comment on these puppies:

 

 

 

 

 

Most of my bunkers, btw, will require a major overhaul once the CF provides the long-expected pot-bunker-ability. To be in character they need to be pot-monsters with a flat, horizontal sand bottom punched vertically into the ground.

[IanD]

Fairway and Fringe > Love 'em.. those tiny lines indicating machinery or grass cutting, to golf trolley and cart use... like it alot ! It would be a definite keeper for me, also knowing you've got the planting to suit as well. Lock 'em up...lol.

 

Bunker fringe texture, for me.. not quite there. Not sure what to say, but it's perhaps needing a little more colour from the fairway fringe. Although to be fair.. how far do you go...?

 

Green.... unsure about this one. It's an almost spot on, or too far on the yellowing... I can't decide on the limited pictures, but I'd guess over several holes with the directional light and shadows, it would give you a better indication.  Notice how non committal I am about this one lol...

 

Sand, I won't touch upon, as you rightly say, this will change considerably across a course depending upon the many variations we hope to see with bunkers.

 

All in all though, I'd be very happy with the textures you have K11...  you are likely spending far more time perfecting that look than I. I'm getting annoyed at the huge variations that are possible, and talking myself into and out so many options - I get little else done. The interference that seems to occur regarding planting and subtle changes to colour to suit textures etc, can seemingly become a minefield of variations. I've always, always advocated options.... still will... but I so want someone standing over me so many times to tell me "yes, that's it" lol..

[Kablammo11]

You can have these, Ian. One of these days - when they are refined for good, most likely - I'm going to upload all the CF textures and shaders and terrain textures of Willow Heath into a folder. The idea being, of course, that you would have to adjust them yourself, change the tiling, adjust the colors etc...

For the green, I perhaps must increase the contrast of the background texture to bring out the differently colored patches a bit more, so that it does not look so uniform. But I must decide this in Unity, not from a compressed jpg in here. As for the bunker lip - least of my concerns right now. It's supposed to show the raw soil peeking through at this spot. 

 

Thank you for your comments - and thanks btw for everybody's comments. This Show and Tell is very helpful for me to see what works and what doesn't. Without it, slowly stewing incommunicado inside my own lunacy and lacking any feedback from the sane people outside of my tortured mind, my work would certainly turn out to be an unsavoury mess. If anyone of you sees something fishy, kindly be as harsh as you want to draw my attention to it.

[shimonko]

I like your bunker texture and the color--it allows good definition to be seen with being blown out like the American white sand. I like eggs with brown shells too, not white

[Kablammo11]

Thanks, shimonko. And I also prefer whole wheat bread.

 

The default CF sand texture is way too Augusta. And Augusta tries way too hard to look like a golfers wet dream and very often just ends up looking too much like a cartoon - or utterly fake like a massive Botox treatment gone horribly bad. 

There are, luckily, other and better examples of what a bunker should look and feel like - this one here being the most dramatic example...

[IanD]

That's a brutal bunker... looks like where lorries back up to, for refilling...

 

 

If anyone of you sees something fishy, kindly be as harsh as you want to draw my attention to it.

 

There's a dodgy willow out there...  (there goes your week lol...)

[garynorman]

...ahh, the glorious 4th at Royal St Georges

[Kablammo11]

The glorious 8th at Willow Heath. Driveable par 4, downhill, wind from the left. No room for error. Lay up 120yds short or go for it:

 

 

The rather not so glorious 7th. 8th tee to the right of picture. No special features, just long and tight and bumpy. A journeyman's hole, a bit of a "meh" hole - but these bastards play their part too within the flow of a round.

 

 

The semi-glorious 6th now. A long par 3 over a flowering heath meadow.

 

 

And finally, as evening descends, let's play a little game on the par 5 4th. The game is called: "Spot the Willow" - bit of a local thing in these parts.

 

 

Have a wonderful next week, gents. And no, the TGC course designer can't do stuff like this.

[Dazmaniac]

As you view the bottom image, the willow is behind the clump of trees that are located in the fairway (to the right of the pic).

 

[highfade]

Looks really good K11.

 

I love the tree planting. The grass still looks a bit odd. I know one tends to match the colour with the ground texture but if feels too much the same. Maybe a little more yellowish? 

[Sean Folley]

So so awesome..

I will be just happy if they only came out with the course designer. I'm a 90 shooter, These screen shots look like I,would never break 130

[Mike Jones]

That last pic - wow!

 

 

Can't agree with Highfade on this - I think the grass looks great. I would just ensure it didn't encroach onto the short grass textures or it will stick out a bit.