Terrain tutorial out of date? Or just personal confusion?

[bigwill29]

Well that was mostly a swing and a miss although I did identify one issue. I had one tee that was assigned to Tee 2 and not Tee 1. That allowed it to only show my set tees where previously it showed Tees 1-5 without any yardage noted. That said as soon as I tried to load it I got the same error yet it still seems to play just fine in WGC. The edit holes shows every hole has a green and a tee and a pin.

I’m clearly missing something since if I download one of your posted courses they load absolutely perfectly. I probably should have just waited for Wanaki before sinking my teeth into Glacier Wood which is definitely the harder course.

[BrianZ111]

I do have Fitness Golf and a SkyTrak so I can test it here. If you want to send the course designer file over I can take a look and see if I see anything out of the ordinary. Just use the upload program here to upload it to the site and I'll grab it: http://www.golfsimclubhouse.com/wgc2011/upload.htm

I've never seen that problem before but I don't use Fitness Golf often. Would love to but I don't have a high enough ceiling to play at home right now so it's either the indoor range or outside in the net with neither having a projector/screen so I have to look back at my laptop after hitting. I've found that to be alright for practice but not the best experience for playing so most of the time when I use my SkyTrak I just use the SkyTrak app for practice.

The group of designers I know mostly published courses at 512 for max texture size. We experimented with 1024 textures so some courses may be in that on the site, but we found (at least in WGC) there was potential for performance problems if you weren't careful with how many 1024 textures you used and you really couldn't tell a difference unless you're running 4K resolution.

[bigwill29]

I uploaded using the DropUpload1.87 from the link. I've used every texture setting but mostly use the default 512 since I couldn't get the 1024 to work at all.

What I have done is just the first rough draft as I have a lot of detail, tree and tee work yet to do but I want to make sure it works and play with the conditions. Tree work is going to eventually take forever on this course but maybe someone can use it as a Beta version if they wanted too in the meantime.

[BrianZ111]

I was just having you upload it to the site so I could grab it and troubleshoot the issue, not to post it on the site. I don't think we need to post it until you feel you're done unless there comes a point where you think you're going to stop working on it for a long time and just want to post it as is for now.

After some troubleshooting in the designer on your course file I discovered the issue. The shapes you drew where you selected water as the spline type are the cause of the problem. Apparently this spline type isn’t implemented correctly in the Fitness Golf software. After deleting those shapes, the course loads in Fitness Golf.

This feature was rarely, if ever, used by the designers I know. In fact I didn’t even realize this existed until a couple days ago when Chet mentioned to me he was considering using it on a course he was working on. We pretty much exclusively used “Add Water” in the height layer. For flat lakes and ponds that works great. For streams or rivers that aren’t flat it can be a problem though. For that we’d do one of two things. If the elevation change wasn’t too extreme we’d create several flat locks of water in the height layer and hide the ends with something like rocks or vegetation. If it was extreme and this was impractical then we’d use our own textures and draw them in as regular shapes with a template marked as hazard. I will post a tutorial at some point later for how I went about doing that for Princeville. I think everything is a flat pond or marshy area on Glacier Wood though so you probably don’t have to worry about that here and can just use the “Add Water” in the height layer.

[bigwill29]

Oh wow, good catch. I'll give that whirl then its back to the detail work. Did you have a chance to get the Wanaki plot at all? This is somewhat kinda fun putting these together.

[BrianZ111]

Yeah was kind of lucky, it was the third thing I found that was out of the ordinary. First thing I found was a couple bunkers by 11 green with no defined template but that wasn't it. Second thing I suspected was some awkward kinks in some shapes. These kinds of things have been known to cause publishing to fail or graphics glitches in game. Even though that didn't turn out to be it, I would recommend fixing these right away when they show up after drawing. That way you don't forget to fix it later and have to go searching for something. Just manipulate the control points until you get rid of that crossover look. See images below for examples.

wgc_shape_kink.jpg

(82.13 KiB) Not downloaded yet

wgc_shape_finger.jpg

(62.26 KiB) Not downloaded yet

I'm going to try to get the Wanaki plot done on Sunday.

[bigwill29]

That worked perfectly. And yeah I have a lot of detail work that I’d like to polish up before it’s posted but It’s heading in the right direction.

[BrianZ111]

Here is the Wanaki plot: plot_wanaki.7z

[bigwill29]

Awesome thanks. Now I need to keep refining my water plots.