Augusta National 2023

[froghair22]

Looks very good in many respects but I prefer colors of teeing areas, fairways and rough in the 2009/2010 version.

Same here John as far as colors, but then again very subjective. All in all a very good rendition.

[ChuckH]

Very exciting to get a new rendition of Augusta so soon before the Masters. Nice to get the updated holes and yardages. OMG, standing on the 11th tee with 539yds to go on a par four. Other holes lenghened also. Great rendidtion. Elevations, textures, and planding look great. It could use some buildings, etc. or maybe a tournament version. Thanks, Linkster.

[linkster]

Thanks for the feedback so far! Here is my response to some of the comments.

Looks very good in many respects but I prefer colors of teeing areas, fairways and rough in the 2009/2010 version.

I tried those textures on the course early on but I didn't like them. Made the course feel like playing a US Open with deep rough. I went with a more smooth and manicured look that I think reflects the course better. The textures can be changed if there is overwhelming support for the older Augusta course textures.

No idiotic hole placements (at least those I tested)

I place holes on the flat-ish areas of the greens where the slopes are no more than 3% (1/3 of the bottom of the breakline indicator). I consider how hard it would be to get the approach shot close to the hole as the factor for pin difficulty. I am not sure which pins would be the Saturday and Sunday pins for The Masters but there should be enough pins planted to pick one close. That being said, I think I have a pin front left on 7 that is too close to the edge and the pin front right on 15 is extremely scary to putt toward. Let me know if there are any unfair pin positions.

This is what 18 green looks like. Grey is <1% slope, blue 1-2%, green 2-3%, yellow 3-4%, orange 4-10%, pink 10+%

AN H18 Green 1024.png (515.55 KiB) Viewed 1243 times

AN H18 Green 2048.png (1000.36 KiB) Viewed 1243 times

It makes no difference to me as I am not on APCD and I am not going to be, but is locking the course the best option?

Normally I am all for unlocked courses and sharing but this one is more sensitive than most. I have thought about this all winter and decided that locking is the right way to go. I am even concerned of just naming this course Augusta National. Versions of Augusta in PGA 2k23 are named something else. I named the course and file name to the same order as previous editions to keep confusion down.

Even if the course was unlocked, there is little that someone could do to the file until the APCD corrupted the 2D objects. Any edits to the course would need my full APCD directory to avoid file corruption.

Our AI did not adjust well to the fringe/green, chipping across the green twice (M/M) on different holes...both times they chipped into the fringe expecting a bounce that was 'softer' but of course the ball raced out. I don't think they actually found themselves on the fringe on any holes..they would putt from the fringe I assume? Hmm. I'll have to test that somehow.

Hmmm... I honestly never considered how the AI would react to the fringe because I don't play with AI players. I don't think it would pose a problem for AI players. The display name of the texture is Fringe but it plays as green. Same as the seam blend. Visually it looks as it should but it would play as very large greens to the AI players. My goal was to recreate the run off from the greens that can't be done with stock fairways. I tried to use the fringe texture around the greens on areas that are more than 10% slope (full highlighted bottom of the breakline indicator) as the ball would not normally come to rest there. Some areas of the fringe are not more than 10% slope so there are areas where the ball will stop on the fringe and the first option from the caddie assistant would be to putt the ball. In real life, it would likely be best to putt the ball from off the green anyway.

I'm curious what your workflow was like with this one. I assume this and making LIDAR-based files for people is sucking away your Links/APCD time. Are you terrain-painting or shape-inserting when working with your LIDAR files? It's the green elevations that stick out the most in my mind across all of our community's versions of Augusta...the shelves and tiers and slopes. I found your version 'smoother' than others, if that makes sense. The elevations I expect to be there, for instance the 2 tiers to the green on No 5 or the back right tier on No 6, are there, but not as stark in height change as other versions? Which was good in our opinion. You are going to make me play all my versions of Augusta now to be able to compare!

Do not use the shape insert function! It wrecks havoc with the elevations! The seam blends have to be done with terrain painting for the new verts to correctly assume the height of the underlying mesh. The work flow would be to go around the greens, fringe, fairways, bunkers, rough etc with more verts to create the seam blends. I like drawing the edges with lines in QGIS and transferring to the APCD with a texture. There is minor cleaning up of the elevations but that is all that is necessary to do the terrain.

