Sheshan GC is a real parkland/lakeside course in Shanghai, China which one might remember from the WGC-HSBC Champions official PGA Tour tournament between 2013-2019. Sean Landry (AKA 72Animal) started this course several years ago and made the layout and most of the elevations, but he hadn't worked on it for a long time so I asked if I could finish it, and he kindly gave me free hands. I have wanted to be able to play this course in Links for a very long time, I think the Links course library has a severe shortcoming in how few Asian courses there are, and this one has received many awards, including multiple ones for best in China, top 10 in Asia and top 100 worldwide. My goal with this course was never to make a meticulous or spectacular APCD creation however, I just wanted to finish it into an enjoyable experience of the real thing, which I think it has become, but it certainly hasn't had a lot of attention to details or extras in the surroundings like buildings and such, which are only semi-accurate. Focus has been on gameplay. The course might not look obviously Asian, but it actually doesn't in real life either to any great extent, in large part because the district area is heavily inspired by the west as a theme - in particular by the Tuscan region in Italy. I think the planting set I used is fairly close to real life.
-Tees: Back tees are based on the official hole distances from the 2019 WGC-HSBC Champions scorecard, Mid, Fwd and Jun tees are taken from official info from the course's official website and therefore represent best how the course is played in real life outside of tournaments, Ldy tees I chose to place basically the farthest back possible, which in total still only ended up 87 yards longer than the Back tees.
-I chose to go with the majority of the rough being heavy rough. The reasoning for this is because I hear they always let the rough grow really thick in real life whenever the PGA visited the course. I think the course would play a little too easily without it. There is still a strip of regular rough inside the heavy rough.
-Greenslopes are based on relatively detailed official visualizations of the main features of the greens, which means they are nowhere near as accurate as when made with high-detailed green-charts, but still pretty close to the real ones.
-No pins are placed within 4 feet of slopes steeper than 3.5%, and I believe they're all at least 9 feet from fringes.
-The course may possibly look its best with shadows turned off and skies that aren’t too sunny, but I personally play with shadows on and sometimes sunny skies, and I think it looks fine then too.
-If the (2D) buildings look Mediterranean in style... it is because they do in real life too - the whole area is architecturally inspired by the Tuscan region in Italy.
(The screenshots are actually taken from the Beta, there are a few minor changes in the final causing the H2 screenshot to be slightly outdated, but the final looks basically the same)
- H2 png.png (1.17 MiB) Viewed 7127 times
- H5 png.png (1.2 MiB) Viewed 7127 times
- H7 png.png (1.16 MiB) Viewed 7127 times
- H8 png.png (1.27 MiB) Viewed 7127 times
- H17 png.png (1.54 MiB) Viewed 7127 times
Just played a full round on it myself for the first time, it actually turned out more challenging than I thought it would, which I like.
Thank you so much Sean Landry for starting this course, and for letting me complete it! And thank you to all beta testers.
