Shadow Creek by Dan DeShaney - Beta ready

[Adelade]

Shadow Creek - the version started many years ago by Dan DeShaney - is now fully finished and ready for Beta testing. All that is left to do is adding splash screens for the final and potentially tweaking any issues that might surface during this Beta test. If you want to test it out and report any observations/opinions either in this thread or by private message to me, I would be very grateful. I'm happy to hear out all kinds of feedback, no need to hold anything back, but I also make no promises to please everyone and everything.

Dan DeShaney started this course around early 2022, and had it about 70% finished when he felt like he could no longer work on it, mostly due to health reasons. The course was passed on to me (Dan gave me free hands to do as I wished with it) and though I have my other courses I want to work on, I have tried to do his Shadow Creek as much justice as I could manage. The course would undoubtedly have turned out better - at the very least more rich in details - if Dan had been able to finish it himself, given how wonderfully meticulous he always was with his courses, but I am personally satisfied and pleased with how it turned out.

If nothing unforeseen happens, I plan on uploading the course as a final two weeks from now, so any feedback sent after June 14th risk being too late.

Download link to the Beta:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/l0w7h81p ... okod3&dl=0

Sidenote - with the Alpha release I said I would completely redo the tree planting, which didnt end up happening. I liked the alpha planting enough to keep it and instead make tweaks to it.

[sagevanni]

I'm not a beta tester per-se but I went thru the course and it looks outstanding...!!!!!

Sage.......

[gu444]

Course looks great, excellent work!

[Pete]

Lovely work

[Ian Wells]

Adelade,
The course plays very well and I found nothing of concern.
For what it is worth I found the colour of the stream that runs along the first hole off-putting. To me it was more the colour of a swimming pool than a stream. However, I have not looked at the real course so ........? My only other comment is that I thought the fringe texture was too coarse, I couldn't imagine putting from this fringe, which is what I mostly do in Links.

Thanks for completing this course.

To you and Dan both.
Ian

[Adelade]

Non-reflective water is always tricky, because there is no way to make them look correct in all circumstances in Links. It depends on so many things, like the viewing angle, lighting, colour of the sky, wind, current, water purity, depth, material underneath... probably more... Some times, the most "realistic" thing is to make creek water black or brown, but then players in Links might confuse the creek for being just a path or some other harmless thing. That doesnt happen in real life, because real water moves, or else has reflections that the eye easily identifies as water when one's viewpoint moves. Thats why I always advocate erring on the bluer side when it comes to non-reflective water in Links.

Now, I know you're not arguing to not have it blue, just less pool-blue, which I do agree is a good point. However, there was a point during the course's development where I felt the same way you did, and I did a bunch of back-and-forth testing to try change it towards more of a dark-blue colour, and/or less saturation and/or different hues. I tend to do this a lot with various textures/objects/etc in the courses I work on, but this time I struggled, I felt like everything I tried just made it look less pretty, so in the end I went back to how Dan originally had it.

I'll look into it one more time, but I might end up keeping it the way it is, or close to it. For one thing, I feel like the slightly "fantastical" aesthetic sort of fits this particular course.

[Adelade]

About the fringe, the way the course's mesh is structured makes it troublesome to have a different look for the fringe around the greens compared to the fringe around the fairways, but I can probably make it slightly better with a lower planar scaling.

[Ian Wells]

Adelade,

For one thing, I feel like the slightly "fantastical" aesthetic sort of fits this particular course.

That is more than enough reason to leave it exactly as it is .

Ian