96 replies to this topic

[Kablammo11]

Hopper Isles Test.jpgMaybe 1 of those TW08 Japanies coureses was 1 of mine , I made several there  Hikihaki Gardens for 1  .... am right now crashing thro' Unity / Blender etc ...  I have constructed a few courses  1 of a Hopper Isle type style  .....  Hopper Isle was the only water course in TW08 for 18 months was an easier creation there for me ,,, I hit many issuses with the water hazard placment here & stopped  .  I am coming   !!!!!    I made over 100 fantasy courses for TW08   ...once I m confident of Unity & its periferals ... expect me about soon      Gr8 Stuff  K11   ,  cant wait to try a round there        Pic of Hopper Isle Test in Unity / JNPG

 

Welcome to the hood, Cello. I'm afraid I did not have access to TW08 courses and am not familiar with your work. I'm sure you'll enjoy the delightful agonies of course creation around here as much as in TW08 and I wish you the best of luck with your projects. And, sorry, you CAN and you MUST wait to try a round at the Shogun - this one will not come out without turf effects, and these are still a long time off, it seems.

On a related issue, I wasn't able to look at your Test.jpg, something about me not being allowed.

 

 

Today was a drudgery. Drawing water hazard lines is not my idea of fun. Still, for what it's worth, it's part of the job. Here's my recipe for minimising the aggravation of this chore:

I always draw the water hazards and the OB in line mode with the little forced square button ON. That way, I get a manageable amount of controll points instead of a gazillion number of them. And for the calculated hazard spline not to bury my design in unseemly hazard stakes, I change the setting of Meters per post from its default 5 to 36 or more, so that these are few and far in between.

 

 

Next up: Terrain Textures. 

 

 

There is no additional insight I can convey here that I haven't already tried to bring across in umpteen previous posts, threads, tutorials.

 

 

So I just reiterate the quintessence: No pain, no gain, ya gotta feel the burn! Never trust a single texture to work perfectly across your entire plot. It won't.

 

 

So be prepared to achieve your desired look by having textures interact with each other. Rule of thumb: Same texture over a distance of 10m or more is inexcusable! Lazy and sloppy work, a true disservice to the end consumer. So mix them up, make something happen on the ground, never ever go for the quick fix single texture, smear blithely into over vast spaces and convince yourself that this is enough.

 

 

It's called Terrain "Painting" - so paint your textures, don't just slap them in there.

[Cello]

I got a hand with uploading pic's here  ...  i ll post a blog in show & tell maybe with a few of my present testers.

[Kablammo11]

Terrain painting is about finished (of course I will keep retouching stuff on the fly whenever I see something dodgy- not easy to be on top of everything that happens over 1.69 square kms).

 

 

OF course, what looks a bit riotous from high above is designed to look a bit more natural when observed from golf ball elevation

 

 

 

Stuff needs to happen on the ground. And by stuff I mean visual transitions and constant change of colours and shapes.

 

 

 

And that does not necessarily mean dozens of different textures. It means making a few ones interlock and dance with each other. I used 6 textures to get this effect.

 

 

Next up on my to-do list: The exact of opposite of draining the swamp! Make it less monotonous and swampier. Pimp it up something good!

Stay tuned...

 

[Kablammo11]

Well, I promised I would report about my swamp swampification, and since I always follow through on my threats keep my promises, here's a brief sit rep. It's not finished, but I'm sure you're bored out of your skull with dying to learn what I'm up to. This:

 

 

The killing fields of the Shogun? Nah, nothing to get hot and humid about. I altered the water plane texture, adding a cloud effect discolorisation to make it a bit more gooey. Then I raised a network of small causeways and a few small islands to add a bit of structure to the void and break up the vast expanse of the back nine swamp. And I also added a few lily pads here and there.

And finally, I placed a particle effect on top of it all, to blur it up something good and add depth. 

 

 

I like it. Adds a bit of an otherwordly touch to proceedings.

No mystery about the technics involved: Download particle effects, go for the "Dust Storm" prefab, tweak the colors, the size, the emission etc, and you get a nice ground fog that actually (I checked) moves with the wind inside the game. Might come in handy for seaside links courses as well. It helps covering up the messy land to water divide and above all, it nicely separates between nearby and far away, shrouding the latter and softening the whole (as would a dense fog, only better, and with a slight motion to it that covers a reveals changing bits of the background).

Soft! It's gotta be soft! Has to! Softly soft. Hard and crisp images, where the mountain a mile away looks as sharp as the bush right in front, are for numpties.

 

I swear I will reveal more whenever more transpires.

[NoPutt]

Ahh, the old duststorm particle, I remember it well from Dry Gulch, 

and I seem to remember you were tempted to use it as a misty/steam

on Five Sisters. Looks great, can't wait to see it in motion.

Oh well, If I can't have a Geisha Bush, I suppose a Lily Pad will suffice.

[Kablammo11]

No geisha bushes for you, Neal! At best, I could conjure up a thorny thicket.

And the cheek of you, asking for moving clouds! If you think I'm going to produce and post a video just for you, my friend, you are totally... right.

 

 

To make out more details, you need to enlarge this.

[mcthommo]

Nice to hear your dulcet tones again, SIr.

Interesting looking concept so far- good work fella!

[NoPutt]

Ahhh, the serenity of golf. I love

the last hole shown in the video, although

it would have been better with the HUD Off.

Oh, almost forgot, I ain't stickin' my samurai sword

in no Thorny Thicket, rank you berry much.

[DPRoberts]

That particle effect looks phenomenal. I feel for the workers who cut those patterns in the greens.

