olazaboll, your answer is a bit further down this post.
But first to Ian and his question of "when and how does the game know that a fairway is a fairway":
Specific attributes are being assigned to each spline/outline by the designer at their creation: Green, green fringe, fairway, fairway fringe, bunker, semir-rough, rough, deep rough.
These attributes consist of a set of textures (which can be twiddled with, improved, customized as you please) and of a "Physics Material" that will determine the ball physics. CF comes with lots of Physics Material presets - there are 3 for the fairways, for instance: "Fairway", "Fairway Soft" and "Fairway Hard". You can mix up these materials within one and the same golf course if you clone your fairway settings in the Layers Library to be able to use different physmats on different golf holes. There currently are 21 of these presets, from dirt to water to stone to lip of the cup, which will guide the way a played golf ball bounces and rolls out on each different surface.
The game will only recognise a fairway if or when a played ball lands on a CF fairway mesh - or shape - that has been assigned a fairways Physics Material. Or, to be more complicated, on ANY shape that hast been assigned a fairways preset. I could assign a fairway preset to a bunker if I wanted. But of course I won't.
Should a ball land on the terrain at large, the not-CF-bit of the plot, I think it will be treated the same as the "rough" preset.
That's at least how I read it right now. Mind you, I don't know enough to state this as a fact, so I'm not necessarily right about it, even though I'm quietly confident that I'm not far off the mark.
and hello Ola, who posted right into my answer to Ian.
1. I have not designed for TW08 because of my Mac handicap - Windows only. The course desginers I used were, back in the days, the JN5 thing and the APCD (or the buggy Mac port of it). I never published a course design, so there is no previous work of me in existence. I was invited to this private Beta not so much on design merits than on because I'm a Mac User.
2. No, my CF hasn't come with any 3D object - though MJ a few days ago offered to issue us with a tree pack.
- 2D's as in billboards? You could import and plant 2D trees in the far background and set them to face the camera at all times. Or the houses of a distant village. Why not? Anything 200yds away from the golf course might as well be 2D.
- Everything pertaining to these 2D and 3D objects is a Unity issue. The CourseForge does not deal with them. Importing and manipulating them is always the same in Unity. While you plant your course, CF will sit on the sidelines and do nothing about it - not it's job.
The public release of the CF, MJ told us long ago, would ship together with a selection of 3D objects. Which ones and how many of them will be included I do not know.