The biggest thing I have noticed with LIDAR based DEM imports is that designers have always over-estimated the severity of slopes and depth of bunkers. I'm not complaining about that but honestly, we were all guessing as to what the elevation of the terrain is. I learned the hard way with a 3m grid of St Andrews that vert spacing is very important to accurately recreate the humps and hollows of a links course. The vert elevations from the DEM import are absolute terrain elevations but the APCD applies a smoothing between verts to create the terrain. This is why it takes a lot of verts to get an accurate terrain with unsharp edges. I will go back in and add more verts along green contours at some point to get more definition to the green ridges but the change in heights across the greens look very accurate. I use full mod green speeds of McFc and the putts seem realistic. At least LIDAR based DEM imports are mod friendly.

I usually have a couple hours in the evenings for APCD work. Doesn't sound like much but it adds up. The terrain imports take a couple evenings for me (3-4 hours) depending on how much I need to search for the raw DEM's. I will gladly do them for any designer who wants to work with one because it does save time and the results are very accurate, even if they are a little smoother than expected.

Very exciting to get a new rendition of Augusta so soon before the Masters. Nice to get the updated holes and yardages. OMG, standing on the 11th tee with 539yds to go on a par four. Other holes lenghened also. Great rendidtion. Elevations, textures, and planding look great. It could use some buildings, etc. or maybe a tournament version. Thanks, Linkster.

The course is brutal from the back tees. That's why I made the Forward tees for Links. I will update the file with some 3d work and a tournament version but it wasn't going to get done before The Masters so I released what I had.

[pmgolf]

I was happy with the pins on all holes other than a minor exception for #12. On the golfers right of the green, there were no pins that were middle of the green other than one that was on the far end. The Sunday pin is usually in that area. Great job everywhere else!

Pete

[morvio100]

New Augusta...= golf porn....the Linkster deserves his username....the Linkster has crushed it....SPECTACULAR....cant wait for St Andrews....crowds ....get what your saying....please take your time and be very careful in there placement as they might ruin the beauty of your creation...maybe do a version with crowds and without....insane work....the accuracy ...puts this in a league of its own....amaze with incredible 3d work also.....all in all .....SIC.... .....is St Andrews near completion...??....ps on the edges of the ponds(where the water meets the terrain)...maybe put very sparsely ...minor collections of leaves or something ...to break up the quite linear/clinical look of that meeting point.....sensational.....ps...the bunker work = off the charts.....textures ...all good....dont change the texts....11/12/13/......as good as I've ever seen Links2k3 look....or should I say Links2k4....as in ....the Linksters in town....aaahhh yyyesss..

[MrT]

I kept playing it a little bit more today and I can definitely say that I like it a lot.

The only thing that saddens me a bit is that it is not possible to get some more power out of the clubs. It would have been nice to be able to attack a bit more. But 300+ shots are really hard to come buy with the early 2000's power that the game allows. Obviously, that has nothing to do with the course itself and it is in Links. Still managed to birdie all 4 Par 5's and a couple of Par 3's.

A couple of holes that in the previous version played bizarre, now they play fine. That is great

I also like that trees are less in one's line of shot when driving the balls. I never played Augusta in real life and with 99.99% probability I never will.. But I always wondered if that was a real thing or a designer's interpretation.

I really repeat myself and must say that,in F/Fc, it has quite a realistic feeling, more so than the previous version. I am going for another round now.

[Danny D]

I kept playing it a little bit more today and I can definitely say that I like it a lot.

The only thing that saddens me a bit is that it is not possible to get some more power out of the clubs. It would have been nice to be able to attack a bit more.

If you want to hit further down the fairway, you can always use the forward tees.

[MrT]

I kept playing it a little bit more today and I can definitely say that I like it a lot.

The only thing that saddens me a bit is that it is not possible to get some more power out of the clubs. It would have been nice to be able to attack a bit more.

If you want to hit further down the fairway, you can always use the forward tees.

Well, yes, but playing from the baby tees is not the same thing.

[chad]

Hi Linkster,
Can you confirm if the traditional pin placements were added to your beta? I can try and figure out the Saturday/Sunday pins myself, and post those for all members when I have it ready.

These are the pins used for all four rounds under the 2009 version -

The Masters Pin Settings
------------------------
Thursday: 5 7 8 2 5 3 9 0 8 14 5 2 1 10 17 15 0 4
--Friday: 3 3 0 7 1 8 7 4 0 9 8 10 14 6 12 3 10 2
Saturday: 11 17 8 8 13 13 7 13 10 4 17 2 6 2 9 4 11 9
--Sunday: 15 11 6 1 10 4 9 10 14 6 6 14 14 14 1 3 7 15


Thanks.

[linkster]

chad

I planted the pins on areas of the greens that would be fair for mod settings. You should be able to match a pin in the beta to the traditional pin placements, maybe within a couple yards in some cases. If you want a pin moved for the final, give me a direction and distance to move it towards.