• hbdeveloper
• On February 5, 2015

There was a great response to last week’s Dev Diary regarding Multiplayer. As I said on the Forum, I wasn’t even sure how many people read these so the response proved that a lot of you guys actually do. I’m glad they’re causing such a debate.

The team continue the work on the season mode, which is taking up majority of the work in progress. With features like this there are quite big chunks of work which take several weeks to complete. This means that writing a weekly development diary about the progress looks a little static. However, I can assure you we’re making great progress and we can actually start playing it tomorrow for tuning purposes.

John has been locked in the recording studio most of the week, playing the barebones season mode and recording some unique commentary. It’s going to be a very cool experience, very insular which is unlike the other modes, and something that really makes you feel the pressure of competition and the need to be consistent.

If you tuned into the Twitch yesterday you will have seen Paul going through some of the new tools available in the Greg Norman Course Designer that will appear in the next update. Things like Retaining walls, steps and fences. If you missed it, and you’re one of the many talented designers out there, it’s worth a look.

Talking about course design, if you’re looking for some new courses to play or you have a new course that you’re very proud of and think it could win an award head over to this thread or this thread. There’s some amazing courses in there already. I’ve been enjoying Biggin’s Shakespeare inspired course and his hole descriptions are beyond amazing. As a team we loved reading them on the forums, and reminded us exactly the reason the GNCD turned from a course generator into a course editor.

I’ve had quite a few PM’s this week about our physics system in the game and questions about whether we will be moving towards an ‘Emergent Physics’ system. From what I understand this is a real time physics system that affects the ball in real time, rather than predicting everything up front and forcing the ball along a path that is predetermined. Well there is good news for you and us, because we don’t have to do any work. Our game already does this. Everything is happening in real time, look how many times John has to correct himself. So if you’re wondering about our physics system take a look at Adam’s Dev Diary from way back in March last year to get a better understanding.

Lastly, I keep reading that the game is too easy off the Tee – that it’s too easy to drive straight. We were always a bit baffled by this. We find it reasonably tricky without it being too uninviting for the newcomer. It was only the other week, during a conversation with Lorin, that I realised that people were using the default stance settings off the tee. These are balanced to the average to the above average user. You guys out there that I would class as the pros should change your stance, in the Shot Shaper, to give you some more distance but also increase the difficulty of hitting the ball straight. It’s a great risk/reward mechanic and does add more variation to the drive off the tee. Give it a try and let us know how you get on with that.

Thanks
Anthony