12 replies to this topic

[BogeyOne]

Southampton Links for me.

How about you?  Say why if you want to.

 

 

P.S.  One of my favorite quotes is from Lily Tomlin.  She said, "We never really grow up, we just learn how to act in public."

[marts30]

Yup, Southampton!

[IanK]

Willow Heath for me. It's the ducks. I can't concentrate with all that racket going on. ;-)

[ZONA]

I think they're all pretty good but none yet have blown me away. I think overall the greens on damn near every course are a bit on the fantasy side, with having tiers and slopes that are far too aggressive, too many severe slopes with nasty pins everywhere. I think the greens on Massachussets are probably the most realistic. But from tee to fairway I do like most of them so far. It's really only the greens that really have me turned off right now. 

[frank70]

I think they're all pretty good but none yet have blown me away. I think overall the greens on damn near every course are a bit on the fantasy side, with having tiers and slopes that are far too aggressive, too many severe slopes with nasty pins everywhere. I think the greens on Massachussets are probably the most realistic. But from tee to fairway I do like most of them so far. It's really only the greens that really have me turned off right now. 

Mike said in another thread, that they have implemented the topography of the courses 1 to 1 from the real world. These greens are the real deal. We are used to other games and are comparing PP to them (the wind effect is another topic where i'm seeing this). Problem is: Other games never ever had a realistic representation of the greens. In other games the greens were/are too flat and don't have enough ondulations. I simply love this part of the game. Miss the target on the wrong side or with the wrong spin and your ball is 40 feet away from the pin. This is the deal in real golf as well - nore more dart throwing at the flags in this game!

 

Pin positions. There you are right. Too many pins right on ridges. Some are almost impossible to play at.

[ZONA]

Mike said in another thread, that they have implemented the topography of the courses 1 to 1 from the real world. These greens are the real deal. We are used to other games and are comparing PP to them (the wind effect is another topic where i'm seeing this). Problem is: Other games never ever had a realistic representation of the greens. In other games the greens were/are too flat and don't have enough ondulations. I simply love this part of the game. Miss the target on the wrong side or with the wrong spin and your ball is 40 feet away from the pin. This is the deal in real golf as well - nore more dart throwing at the flags in this game!

 

Pin positions. There you are right. Too many pins right on ridges. Some are almost impossible to play at.

You have to understand something, the most commonly available elevation data available usually is 3 feet spacing, sometimes more, sometimes less but not usually less. That means for every 3 feet, a data point is scanned and produced. I don't know how they do it at PP, but I've worked with over 75 data set imports and it's never 1 to 1 exactly how a green is in real life no matter how good the data is. But I will say this, usually the more tame a green is in real life, that data is is going to be more accurate, because there is less of a discrepancy between data points. The more undulated the terrain in real life, the more discrepancy between data points exists. You also have to be careful of data exaggeration. If you don't check your import setting correctly, this can happen easy. 

 

But hey, at least we agree the pins are too severe in most cases. And all I've really said is that I think most greens just need a tad of smoothing and better pins. I too actually like some nice slopes, just not mega slopes. 

[Greensboronclion]

Southhampton also for mes it is quite a task but must say all are very challenging. As for the greens as someone who plays at least once every week and all over I can tell you the undulation of the greens is pretty much spot on to real golf course of any stature. Sure most public courses ore not two or three tiered but go play down in the Pinehurst NC or Myrtle Beach area and I can tell you that is what you get. If you hit the ball to the wrong point on these five course you can land 5 feet from the stick and end up with a 40 foot putt due to the slope. That is real golf on a top notch course and for that I love this game and tell me as this happens during the game don't you get as frustrated as you do when playing real golf. The other day I was cruising along on Illinois course at -3 after 15 and ended the round at 2 over and that is 5 strokes to par in three holes due to a couple bad shots. This game like real golf requires that you fully concentrate for all 18 holes unlike Links where we could just grip and rip and shoot our 55 each round.