[Kablammo11]

I just reverted back to square cube patterned greens. The previous pattern was nice and ticked all the right philosophical boxes, but it felt a bit too confusing while putting. Trial and error, the most reliable technique of design.

 

NoPutt, for reaching the pulpy inside of a thorny thicket, the katana is the wrong tool. Try a kama or a kusamigara instead. I really loved the topical puns in "rank you berry much". You, Sir, always deliver high quality.

 

Furthermore...

 

[Kablammo11]

And now for the audio bit. All the squeaks and noises on my courses travel quite a long journey before they end up vibrating your tympanic membrane. I DIY my audio loops from scratch, which does not necessarily make them sound better, only different. And we all should know that "different" is marginally more bearable than "more of the same".

So, yes, the audio side of things requires a bit of work. But its so incredibly important! It's half of the end result. It's one of the designers most powerful weapons, and it must be wielded in combat.

 

The journey of my sounds starts here, on the internet, at one of many online audio collections. This is where I browse for my individual sound effects: Birds, frogs, liquids, wind, insects, temple bells, japanese wooden flute and so on.

 

 

...until I have a swag bag full of nice litte audio bits inside a folder. 

 

 

And with that, I start assembling loops, endlessly repeating sequences of sounds. I use Final Cut Pro for this, a video editing programme with which I happen to feel comfortable with, but there are other audio apps around to do the same. Every loop has a basic ambience and some slightly shorter effect clips. In this "swamp" loop I have a marsh ambience together with a bit of gurgling water, and scattered into this are sounds from frogs, mosquitos, cranes, crows and the splashes of leaping fish.

 

 

Having compiled my loops I then can import them into my Unity project, and plant them all over the course. 

 

 

In the image above, the "Main" loop is just the basic wind noises with a bit of distant wildlife. This one will run always, so it must be quite subdued. Birdloops A and B are two different birdsong loops, one a bit more harmonic, the other a bit more strident, which contain lots of pauses and emptiness between the birds and are set to different spots of the course, sometimes overlapping each other, sometimes far apart. The swamp loop is exclusive to marsh areas, where it replaces birdloops.

Intro and Holy are two specialty loops for my usual welcome signal at the start of the round and for temple bells sounding softly near some of the spirit shrines (I do expect complaints about these...from philistines)

In Unity, all of these loops will start looping at loading of the game, btw. Most of them being restricted in space, they can only be heard when the camera and the golf ball are in their range - usually, players on the course are in range of 1 to 3 different sound emitters. Each one of my loops has a different duration, so that from the start they take more and less time to start again: thus making sure that - when combined - they never repeat the same combination of sounds ever. One final detail:

 

 

After importing your sound files into Unity, open them in the Inspector before you plant them in the scene. And there, see if you can change your default settings to something like the image above. Look at the difference between the Original and the Imported size... quite a bargain! If you compress and stream your audio files, you can significantly reduce their footprint on the performance. Even at 22 percent quality, as in the example above, they still sound perfectly okay. So, go see if there is a way for you to lighten to load of your players computers.

 

And all of this, for what? For this:

 

[pingzing]

 

別の個人をやって帰ってくれてありがとう

Betsu no kojin o yatte kaette kurete arigatō

 

どのようにあなたがそれについて行くかについてのステップガイドとeducationlプロセスであなたのステップを本当にありがとう。

 

乾杯K11

Dono yō ni anata ga sore ni tsuite iku ka ni tsuite no suteppu gaido to educationl purosesu de anata no suteppu o hontōni arigatō. Kanpai K 11

 

アリガトウグラスホッパー

Arigatou gurasuhoppā

[NoPutt]

Thanks K11, Astonishing editing and, some great sound tips.

Oh, I love the knell.

[NoPutt]

Bring back Tara..Now!

[mcthommo]

More of an Emma Peel man meself!!!

[Kablammo11]

Tara, and only Tara, always! Emma Peel is way too mainstream as far as male fantasies are concerned - the obvious choice and hence something I deeply distrust. World, look past the cheap Emmas and worship the quirky Taras!

But Tara's omission is intended. I really wanted one thread without any distracting tarafications and nasty, slippery puns and innunendos by you-know-who. Which I got plenty tired of on previous occasions, it started to happen in much too Pavlovian a fashion.

 

 

So, no Tara for you guys! My imaginary sidekick is sitting this one out - she has asked for a lenghty leave of absence to return to her homeland of Canada, where she is currently trying to fight the suicide epidemic raging among the indigenous people. She's a good girl, Tara is, with a big heart - no tits jokes here, please.

Did you als notice the complete lack of strangled kittens references by me? Though these might yet return, because...

 

The Shogun currently lies dormant while I struggle to move past my crippling disgust of what must come next and patiently meditate for inner peace before heading towards the Speedtree aspect of things. Which indeed is classic strangled kittens territory, and I so dread having to go there.

[GoldenBear]

deleted

[NoPutt]

Ah well, I do miss the days when you were on your meds

and could stand a bit of punny stuff. You trained the dog, and

it is now programmed and will continue to seek rewards no

matter how many times it's kicked. Now you know why Pavlov

didn't use a cat. Raugh out Roud.

[Kablammo11]

It must be in part because of that gurning Harry Hacker face on your avatar, Neal.

Your former, mild-mannered, avuncular old self was so much more vibrant as a delightful and truly enjoyable source of saucy word-smithery. But now if I look at that new mug and read "geisha bush" I feel a bit creeped out. Even Pavlov would refuse to try and condition such an animal... Ah well, it was fun while it lasted. No regrets!

[NoPutt]

No worries my friend, I know when to make an exit, sniff,sniff, tear.

I'll be heading to Oasis Lodge where Tara is waiting to show off

her new Geisha Bush, while you remain in your Thorny Thicket.