Look What I've Been Up To

[Adelade]

Do you plan on having a shot tracker feature? Like, in most modern golf games, after you hit a shot, the camera follows the ball on its flight. That puts a lot of strain on 3D rendering (compared to Links 2003 anyway), and it would likely look awkward with 2D objects.

[sagevanni]

JC,
Did you have to do any planting or is just showing up due to your design process?

It looks GREAT so far.......

Sage......

[linkster]

My designer creates .CRS files, but it could just as easily create .CRZ files. I could basically make the file extension be whatever I wanted. Of course, now that I've built my own game I know why the Links CRZ files are "uncrackable". I've tried to open them a number of ways using AI and it was a complete failure. The reason is that those CRZ files are just archives that contain all the pertinent data to build the course when it's loaded. My CRS files are exactly the same. The difference is that MS made those highly proprietary and the archiver made them where they can only be read by the APCD/Links Extender and the game.

Nobody is going to crack those Links course files. Nobody.

Andrew Jones did back in the day. He wrote the Links Extender program and all the utilities in the package. This has given designers the ability to extract assets out of .crz course files, even locked courses.

I had a quick look at the BLOSM Blender tool. Google Earth 3d is proprietary. That was enough for me to stop looking.

Have you had a look at the Open Platform Golf Course Designer? Their course designer utilizes all the import features you are trying to recreate along with some more advanced visualizations. It is the golf course simulators that are in the leading edge of virtual golf. My hope someday is that one of these platforms creates a PC game for the front end, alongside the simulator input.

[Colin Jones]

I'm fascinated by this and find it very exciting actually. If there's anything you need an experienced APCD designer to test/help with anything, give me a shout out.

I have no technical understanding of what is going on but I do have one question:

How do you intend to handle the IP issues associated with releasing replicas of real courses? We might fly under the radar here at LC, but you won't be able to do that on Steam (I wouldn't think so anyway). With the (amazing) LIDAR import function, the entire designer model seems predicated upon copying real courses.