Golf Sim Clubhouse Forum

I laid out Carnoustie last night.
Will see how for I get.
Haven't used the architect for god knows how long.

Might be fun, even if it's for my own use.

Yeah, my architect skills are still there but my desire to do things with it comes and goes. I have updated 3 of my courses so far but still haven't rereleased any of the three yet. Still got more to update and a couple of my architect files are lost to an old computer. Thought I had all my architect files saved but I messed up somehow. Will release the ones I completed soon; I hope. I did play Carnoustie this year as 1 of the 3 courses played in the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship.

I think the course we have is a classic from Alan Toft, but it's from 2001, the real course has been tweaked since then, and lengthened.
I have been lucky enough to play a few links courses for real this last 12 months, that is what has rekindled my interest the the architect.
Some of the courses we played were like being in the moon. Fantastic experience!

Hole layout complete.
Fine tuning of shape to be done when working on individual holes.
Hope I can remember how the architect works!

It might be too late for this design already but if you want a plot done based on my new LiDAR import technique let me know. It will also be awhile though (a couple weeks) before I can actually do it for you so maybe it's not worth waiting for if you want to continue to work on your design sooner. (see this thread for more details)

Hi Brian,
Thanks for your offer.
Can't do any harm in trying a new plot.
I guess I start from scratch again drawing
the hole shapes in position on the new plot?

David

Well, it hadn't occurred to me to look until now but there's actually no LiDAR data available for Carnoustie. I was thinking the coverage in Scotland was good but not in this case I guess. So I can't help on this one, sorry about that! If you have any other courses you want to do in the future though, feel free to let me know and I'll look into it.

As far as shapes, I have the ability to import vector drawings as shapes in the architect program as well now. So when I do a plot I'll pull in the Open Street Maps data for these courses. It'll get you close but you may have to tweak the shapes depending on how good of a job the person who drew it in OSM did. OSM is being used by designers in TGC/PGA2k21/23 so a lot of courses do have high quality drawings.

Still chipping away, a bit here, a bit there.
I wonder where we got the time from in the past to bang out all those courses!
Be interesting to see how a more powerful PC handles the architect programme, and what sort of problems we run into as the plot gets more detailed.

Good stuff, keep chipping away David! It'll be inspiring to drop by and watch your course develop.
But beware! You'll find no extra design-time when retired. Pol will simply rope you into the exciting world of dusting, vacuuming 'n laundry
The advent of ever-more more powerful pc's didn't seem to improve my own design ideas much. 'Interesting' is not the word for it
Simply getting PGA to function was a noble enough art, but I determined that if 'design fever' ever returned, then simplicity would be a great byword.
Less being more, so to speak.
Good luck with our New Carnoustie, upload pics often.

Glad you're still working on this. Good to know I'm not the only one suffering from the lack of time problem. Clearly the days must have been longer 20 years ago!

I'm not sure that faster hardware really matters for this game anymore. There is for some reason a limit to the number of points that can be contained inside a dropped shape but it seems to be a software issue as far as I can tell. If you exceed 150,000 points inside a shape you get into the danger zone and if you get to about 180,000 you're pretty much guaranteed to crash. There is no limit on points on the plot overall though. When I cordoned off the plot with dropped shapes before adding detail and kept every shape under 150,000 I achieved a plot with 4.5 million points on it and everything is stable. Figuring that out was an important key to developing the LiDAR import method I mentioned in another thread. I still prefer to optimize it down after the import (an .ach file with 4.5 million points in it is over 200 MB!) but I prefer to import it at high res because the PGA 2000 architect's optimization tools are designed much better for golf and give you more control where you need it than 3rd party tools do. Now if I can just find some time to put that knowledge to use in the form of a completed course in this game...