Ok, we are almost there. We are hoping to get this out this week. We have 3 things left to finish that are part of the planned U5 upgrade release.
1) Upgrade the Florida Glades Course to Unity 5
2) Fix a nasty bug in the stats reporting
3) Add Hard and Soft ground settings into the physics
Best Guess right now is a couple of days. Here is a complete (mostly) recap of what is in it.
Improved Lighting and upgrading our Time of Day lighting system. The whole lighting and shader system in U5 is much more immersive and flexible so we have completed a revision of all the settings and data related to the Lighting, shaders and materials inside the game. Much more dynamic and vibrant should please the folks who complained that it was lacking in contrast
Tree passthrough collisions with a random sound and effect on the ball in flight. Each collision results in a random dorection and speed change
Integrated the wind into the trees more realistically so now the higher the wind, the more the trees will move. The cloud movement is also tied into the speed and direction of the wind
Integration of complete skid/slip and roll system into our physics engine bouncing. This means that spin rate, vertical velocity and softness all determine whether a ball will skid on impact or whether friction with the surface will scrub all the spin off the ball and it will be rolling on impact with the ground. This leads to the ability to hit a much larger variety of shots with more realistic results.
Move to more simplified firmness setting with Soft Normal and Hard. See Above
New Pitch and Lob shot type options remove the need to continually adjust the loft of the shots manually and help to replicate the fine control that the pros display in this part of the game. In conjunction with the new ball and ground physics this allows us to replicate many of the shots you see on the PGA tour week in and week out such as the low pitch shot that grabs and spins itself out near the hole. As a result we have adjusted the shot center to be for small adjustments only in loft, the old draw and fade setting remain unchanged. The lob shot has an added difficulty to it in that missing the snap early will result in under hitting the shot and late will see it come out lower and faster than intended.
All new putting physics incorporating skid on leaving the putter which again adds to the reality of the putts. We also have fixed the high speed launch issue and have adjust the putting distance control to be more user controlled rather than having the distance to the hole 'preset' on the swingmeter. This will make judgement of diatnce much more difficult and to compensate we have reduced the direction penalty for missing the snap on putts. There is a new camera for putting you can enable in the game settings UI which is lower to the ground and avoids the issue of the player covering the hole.
Added in a handicapping setting into scoring so now you can play net matches against opponents with a defined handicap. Right now this is on an honor system but eventually it will be integrated into the actual scoring of the player. This will happen once we get the Perfect Golf Club website and API up and running.
Added in stat tracking so at the end of each round you can see all the players stats and then have your stats for all your players synced with the cloud. You will also be able to see other players stats if they allow their stats to be shared. Right now there is no UI for this but if you want to see a players stats you will see the response returned in the console. We will update the UI functionality in a later release for historical to date stats but did not want to delay the U5 release further.
Restoring offline mode. We have fully restored the offline mode in the game. This means we have restored our own networking code for offline play. You can now play without being connected to the internet or when steam is off and set to offline mode.
Passworded games and passworded chat. You can now protect online games with passwords as well as chat channels with passwords
Added Horizontal Motion Swing, and tied it into the handedness setting in the player menu, so if you play left handed the swing will be to the left them the right and reverse for right handed players
Improved the hole cup physics. Balls will lip out more realisticly now and the ball if hit too hard will hit the back of the cup and bounce upwards a little. Balls rolling on green will now bounce off the pin if it is in.
A much improved camera system with revamps on the Reverse and Landing Snap cams and well as changes to the follow cam all designed to eliminate the bumping of the camera as the ball bounced
Added an F4 camera which is active when putting and shows the view of the putt from the reverse side of the hole
Made changes to the F3 view which now moves to the landing area of the club currently selected in the swingmeter. While the F3 camera is active you can change clubs to see how the landing area changes. F3 is not available in chip pitch or flop mode.
Added several items to the graphics settings:
- Turn adaptive lighting on or off ( think of it like your pupils of your eyes adapting to shade or sunlight)
- Turn Sky Scattering effect on or off (Makes the sky a more deeper color)
- Turn God Rays and lens flare on or off or both
- Replaced Tree Billboad Slider with new LOD slider for Trees, Higher Values is Higher Tree Quality. Default is 2
- Added a variable to players to adjust the size of the comet trail to their own liking
- Added a delay to the follow cam catch up time so you can set this to your own liking
Changed Weather Settings Menu:
- Removed Dust and replaced with Variable which has variable cloudiness on a clear day
- Changed Storm mode so there is a 50 50 chance of a storm rolling through every 20 mins so not stormy all the time
- Changed Rain Mode so more of a showers mode.
- Added Active Weather Slider - This will cause gound to soften when it rains for a certain time. Due to time limitations this has not been implemented in this release but will be activated in a later release.
Added a normal map slot to textures resulting in new rake marks in bunkers etc
Bug fixes and Changes
Fixed the OSX Greed Grid bug
Reduced the size of the width of the grid when not on green
Removed the lines depicting the hazards and left just the posts (they were ugly)
Removed the Special characters in the UI that prevented them showing up in certain Operating Systems
Fixed A cancelled shot by not clicking at the bottom reset the shot center
Added in temporary measures to reduce cheating
Fixed a situation where a ball in the hole could be registered as Out of Bounds
Fixed the hole in one bug
Fixed a bug where a mulligan could deduct two shots from a players score
Fixed a range of alt shot bugs
Fixed a range of bugs caused by the gimmie button
Fixed auto gimmie and gimme causing 2 shots to be added
We are sure there are more like the hole in one bug and others but we are finally at a point where we can start to test the gameplay again so have at it and let us know what you can find
So whats next:
We plan to tidy a lot of things up fix bugs in the U5 build and add in the following for the next release:
An all new animation system.
Active Weather which will cause ground conditions to change with the weather
I am sure I missed a bunch of stuff we did out.
