132 replies to this topic

[Mike Jones]

While there is only so much you can do with a click based swing, there is a whole lot you can do with an analogue swing system no matter what type of controller you use. I think we are off to a solid start with our tempo based swing variables and there is a lot more we can add in the future.

 

Just like in real golf, perfection in PG is strived for but rarely achieved. Even the best real tour pro's best rounds are a string of near misses. You can be far from perfect and still shoot a 63.

[shimonko]

I agree on that sort of stuff, K11, and know such things are key to a truly addictive game if done right (I spent 10+ years purposely creating addictive video games), but only if they're hidden to players. Keep them searching for 'the breakthrough', just like golfers IRL. 

 

None of this confidence meter stuff, let the player feel confident from the long term results he gets from a club,  a lie, a hole, a shot, no choking when it counts,.. not be told. Confidence can be picked up in the movement of a mouse and even how long it takes to prepare for a shot. 

 

In fact, only two people in PP would know the full algorithm in what determines a shot (and they must not travel on the same plane together).     

[Ted_Ball]

I have to admit that I'm feeling very positive about PG Mike. There is a real quality about the programs being created, the short videos released and the results from the CF testing crew. I'm sure this quality will manifest in the swing system and all other aspects of PG.

 

Please don't think I, in any way, believe that anyone should take serious notice of my fantasies. I will be enthusiastically using any of the systems that will be implemented in PG.

 

Yeah Davefevs.

 

Of all the "sports" out there that could be simulated I believe golf is the one with the greatest potential and staying power. I want it to be difficult to master . I want to have to play a lot so that I can improve my scores and my skills. (I haven't mastered the game in 50 years but when I did play regularly, twice a week, my handicap dropped by a few strokes). I certainly don't want to be involved in tournaments or ladders where people are immediately shooting sub 60 rounds at will.

 

And then let RNG decide where the ball would end up. I also like the idea of allocating points to different skills, e.g. Driving, putting etc, that would influence the range of the RNG.

 

Yes, yes. Dave you are on the right track with allocation of earned skill points for different types of shot and K11 with your love of certain clubs. That sort of slow building of attributes worked very well in World of Tanks. Not only did your skills improve (aiming, rate of fire, repairs etc) but more importantly it kept you playing. They had me for three years - playing regularly and playing that much meant my tactics improved, my win rate improved and I enjoyed it a lot more as a consequence. The reason I'm not still playing WoT is because I couldn't really progress much further. But, my word it took a long time to get to that point. Any publisher would love to have me building their traffic statistics.

 

Accumulation or building of skills leads to a competitive competition environment if done right. More about that later.

 

But I'd like to get back to 'realism' and the role RNG would play. When I think about it having read highfade's post I can see that you can't have both RNG and an input control method. As highfade says there shouldn't be a perfect snap and the embedded 'slightly off' function determines the amount of miss. So what's the point of having an added variable with RNG. You could also argue the other way around. The trouble I'm still having with the manual swing is that we still have to get that ding point calibrated and programmed so intricately to simulate a real stroke. I'm not sure that's possible. The perfect/slightly off perfect snap will still be close enough to a good shot to contribute to a similarity of all the shots played from the same spot. I have a horrible feeling that most players will be hitting the ding regularly no matter how well the gauge is calibrated. If you can't get close to the ding regularly you probably should give it away - and that would be sad for so many arthritic, shaky, bad-sighted, (plenty more afflictions but I don't want to offend anyone) folk. My 'no input' method takes away those problems.

 

So the guy takes his stroke.

 

RNG doesn't have to be clever. It's simply a roll of the dice albeit with a lot of sides to the dice. The probability of a certain number or result coming up is based on a bell curve and the shape of the curve is based on the skills or attributes (experience) of the player as well as the club they use a la K11. There is a possibility that the result will be from the far outer edge of the bell curve and the ball could slice dramatically into the water but that would be rare and unlucky. Most results are from the fat part of the curve and the ball finishes closer to where you aim. RNG determines distance, direction, shape and possibly trajectory.

