Tree Density... How much is too much?

[wojo]

The course I'm working on (Salishan GC at the Oregon coast) should be pretty interesting to landscape. The front nine cuts through an old growth forest of Douglas Firs, and the back nine is down the hill near the ocean, so it sort of has a little Scottish links flavor. I was lucky enough to find a golf fanatic website where I can download lots of Salishan images so I'll be able to add the foliage in APCD to pretty much match what's really out there. I've been experimenting on planting forests of trees for the first time. I kinda like using 3 or 4 species. I find I can get the forests to be pretty dense (pretty realistic), but I'm a little worried I might get a point where there's too much for the program to think about. Anybody have a rule-of-thumb recommendation for how many trees per hole or how close big trees should be to each other to prevent crashing later on?

Thanks.
Wojo

[pmgolf]

Just checking - you do know about the "Forest Planting" button, right?

Pete

[Adelade]

Im hardly the most experienced person when it comes to this but I have a very strong impression that tree density matters very very little in terms of loading times and such, what matters much more is grass density, and perhaps above all - the top views assigned to the objects (which also create the shadows). Ideally grasses and smaller bushes shouldnt have any top views assigned to keep things smooth, and I believe (I could be wrong) that one can significantly improve loading times by not using too many different top view files per course (for example, 5 different tree objects (or even more) can share the same top view file for efficiency). So I would say plant trees as dense as you want.

After writing the above and reading your post again, only then did it occur to me that perhaps you meant APCD and not Links when you said "the program". I guess thats a different beast, APCD is always going to be able to crash in relation to planting, but I dont think its worth compromising one's planting because of it - at least not in terms of trees (grasses may be a slightly tougher choice, but even those I think you can usually make pretty dense if taking proper care). Instead resolve to save very often when doing planting stuff, and dont have 2D objects turned on in the APCD 3D views when not necessary.

P.S. Remember to make sure your object settings are correct for all your objects before doing the executive planting so to speak - or you will end up having to redo it just like many others before you.

[Adelade]

Oh another thing to perhaps keep in mind - players dont tend to like too dense forests if they can end up stuck in them without reasonable ease of escaping

[Stephen Sullivan]

Oh another thing to perhaps keep in mind - players dont tend to like too dense forests if they can end up stuck in them without reasonable ease of escaping

I would always hope areas like this would be set as Out of Bounds

[wojo]

Thanks, guys... I'm thinking the reality of that course would be that if you're more than about 20 feet into any of those forests, you're screwed.

Has anybody ever created PDFs so you can print out elevation views of what's in the libraries? I might do screen captures of the big trees and fir trees and then crop them down to that little blue viewer window and then compile a bunch of JPGs into a printable file of some sort. Let me know if anybody ever published that.

Wojo