DEV DIARY: BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE PROCESSOR

hbdeveloper
On March 12, 2015

Good news for each and every one of you this week but especially those with Xbox Ones and PCs that are struggling on some larger courses. We’ve made some significant optimization improvements over the last 7 days.

We discovered that animals, excluding birds, were taking up a huge amount of processing time while off screen. Improving this gained us quite a few frames per second.

On top of that we also improved the shadow rendering routines on objects in the distance that have a low level of detail. This gained us even more frames per second back!

Taken together with some speed improvements in the water drawing routines the game is now performing up to 40% better on some of the slower courses – plus the game is also looking better.

With these gains, we’re now looking at the impact of upgrading the Xbox One to 900p. At this point this is most likely going to be seen in the May update. So good news for everyone!

A lot of people have also been having problems with load times on some big user created courses. We’ve also improved these significantly for the next update so you’ll see the difference in those when it goes live.

Speaking of the update, here’s the latest on where we are with it. We have actually had the update finished and ready to go since the end of the last month but we’ve been held up by some red tape with another build of the game. This meant that we couldn’t have two builds of the same game in with Microsoft and Sony at the same time. We’re just waiting on word from those guys that it’s OK now to submit. The up side is that those few extra weeks wait resulted in some performance bonuses in addition to the new content, so probably worth the wait.

If any of you are going to the China Golf Show this weekend in Beijing, I’m told that The Golf Club will be there with a recreation of 3 holes from the Ho Tram Golf Course in Vietnam. This is a course that the Greg Norman Course Design Company designed in the real world and have used the Greg Norman Course Designer within The Golf Club to recreate it within the game world. It looks really great so if you’re there take a look.