 

I can hear you saying that this mathematically computer generated shooting isnt realistic at all. ( I seem to be anticipating arguments in this thread. It reminds me of the travelling salesman who gets bogged out in the country late one rainy night. He sees a farmhouse on the hill and decides to go up and see if the farmer will pull him out with his tractor. On the way up the salesman starts thinking, "He's probably sound asleep, he wont want to come out in the rain, he'll think I'm a dill from the big smoke, he'll think I'll want to share a bed with his daughters, he'll be really annoyed, he'll be angry and disgruntled, he won't help me, he's probably a real bastard". Eventually the farmer is woken up by some bloke yelling out "You can stick your tractor up your a.se") Well sure it seems unreal but I want you to think about the alternatives and compare them in terms of how close it is to what happens in real life. The game of golf is a series of decisions. 18 holes will take you around 4 hours. You will play close to 100 shots. Each shot takes you 3 seconds. Of that 4 hours or 240 minutes you will be be in the stroke process for about 5 minutes. During each of those strokes you dont think about much at all. Extend the club head along the ground as far as you can on the backswing, look at the back of the ball, swing smooth. Decision making and analysis and intellectualising make up a much bigger proportion of the game. The swing isn't all that physical. It's the walking that provides the exercise. So maybe there is too much emphasis on "the swing". Push the "TAKE SHOT" button and get it over with. Then have all the fun of deciding where to aim the ball, course management, reading the wind, choosing the club, placing that ball right where you can hit your approach with your favourite club with confidence right over the stick and good old RNG plonks it with a bit of backspin above the hole and it sucks back down off the tier 3 foot under the hole. 

 

I'm making all this up, naturally.

 

Next I'll discuss some other parts of the computer golf game that need some realism added.

[Kablammo11]

A simple  "Take Shot (incurring realistically random interferences according to the Teddy Ball Random Swing Method™)-button sounds like an acceptable play mode to me. One of many. A well done swing meter, just for the sake of argument, could manage to allocate uncertainty and fuzziness to a computer golf shot as well. The question is: How hard do you want to go looking for all these minute details? I'm sure that the local Devs are willing to look very hard - they need time and a bit of our input for that and I am willing to grant them both.

 

That said, more traditional input methods like meter clicking and mouse moving are an established staple of the computer golf lore, and still do deserve some love, too - and be it because they have been around for so long that they evolved into "second nature" for many players.

 

There is only one thing that would send me into a bilious rant immediately: If anybody, be he Dev or player, for some reasons came to conclude that there is one and only one true way to play this game, his way, and that all other ways are utterly wicked and therefore everybody else should do it his way or not at all. Such an attitude would send me on a player freedom crusade faster than you can say "What now?".

But I do not see any danger of that around here and I'm making all this up, too, naturally.

 

Next I'll discuss whatever Teddy is discussing next.

[Ted_Ball]

Yeah K ( if I can call you that - and asking that makes a mockery of the reason I called you K - which was to save time. I feel like we have all the time in the world in this Beckett-like world )

Yeah...umm what was I going to say.....oh yeah.  As you say: a well done swing meter can add fuzz but how can it add the anomalies that are inherent in the real swing which keep scores in the real bracket. I suppose if everyone shoots 57s in a game then it becomes normal but it just doesn't seem real. When I organised a club or whatever they called it in TWO I even insisted on each member having the name of a real golfer. I didn't want xxxD3vil_sPloDg3xxx winning my tournaments. It was actually a lot of fun but I still couldn't keep the scores real no matter how many restrictions I used. Gees I hope no-one here was involved.

[Kablammo11]

I may have been involved... Was your group the one where I signed up as Ronan Rafferty, T? It was fun, I enjoyed it, especially those gale rounds where you couldn't reach the fairway from the back tee...  As myself, Kablammo11, I scored a few rounds in the 40's, I confess - without any shame. I stopped short of putt or shot previews (these really were ridiculous!) but used any other help available and I enjoyed going for an Ace Quest round at Wolf Creek every now and then. My overall shot average in TWO was around 53.

You see, the spirit and the lure of competition is independent of the methods used. Getting the one shot less than your friends requires the same commitment and intensity, whether you compete in a super-easy arcade game with scores of -50 or an ultra-hard sim with scores of +4. Same thing.

Keeping the scores real, this is my point for this post, is not a top priority for me. It's a "nice to have" but not necessarily a "must have". Realism, yes, by all means - a strong reality fetishism...um... I'm not so sure about that. Whaterver else it might be, a computer game is not reality. And it does not lessen the game or its enjoyment if ithe scores are a bit lower than in reality. I respect your views and do not wish to impose mine on you. I merely am trying to explain that it's a thin line between "keeping it real" and "having stupid fun". I might not always stand on the same side of that line as you, which is okay. You're okay. Everything is okay. Okay?

 

I'd prefer K11 to K, after investing two minutes into my little logo - to better hide my real persona behind a snazzy brand.

