56 replies to this topic

[TheLighterDark]

I'm sure that most of us are familiar with the "Hell bunkers" scattered throughout the Old Course at St. Andrew's, as well as several other famous British courses. 

Will it be possible to recreate these traps in Course Forge? 

[LasseThid]

I can't see why it shouldn't be possible.

As far as I can see from the videos you just need to draw the shape and then lower the ground inside of the shape and in the worst case you should be able to move the verts individually. Atleast that's my understanding of it.

[Kablammo11]

It should be possible, yes. But we would at least need an extra texture to create steep bunker lips, like this one. Sometimes, the sandy bit is only one part of a complex sand hazard.

 

 

(And don't get me started on the coding wizardry involved with making our avatars adopt this stance)

[garynorman]

This is one of the things that I very much hope will be 'doable' in Courseforge.  I am a little worried with the automatic seam blending that this sort of control will be difficult.  Hopefully I am wrong...

[Bluenoser]

Why would it be difficult?

 

If anything, it's going to be about 20 times easier than APCD to do this.

[Acrilix]

Why would it be difficult?

 

If anything, it's going to be about 20 times easier than APCD to do this.

 

Not sure I agree with this from what we've seen so far, though we've seen very little of Course Forge.

Hopefully, Course Forge has a lot more options that we've still yet to see. Apart from the better shape commands, and automatic seam blending, most of the other features are standard Unity commands, and these are nowhere near as powerful as APCD. I definitely want to see some form of terrain tilt command, and vert control, because the Unity brush commands will make some jobs exceedingly difficult to accomplish.

[Kablammo11]

I agree with Acrilix: Course Forge is 80% Unity with some golfy features on top. And Unity is not necessarily easier to master than the APCD, I bumped into some huge, very basic issues right away when I tried to play around with it - some of the Video Turorials around here start at a point that is not in reach for unaccustomed amateurs. You can't just open a new project and start working on the nitty-gritty of your golf course, it's more likely going to be a long slog from noobville suburbia into geek central...

I strongly recommend that all wannabe course designers start fiddling around with Unity and especially it's terrain features right now, or else they are going to get a bit of shock when CF is realeased.

[Mike Jones]

My tutorial videos - we're up to number 3 now - are done in real time and the time from opening unity to starting to use course forge is around 5 minutes. You can see which buttons I click as I talk through them so it's not really that difficult TBH. We only use a very small selection of Unity's features and they are pretty basic in their use, like anything - just needs practice.

[Mike Jones]

The blends between 'layers' are definable in advanced modes so if you want to make a seam blend over a yard or an inch you can do.

All our layers come with defaults which can be altered to suit your needs. Our bunker lips are triplanar mapped automatically and once again the textures, depths, slopes etc can all be altered. All the course layers such as Rough, Fairway etc come with default textures - good ones! Each texture is made up of two individual textures blended together and they can be customised if you want to create and use your own textures or someone wants to share one of their texture 'libraries' with you.

If you have a great overhead image to start with of a real course you can even choose to use that as one of your texture blends and so your mow lines, worn and dry patches  etc will all be as they are on the real course.

At some point I'll be doing more advanced tutorials on all of that but for the time being I'll continue covering the basics of creating a course in Unity and CourseForge.

 

The main focus of CourseForge is to produce great looking courses in a fraction of the time it might take in other programs. This enables more time thinking about the course design and less about the the technicalities which plague other design programs.

[Kablammo11]

Yes, but... if, dear Mike, I can't import anything into Unity, because I'm on a Mac (and that's how I roll), and I don't care to import real golf courses anyway, then I have to create layouts and matching heightmaps in, say, Photoshop. And starting just with that, some very basic little things are not covered by your tutorials, like:

 

1. Does the default terrain always have to be 2000 x 2000 meters? Are we limited to a max of 2 km - what about long and thin courses like St. Andrews?
2. Meters? I did not find a preference option to set yards.
3. What are the recommended dimensions of a heightmap Photoshop raw file? 512, 1024...?  (in some tuts on the web they say 513 and 1025)
4. Does an imported terrain heightmap produce the same sort of ground grid as a bing terrain file? For the life of me I could not find a way to make that grid visible.
5. What is the recommended resolution of a layout jpg file?
6. And add to that all the little hassles and challenges of having to come to grips with a new, complex software. Knowing which buttons to click is fine, but actually acquiring an understanding what all these available parameters mean and how they influence the result, well, that takes some getting used to.
7. There is nothing you can do about that. Acutally, there might be: I predict that when you publish the Course Forge, one of you guys should basically take a couple days just to answer member help requests. You might even open a new Forum section called "Unity Help" for that.

