With the CourseForge finding it way onto our PCs within 3 to 11 weeks (Andrew'ss ETA), here's a few more little questions I have. For many of them, a simple yes or no will be a sufficient answer.
1. Tee Areas
1.2. How many tee categories can we create? 3, 4, 5 or more? Champion to Junior? Can we name them as we want?
1.1. Will we have the option to define different tee positions for each category? So, instead of a fixed location for, say, the ladies tee, will we be able to define, say, a forward, middle and back position? Or a larger area within which tees are placed randomly?
1.3. Will the players get to place their ball on the tee, to give themselves a slightly better angle for their shot? If so, we would need to know this now to factor it into our tee area designs (breadth/width) and its position.
2. Terrain
2.1. What is the recommended Terrain Shader for the CourseForge? With or without normal (bump) map?
2.2. Are there any collision settings to observe?
2.3. Non-Course-Forge-Textures: Will be able to assign preset physics settings to them? (Long grass, mud, rock, dry ground...etc?)
2.4. Does CF require an Unity Terrain to work on - or can other terrain data, even 3D meshes with textures, be imported from other terrain creation softwares to serve as a terrain and will the CF work on them, too?
3. Tee 2 Green
3.1. Will we get to mark hazard areas like O.O.B, lateral water, even G-U-R appropriately? Preferably by drawing a line on the ground with CF placing all the little markers itself?
3.2. For par 3's adjecent to water - Can we create and assign drop zones if the player finds water from the tee?
3.3. Most courses place small distance clues, either sticks, saplings or rocks at both sides of the FW, marking 150/100/50 yds to the center of the green. Some also give the distance left on sprinkler heads. This may be vital for expert mode players playing without any helpers. Does CF provide for an automated option or will we have to do this manually (requiring a tape measure, btw).
3.4. Talking of sprinklers, and I know this is wicked wild, could there be, eventually and well further down the road, an irrigation system that will activate sprinklers during a round?
3.5. Walls and fences. I asked if there was a way to build walls and fences sometime back in January and the answer was "No, not at this stage". Yet since then we saw the image of the Lake Bulkheads, which basically are some sort of wall (or a path desgin tool with assigned 3D segments which might double as a wall tool). So I ask again: Can we design walls and fences now?
4. On the Green
4.1. We saw the 3 categories easy, medium and expert on old screen caps. Is this still valid? How many pins per categories do we get to plant? (Usually it's 4, for 4 day events). So is it still 3 x 4?
4.2. Will the Forge provide any help when placing pins, like...
• A visual overlay that shows spots with too much slope for a pin to be placed on
• Dropping a virtual ball on a spot to see how steep a slope is and at what angle it runs - by watching the ball roll away.
5. Audio
Audio is a vital part of any audiovisual medium (it's worth exactly half, actually) so the audio design is part of the job of course creation. Unity has some in-built audio features and these may be all that we need. Still, beyond these...
5.1. Will the Course Forge contain audio files for general ambient sounds?
5.2. Will CF contain the ability to define localised audio zones and to import matching audio files for them, like birdsong, higway traffic, bubbling brooks, crickets, etc...
6. Customizing Templates
I do realize how much, truly Titanic work comes with creating the 100's of templates needed for a course design software: Ground textures, trees and plants, mesh objects etc... Yet advanced design will always require designing beyond the templates. Not much, maybe just altering the color a bit here and changing the aspect there.. not necessarily leading to a better result, but possibly to a unique design.
6.1. Will the CF surface textures be customizable inside the CourseForge: Choosing another color, for example, altering the depth of the bump map, changing the tiling (to the same degree as textures imported into Unity are customizable)?
6.2. Will we be able to customize 3D meshes outside the CourseForge? Like with the bulwarks, if I would rather have a stone wall instead, could I import a self-made stone wall mesh and replace the CF template of the bulwark with it?
My modest experience with Unity tells me that all of this should be possible. My concern is that by exporting, altering and re-importing templates some of the specific CF-functionality might be affected: Collisions, physics, etc... I would like to know if that's the case.
(Also, my first CF project will use CF-templates exclusively)
7. Mac?
Yeah, you know what this is about. It better be.. So: Mac?