[Ted_Ball]

K11, this feels like we are in a stageplay called "Waiting For Pergo". I have to admit that I ceased my thought experiments when I got a little depressed after reading another thread here that this game won't be coming out for a long time. Will Pergo EVER arrive? Well that was the point of Beckett's play I suppose. But then I headed over to the TGC forum and my mood brightened. In fact I was hugely amused at some of the info coming from guys who have bought it. Someone had shot minus 22 after 15 holes and that stirred up all the old arguments we heard at TWO. Hilarious. So now they start with suggestions about making the courses tougher and the greens smaller and the undulations greater and taking away percentage guides and making the swing gauge tougher and so on and so forth and not only missing the solution target but shooting in the wrong direction completely.

 

Well, Kablammo11, I don't recall Ronan Rafferty in my original comp but after I was frogmarched out of town I think there was a spin-off comp and the 'real name' golfers continued with the tradition. My exile was because, in the interests of real scoring, I asked all the members to reset their golfers to the default skill level. I had allowed some leveling up but it got out of hand and the scoring was still way too low. They did not like that at all and complained that they didn't want to lose any leveling even though the best players were just creaming the field. It reminded me of a guy in a sim car racing club I was in who was streets ahead of everyone else and led by huge margins and drove the whole race on his own. It would bore me to tears without the 'racing' with other cars around you. 

 

I understand absolutely the need to have fun with a computer game and there is an enormous market for players who just want to open the game and start swinging for a quick round. A publisher would be insane to restrict a game to sim realism and not have 'arcade' type gameplay. Most games out there have varying levels of realism. When I played TWO I wanted to shoot sub 50 as well and, as you say, the competition is still keen and equitable among the players who reach those levels. The reason you shoot those scores is because you can. I'm certainly not trying to force my idealogy on anyone but I'll reserve the right to attempt to get people thinking about things in a different way. Let's keep this thread as a conference of ideas on how you would go about simulating the game of golf on a computer and hopefully being entertaining in the process - while waiting for Pergo. The target demographic for Ted Ball's Swing Golf - Realism, Simulation and Verisimilitude is quite small. Around about 83 people world wide. Just enough for a good competition each week for 3 grades (more on that later). The cost will be nothing. In fact I'll pay people to play. The development won't be hard. As Steve Martin said, "Anyone can be a millionaire. First - find a million dollars"

 

Nice logo by the way K11. I tried to find a photo of Ted Ball for my piccy but sadly none exist on the internets. He was a bit of a bodgy, or rocker as you would say in England. All I have are my memories and the same swing.

 

Now back to the matter at hand.

 

I like your ideas about the favourite club and preferred shape of the shot. Experience points gained playing the game (or even practicing) could be allocated to individual clubs, shot shape, trajectory or height (very important), driving skill, fairway wood/hybrid/long iron/short iron ability, short game prowess and putting skill. I would probably add length but I'm still doing thought experiments on that. The skill levels of all of those things would influence the RNG spread and would have the resulting effect on your course management. The shot shaping or the ability to draw or fade is a special attribute that I believe would add a lot of satisfaction in playing TBSG. I'm not really sure of the best way to implement the shots in the setup at address. Like K11 I have a natural fade which started as a young boy as a natural slice of course. I actually compensated for the slice by simply turning the club face in all those years ago. Not elegant but it worked to a degree. Obviously my swing shape was "out to in" coupled with laziness and lack of strength. So my initial thought was to setup in the game for shaping by closing or opening the face of the club but it seems a bit too simple and caveman-like. Having an adjustable swing shape is probably a better option but it all gets a bit fiddly and I don't think you want to be changing all that in "options" on the run during a round. But then again if you have a natural draw or fade as your default swing then that would account for most of your shots during a round and the occasions when you needed to avoid trees etc in your line to the green then it would be worth the effort to make the changes. If I think about my own game (its not that good - 18 handicap give or take a shot- and never had a lesson), to fade more than my natural shot I just open my stance and open the club face. The swing remains similar. When I did work on drawing the ball I did change my swing path but I never felt very comfortable or confident doing that and after a month dropped the whole idea. IRL when I'm faced with a shot around trees, under branches, in the left rough, which has to be hooked, I'll close the club face a lot and give it the old Ted Ball swing from the hip off the back foot. You probably aren't surprised that I'm so good at that certain shot IRL. I'd like to see that and I think it can be simulated in TBSG.

 

The next thing is aiming. I've got some ideas about how this should be done without resorting to little sticks moving around and controlled from some strange eye in the sky looking down on a fairway from 1000 metres. (I'll withdraw that Madam Speaker).