 

Don't worry, no need for you to answer, I will tackle my issues myself and read up on all the stuff and watch as many tutorials as I need to get the hang of it. I'm in this for the long haul and I'm a tad stubborn. But when you say that "this enables more time thinking about the couse design and less about the technicalities which plague other design programs", please understand that all I'm thinking about at this stage are these damn technicalities. Simple stuff like changing the view, which by the way will take about an hour to absorb for everybody who hasn't done this yet. Of course, I could be a clueless old fool and everybody else will find all of this just a breezy walk in the park. Either that, or many others will bump into the tecnicality barrier. My concern is not that this can't be overcome, but that this would deter them from pushing through the pain.

That's my message: There will be pain. Less for some, more for others... so start learning Unity now! I'm sure that once that curve is negotiated and the Course Forge is activated (great stuff, btw, and very simple (not), having all those assets and packages and whatnots that need a special invitation to show up in your inventory), that then designing a golf course will be fun and beautiful, no doubt. 

 

Until then, here's a good little helper for everybody: The undo command is working fine. You will use it a lot of times.

[Kablammo11]

Oh, and just to show that I did get somewhere eventually: 

 

[garynorman]

The blends between 'layers' are definable in advanced modes so if you want to make a seam blend over a yard or an inch you can do.

All our layers come with defaults which can be altered to suit your needs. Our bunker lips are triplanar mapped automatically and once again the textures, depths, slopes etc can all be altered. All the course layers such as Rough, Fairway etc come with default textures - good ones! Each texture is made up of two individual textures blended together and they can be customised if you want to create and use your own textures or someone wants to share one of their texture 'libraries' with you.

If you have a great overhead image to start with of a real course you can even choose to use that as one of your texture blends and so your mow lines, worn and dry patches  etc will all be as they are on the real course.

At some point I'll be doing more advanced tutorials on all of that but for the time being I'll continue covering the basics of creating a course in Unity and CourseForge.

 

The main focus of CourseForge is to produce great looking courses in a fraction of the time it might take in other programs. This enables more time thinking about the course design and less about the the technicalities which plague other design programs.

 

Excellent, this is what I was hoping to hear...  I'm sure that it will take practice to get some of the intricacies of pot bunkering and other course design elements down so that they look real, and it's great to know that there are many time-saving features in CF, but it's also good to hear that everyting is customisable meaning that you can create unique features... 

[axe360]

The blends between 'layers' are definable in advanced modes so if you want to make a seam blend over a yard or an inch you can do.

All our layers come with defaults which can be altered to suit your needs. Our bunker lips are triplanar mapped automatically and once again the textures, depths, slopes etc can all be altered. All the course layers such as Rough, Fairway etc come with default textures - good ones! Each texture is made up of two individual textures blended together and they can be customised if you want to create and use your own textures or someone wants to share one of their texture 'libraries' with you.

If you have a great overhead image to start with of a real course you can even choose to use that as one of your texture blends and so your mow lines, worn and dry patches  etc will all be as they are on the real course.

At some point I'll be doing more advanced tutorials on all of that but for the time being I'll continue covering the basics of creating a course in Unity and CourseForge.

 

The main focus of CourseForge is to produce great looking courses in a fraction of the time it might take in other programs. This enables more time thinking about the course design and less about the the technicalities which plague other design programs.

 

Of course then we will have to be able to put that course into the Game and all libs used will have to be available to all members so they can download, install and play the course..

[Bluenoser]

Of course then we will have to be able to put that course into the Game and all libs used will have to be available to all members so they can download, install and play the course..

 

Hopefully PP is more like Links and not like TW in this regard. No libraries necessary to download.