[dedBuNNy]

I like SH for sure a challenging course cranked up. I've been playing ILL for the most part since it came out. Lotta fun, Moving the teebox can make for an interesting round, easy isn't always easy... You can get into trouble fast with a bad drive.

 

Pinehurst... Ya, love to see that nightmare come to town....

[ZONA]

I changed my mind. When I said none of the courses have blown me away yet, I really think Sebonack (South Hampton) is a fabulous design. Excellent detail. 

[shimonko]

You have to understand something, the most commonly available elevation data available usually is 3 feet spacing, sometimes more, sometimes less but not usually less. That means for every 3 feet, a data point is scanned and produced. I don't know how they do it at PP, but I've worked with over 75 data set imports and it's never 1 to 1 exactly how a green is in real life no matter how good the data is. 

 

That's more because even with the ~1 metre elevation data captured by publicly available LiDAR each point can still be out by inches in height - a big deal on greens. Green scans from ground based scanners would have to be commissioned on a course to get greens accurate down to millimetre level. WGT had them done for some of their courses. PG would likely get green scans when doing courses for broadcast so we might get to see some accurate greens in the future.

[ZONA]

That's more because even with the ~1 metre elevation data captured by publicly available LiDAR each point can still be out by inches in height - a big deal on greens. Green scans from ground based scanners would have to be commissioned on a course to get greens accurate down to millimetre level. WGT had them done for some of their courses. PG would likely get green scans when doing courses for broadcast so we might get to see some accurate greens in the future.

It can be off by more then inches. I've seen it off by over a foot in some places, especially towards the edges of greens where the fringes are and the ground sharply slopes down. I think a limitation they have is with how much detail a Unity mesh can handle. I think 1 meter is the absolute best, not sure but I think that's the case. But even so, a 1 meter grid mesh can still look good, but I've found that many times I've had to go in a fix things on my greens to make them more accurate then the lidar data originally was. It takes getting reference images of the greens from many angles and then tweaking your elevations slightly to match the images. Most times your general slopes are going to be very close, but you can tell by the hard creases that some additional smooth is needed. In fact, in some cases it doesn't even appear that any smoothing was done at all. I'm not sure what type of smooth features the Course Forge has but I would think you could do low level smoothing to get rid of the small things. Yesterday on one of the last holes on Sebonack, you could see some bad creases on the lower front of the green and my ball rolled straight, took a 45 degree angle, rolled straight on that, then took another 45 degree angle back down. It's like the ball was in an enclosed trough or something. 

 

I look forward to getting my hands on Course Forge very soon so I can do alot of testing on importing and fine tuning meshes. Oh yeah, and I want to build some incredible courses too 

[shimonko]

1 metre terrain spacing isn't the absolute best--it depends how big the course is and how much area surrounding the course is used. A 2048x2048 terrain is normally chosen in Unity--the maximum that works reliably. Some courses fit in a 1km x 1km square, so they'd have 0.5 metre spacing. The issue is 1 metre LiDAR data is about the best you'll find publicly and as it's a point cloud of unevenly spaced points, it must be interpolated to the evenly spaced grid that Unity needs This of course brings in more error.

 

Unity has terrain smoothing but I feel there is more control exporting the heightmap and smoothing it in Photoshop, where minor imperfections can be made to stand out. Any issues with bumpiness on the EA courses would have just been lack of time to perfect them.

[Joe Habiger]

This is just a golf game, if you want exact precision go to the golf course..lol

 

I am working on one right now (1 meter elevation lidar and imported to unity using .raw format) and the whole course needs a tiny smoothing, so what if I lose a tiny bit of elevation data, again this is a golf game and we would all kill to be able to play most of these courses in real life. Just a heads up for future golf course designs though, be smart and don't put PINS so close to major slopes, if you have to playtest it and them move the pin do so but don't place pins badly on severe greens. I can't tell you the amount of times I HAVE been punished for a very good shot.