[Kablammo11]

Ah... you were in TWO earlier than me, Teddy. I remember that the abolition of the skill level boosting system about 4 months into my subscription during the infamous update from hell when they switched to gear attributes, and the group I entered merely insisted on default gear that did not include any boosters. That happened around the time of the expansion from hell, the funnily inadequate TW-12 "Masters" extension. 

 

Surely you must mean "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett? I never read the book or watched that play, btw - it struck me as a slightly pretentious premise and I certainly did not need Mr. Bloody Beckett to lecture me on the subject of basic existentialist angst and the pitfalls of conscious reality resulting in absurd situations.

I did learn, though, that Godot never arrives (Wouldn't be much of a story if he did).

But this game will.

[Ted_Ball]

Indeed it will.

 

Looks like I was sent packing from TWO just in time. 

[Ted_Ball]

In the interests of reducing my demographic and my player base for TBSG, so that I don't have to pay too much for people to play, I have made a call that even I didn't see coming. I'm eliminating the avatar. 

 

In Real Life....you know....that strange dimension with heat fluctuations and things that pierce your skin, in real life, if I was to see myself swinging I would laugh out loud. If I relied on having to control myself from a distant point to stroke a ball it would be impossible. I'd over-strain myself for a start. And I'd need a "HEAD DOWN / HEAD UP / NORMAL" control button mapped as an option.

 

I was thinking about aiming and how you see with your eyes and realised that we don't need a body, therefore. I considered how this could be done and was reminded of a golf game which had an animation of the club hitting the ball seen from the eye. I didn't try that system but anyway it was using sliding mouse control. If I don't need a controller in TBSG then I probably don't need the animation of a club swishing through the screen and striking the ball. But then possibly I might. I'm starting to make decisions based on simplifying and reducing the amount of programming.

 

It might be that the more you leave out, the closer to simulating real golf you get.

 

It leaves you with the question of what "The Player" is experiencing in the game. I'll try to paint the picture.

 

OK. You are in the game. After the necessary preliminary loading you're up on the 1st tee. You control the guy. Let's call him Colin. You only see from the first-person. He immediately looks straight down the 1st fairway at Murwillumbah. There is no HUD. All you see on your full screen is the view down the first. You are on the quite high, elevated tee. Spreading out below is a generous, flat fairway. What trouble there is starts at about 200 yards. There is a tight, smallish copse of large fir trees and eucalypts on the left edge. There is another copse of firs at about 230 yards right. The most prominent feature is what looks like a cross bunker. It is in fact two round bunkers with low lips. The first bunker is 215yds on the right side of the fairway and the bigger bunker is 230yds in the middle. Colin has only just started his career and had a default yardage of 200 yards when he first played. Colin didn't look happy at first because he knew he could do better. With practice Colin now hits the ball 235 yards. You don't want to be in a bunker. It's 135yds to carry the front trap guarding the small green from the first bunker. The hole is the slightest of doglegs right. The obvious place to aim is left half of the fairway. Colin's best drive would put him right between the bunker and the copse with a nice angle in. But the fairway is only 25yds wide there. 

 

So, it's quite a precise drive. Colin then focuses his attention on that precise spot. IRL you stare at that point and 'focus' on it. In TBSG you zoom in (somewhat) on that precise spot giving you a long lens view demonstrated by K11 on Willow Heath. While you are focusing on that closer view you notice a muddy patch and standing water close to the edge of the middle bunker so you shift your gaze further left and when you are ready that point (the middle point of your monitor) is fixed as your aim. 

 

Your screen focus zooms out to the original view and you visualise the shot. You launch the ball and the camera follows the flight of the ball with 'focus' and as the ball falls to earth the camera widens momentarily to frame the ball plus the landing area. The camera zooms in elegantly on the ball during the bounce and result. I won't program in a shot as bad as the one that landed on the tin roof of the pro shop 90 degrees right. The next shot into the green from the fairway would require a good focus stare even more so. 

 

"Oh, but !!" I hear you say. "You said there was no HUD and with no HUD how can I tell distance?". Well, Colin knows the distance. It's in his book. He knows how far the bunkers are, he knows how far you can hit the driver (and he doesn't even need the precise yardage - he knows from experience that he is capable of reaching the bunkers). He also should know how far it is to carry the front bunker at the green. Or he'll work it out eventually. It's funny. I never bothered with yardages during the early years of real golf and we all seem to grow an instinct from data we accumulate with our binocular vision and stored in our memory. I doubt that that could be programmed into a golf game.

