CANNOT PLAY A COURSE THAT APPEARS TO HAVE LOADED

[brooks2345]

Hi. I have a Course that is called "Haste Hill Golf Club". I have transferred it to the Links Courses Directory and it shows as being on my list of Courses, so the game is picking up the Course Title OK (from "Edit/Course Properties") . It's all set up like many others, yet when I press "begin playing" it crashes and I can't see why. I have shaved off a lot of unwanted stuff to keep the file size down (just like my other Courses). I have DGVoodoo Direct X Wrapper, but this seems to be OK with the other courses.
According to Sage, Linkster is the man for problems like this!!
Any thoughts or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

John Brooks

[dwg]

I have identified about 10 courses that crash when using the dgVoodoo wrapper, when I switch to the DDrawCompat wrapper they do not crash, this machine has Intel Graphics.

They also do not crash on a machine with an Nvidia HBA.

[brooks2345]

Just tried another course I cobbled together - Rickmansworth - with exactly the same result! The machine recognises the golf course but won't play it. But this time, I haven't cut out any surplus unnecessary items, no planting, and in fact all that was included were tees and greens and upon "validate and save" the APCD came back with "the course is now playable". But in both cases I used Google Earth as my base before making the usual adjustments - but I've also got Corfu and Chamonix using Google Earth with no ill effects. Strange.

John Brooks

[Colin Jones]

I CAN HEAR YOU JOHN.

4096 textures?

[dwg]

Have you tried the alternative wrapper, there is a sticky in the Tech forum about it.

[brooks2345]

Nope 2048 textures

[brooks2345]

Looks like Colin's dead right - I started another course - Knighton Heath - but this time I reduced the download off Google Earth in order to make mapping textures to 512 pixels/24 (Instead of 32) bit - and - no problem - so it looks like I'll have to go back and find a way to redo the two courses that didn't play -(Haste Hill and Rickmansworth ) when I was using 2048 pixels - it appears that 1024 might work at a pinch but no more than this.

Thanks for all your help and suggestions (especially Colin Jones)

John Brooks

[brooks2345]

Just when I thought I'd cracked it...........nope, crashes again????? But no problem with basic faces until you come to seam blends. Then it crashes - for some reason, DGVOODOO and Google Earth just are not compatible for seam blends (and yet these appear to have worked for some other courses I've been working on). Haven't tried planting yet, but since tees and pins are OK, this shouldn't be the problem. Keep trying.

Cheers

John Brooks

[brooks2345]

AHA! When I go into a tiny bit of seam blending (i.e. seam blending tee 1 only) the file size jumps from 2.7MB to 23MB!!!! Well it's obviously a problem with file size, but I'm wondering if my version of APCD is caput. Have checked other files that work AOK and they're all under 15MB. Keep plodding!

John Brooks

[dwg]

John,

I would be inclines to try the other wrapper. I have found about a dozen course files that do not get on with dgvoodoo at all and crash, but are fine with DDrawCompat.

Des