[Bluenoser]

I agree with Acrilix: Course Forge is 80% Unity with some golfy features on top. And Unity is not necessarily easier to master than the APCD, I bumped into some huge, very basic issues right away when I tried to play around with it - some of the Video Turorials around here start at a point that is not in reach for unaccustomed amateurs. You can't just open a new project and start working on the nitty-gritty of your golf course, it's more likely going to be a long slog from noobville suburbia into geek central...

I strongly recommend that all wannabe course designers start fiddling around with Unity and especially it's terrain features right now, or else they are going to get a bit of shock when CF is realeased.

 

You're talking about something completely different then I am.

 

All I'm saying is seam blending will be much easier to do in Corse Forge. I'm not saying in any way shape or form that the program will be easy to master. I'm going by watching the videos and how it shows seam blending to be an easy task.

[axe360]

Hopefully PP is more like Links and not like TW in this regard. No libraries necessary to download.

 

Ahh yes, that would be awesome!!

[Dazmaniac]

Anybody that thinks Course Forge will be a simple product to literally open up, import a layout heightmap, draw few terrain shapes, press a few buttons and hey presto the course is all but done is deluded, lol.

 

Coming from the Links Community I can safely say that from what I have seen of Course Forge (and Andrew's Course Conversion Tool) it is all much more user friendly and much more approachable for the novice designer. This doesn't mean Course Forge will be a walk in the park. We will all have to learn and some will learn quicker than others.

 

I appreciate the comments of having some 'technical support' from PP once we all get cracking, but if the design community here is anything like it was in Links 2003 (can't speak of TW as never got involved) then there will be plenty of guys here who will probably find ways and means of doing things and they will share their knowledge and also answer any queries that they can. The Course Corner threads over at LinksCorner are always busy with folks asking questions about course design and general APCD queries and the community's more knowledgeable designer's are always on hand to lead folks in the right direction. I only envisage the same thing here, but with the added extra of the experienced TW designers also offering help and advice along the way.

 

There will be questions, granted, that maybe only MJ and AJ can answer, but I'm sure we won't have to rely on them for every answer.

 

[Jbx]

Ahh yes, that would be awesome!!

 

Perhaps Mike could let us know!

[garynorman]

Anybody that thinks Course Forge will be a simple product to literally open up, import a layout heightmap, draw few terrain shapes, press a few buttons and hey presto the course is all but done is deluded, lol.

 

Coming from the Links Community I can safely say that from what I have seen of Course Forge (and Andrew's Course Conversion Tool) it is all much more user friendly and much more approachable for the novice designer. This doesn't mean Course Forge will be a walk in the park. We will all have to learn and some will learn quicker than others.

 

I appreciate the comments of having some 'technical support' from PP once we all get cracking, but if the design community here is anything like it was in Links 2003 (can't speak of TW as never got involved) then there will be plenty of guys here who will probably find ways and means of doing things and they will share their knowledge and also answer any queries that they can. The Course Corner threads over at LinksCorner are always busy with folks asking questions about course design and general APCD queries and the community's more knowledgeable designer's are always on hand to lead folks in the right direction. I only envisage the same thing here, but with the added extra of the experienced TW designers also offering help and advice along the way.

 

There will be questions, granted, that maybe only MJ and AJ can answer, but I'm sure we won't have to rely on them for every answer.

 

 

 

Thanks for that...  I'll consider myself well and truly told!!

 

To be fair, from the videos that have been released so far, it looks as if CF IS simply import a heightmap, draw some shapes and 'hey presto'...

 

I know of Mike Jones' work from the past, so I was fully expecting for the CF to have all the bell and whistles needed to produce great work, but my great love when designing is links style courses, and a massive part of creating an authentic style links design is the bunkering.  Coming from a TW background, I know what hoops you have to jump through to get anything even close to a realistic pot bunker in the CA, so I was just hoping for clarification that it would be possible to go into depth when doing so in CF...

 

Like I said though, I'll consider myself told now as I take it you have intimate knowledge of the product, which I am yet to have...

 

Cheers,

 

Deluded of Barton.

[Mike Jones]

Of course then we will have to be able to put that course into the Game and all libs used will have to be available to all members so they can download, install and play the course..

Nope thats incorrect, the libraries are for CourseForge to help in the design process. Once you build your course, everything people need to be able to play it is saved and highly compressed in the course file.