 

And I also hear you say, "Oh!!".....no you don't. No-one says that. I hear you murmur about a lack of a handsome or beautiful avatar. Don't worry. I have thought of that and you will get fabulous biog pics and full TV replay with avatar.

 

I'll talk about setup at address next. I stumbled across a video by Monty giving some lessons. He made two interesting points. One - to hit the ball lower into the wind, swing slower. Two - to hold the ball against a wind blowing from the left, turn the club face in and swing the same. It might be that simple. Dear Monty.

[IanD]

I could go for that... basically removing the numbers from our club selections. You'd also need to ensure the data from any view down the fairway using anything to help your increased focus (or aim) was not displayed too.

 

The more I think about it, the less I like it...  in real life, most of us, are limited to a handful of courses. I say handful, as we all have our local and we play several friends locals too... the odd trip away sees another visit, but if you had to state a number regarding courses played regularly, it could be less than 5. It's likely less than that..! In which case, yes, we'll almost certainly know the bunkers are 230yds from the back tees and our drivers often find them...

 

However...

 

We could be looking at having around 5-25 courses upon release...I don't know how many or what courses. But instantly, we're in a place where data is in abundance. We've never played these courses, nor are we likely to in real life. We're literally in a position where, we've given up working, given up our wives and girlfriends, to discover another opponent standing there on the tee whenever you are ready to play. Doesn't matter what course you'd like to play either, we're instantly beamed upon a starship, and re-materialised anywhere in the world to the first tee.

 

I'd happily have the above as an option though... the ability to turn off things, no HUD to remind us of the club lengths, just memory of previous experiences using them. No data from any aiming stick or distances to pin.. just pure golf against the elements. It didn't seem right painting a picture of the real thing Teddy, without being aware we're going to be potentially encumbered with hundreds of courses..

[shimonko]

I removed the avatar from Links many moons ago when making it work with my simulator, also changing the camera position to suit (as Red Chain, E6 etc do), but didn't like it for mouse play. The click meter already makes sim golf feel arcadish, removing the avatar made it feel even less like golf.

 

But neighbors were complaining about me hitting balls up until midnight, so I had to do something for mouse play.

 

I had wanted to build a head motion sensing cap (as in hat) so I could look left and right to see more of the course, so thought that might lend itself well to putting back in a 3d avatar with a first person  POV, the camera following my head position. It would also enable me to see my body if I looked down, as I had dreams of  being able to adjust my stance this way.

 

Unfortunately Links not rendering in real time made this a pipe dream, plus it was an absolute nightmare modifying Links without its code so I was sort of glad. I put it on the back burner.

 

That experience however made me believe I like the avatar being shown when the shot is being made, even if it's a first person POV looking down at the ball during the swing, like this guy 

[shimonko]

(On a sidenote, I did however build the cap, but for sim racing purposes. I later tested the cap on a mock 3d golf hole with real time rendering and although the ability to look around was nice, what I really liked most about syncing the camera to my head position was normal head movements putting the course constantly in motion. It really enhanced the immersion in the 3d world and made it feel lively, in much the same way that motion in leaves and grass does. I'm surprised sim manufacturers aren't tracking head or eye movement yet.)

[Kablammo11]

I've got two words for you, Jimmy:

 

http://www.perfectparallel.com/topic/176-1st-person-shooter/

 

That was quite exactly 1 year ago. As for no avatar, the current pre-alpha version of the game has none. To me, it always seems like there is something missing in it: An avatar.  It's not that I miss the virtual presence of a pixelated being, but more that I need - on a subconscious level - something that adds as a human scale of reference and that makes the spacial dimensionality more real to me. It's the same thing for architects adding human outlines to their building plans - How do humans fit into this environment?

A PC game isn't a miniaturized golf simulator. And a golf simulator isn't real golf. 

[Ted_Ball]

That's a good point IanD. I did think hard about the yardages. I would like to believe that we could play without ANY guides on courses we are not familiar with. Unfortunately it's very hard to estimate distances on a PC monitor. It's hard in real life. That's why I decided that Colin would have yardages in a book. I have no idea what's in a professionals yardage book but I assume it's how far to carry a fairway bunker and distances to the front of the green from a point near where your ball finished etc. I think that should be provided for the player.

 

I was going to add some more to the swing animation problem shimonko. I was actually going to refer to GoPro POV footage that I looked at today but mainly to show why it might not work. I have trouble with a swinging camera. It's a bit disorienting in PC games. Maybe if it was done well - a steady or stationary cam for the back swing and downswing - a very smooth transition from looking at the ball leave the tee to following its trajectory (maybe there doesn't have to be a transition but just cut to the flight view, it's when we close our eyes anyway). To have a view of your blade behind the ball at address would be nice though and means the club can be opened or closed in that view.

 

It was with horror, K11, that I saw your post from a year ago. I must have read it. I have a memory of it. I was slogging through the forums at that stage so I was reading a lot of stuff. TBSG almost has to be a FPG. First person golfer. I knew that I had to be able to walk around a putt anywhere on the green or fringe. It then follows that you will walk around the tee to select where you will tee up. You will, as you say, be able to walk to a mound top along the fairway to get a better view of the hole and use your focus powers. You would walk back to your ball and your caddy who is standing next to it for scale. You get a free caddy. He basically carries the bag and tends the flag (great scale idea for long putting). I can't see why we can't free roam anywhere.

[shimonko]

The big thrill that we've also talked about before with free roaming is the MMO side of it. Seeing your opponent's or other competitor's avatars on the course on their respective holes playing their shots would be totally cool. I'm sure someone would release a mod turning it into a golf battlefield with frags.

 

I rarely visit the TGC forums, maybe someone who does knows better, but I suspect thats where they'll be taking their little colored blocks representing the other players. Winning Putt looks like it's setting itself up to do the same as well.

[Ted_Ball]

I have had some bizarre matches online going way back. 

[Ted_Ball]

mind fragging

[Ted_Ball]

I decided that it might be a good idea to produce a visualisation of TBSG during the shot making process. It was going to be a movie showing the way you would survey the shot, decide on a club, aim and shoot. I would have to animate the ball flight and the finish. I found a high res photo of the 17th green at Branson Creek Golf Course from about 92 yards out. In this video I would show a wide angle "normal' view of the green and surrounds and have some panning as if Colin was surveying the troubles and possible landing areas. It would show the "gaze focus" zoom function as if Colin was trying to see the contours of the green - this being an elevated ball position. Colin would flip out his yardage book to check the distance to carry the front left bunker etc. He looks at his clubs and chooses the sand wedge. I fine tune my aim, which is simply centering my view of the aiming line on my monitor. Aiming is basically lining up in a direction, not a distance. There is no wind. I won't bother with adjusting the club face. I'll align square to the aiming direction and let my natural fade move the ball from the left and hopefully drop it near the pin. Once I've settled on everything I'll start the ball on it's way. I would have to animate the ball flight with appropriate camera movement with a nice little concentrated zoom "focus" as the ball lands and rolls to its finish.  

 

While I was thinking about how to put it all together I came to the startling realisation that I could create a simple golf game the same way. It would only be a one shot game in it's simplest form but it got me thinking about what is needed in a golf sim (and what is not needed).

 

Ted Ball's One Shot Golf (promo vid showing Christopher Walken at the Russian Roulette table as in The Deer Hunter saying, "I'd rather be playing One Shot Golf") would,  even in this simple form, have almost everything a shot from this spot in real golf has. You look, you look with intent, you aim, you decide on the club, you launch the ball, you focus on the result. The only thing different from most other golf games is a swing gauge or some physical swing input by the player. I could sort of understand the thinking behind WGT where they took thousands of photos from positions around the holes and course. Wow! That was some call to do that. (Was it successful? To a degree but there was always the angle where you couldn't quite get a comfortable view.) So obviously TBOSG would need a 3D hole to play more than one shot and I'd have to change the name.

 

But TBOSG could almost be out in a Pre-Alpha version within a week. Think about this. If I animated say 10 shots from the same spot having a simple RNG lottery then the game is born. I wouldn't even have to embed a RNG into the code (because I don't know how). I could have 10 buttons and the player picks one at random. Each button launches a different shot. The real game of TBSG would have a lot of variables and a lot of outcomes for each variable.

 

It was while researching the flight of the ball in Trackman that I found the solution to the randomising distance problem. shimonko had the right idea when he said acceleration is the key. If a career mode was in TBSG then the player would start with a driving carry distance of 200 yards with a swing speed of maybe 80mph. As the players attributes grow through experience, he can improve his swing speed and therefore be able to hit the ball longer.

 

After the launch of Ted Ball's One Shot Golf I'll discuss aiming in the short game - especially my favourite part of golf - putting.

[Ted_Ball]

I've been researching Ted Ball's One Shot Golf 3D. I think it could be a reality. I've tested a previous to pre-alpha version.