• hbdeveloper_SS
• On December 2, 2015

Dev Diary – December Update News

It’s been a few weeks since my last Development Update. As I said before the short hiatus that they were becoming a little stale. This was due to lots of under the hood work that is slow and not very interesting to the general users, trust me when Rami describes to me what the guys have been up to I need a strong cup of tea just to keep my eyes open

As we close in on our December update I now have some interesting information about the developments of the game.

Multi-Player Improvements – Added Game modes

Bryan has been working tirelessly to get a system in place to give you guys the ability to play both Match-Play and 4 Ball modes in online A-Sync live play. I know a load of you guys are dying for more information on this so I’ll dig into it a little more:

The Player Select/Select Game Mode screen now has two new options “Online Match Play” and “Online Four Ball”. Choosing one of these will alter how you enter the game from the normal flow.

You’ll continue to select a course but once you get to the tee, you’ll be given a menu showing you the slots needed to fill to make the game playable. Go to one of the slots and then invite a friend to the game. Once the desired slots are filled you’ll be taken to the tee and able to tee off. Currently you can only invite friends.

We’re very interested in how this mode goes down with the community. Your feedback will have a huge influence on how we expand the online multiplayer of The Golf Club.

New Themes

We’ll have two newish themes for this update

• Winter – which is the theme that was only available last Christmas for a few weeks. This will now be a constant theme
• Rustic – This is an expansion/replacement for Rural. Jim’s skills within Unity and what we can get from the game and Unity together has meant that some of these older themes look tired, so these re-workings really push the look of the game forward.

Texture Selection

Paul’s work on texture selection, is another one of those things that is a huge piece of work but boring to write about week on week. But what he’s developed is the ability to change the texture of Fairways, Rough, Greens and Bunkers. This is something that people have been requesting for ages and will give a huge variety to course designs.

What we’ve also done is introduce two sliders to define thickness of the mow, and the density of mow pattern – how visible it is. Again this will give huge variation to designs.

Improvements/Bugs

We’ve also been improving and bug fixing in all areas of the game. There were problems with replays not using tournament wind, causing issues. We’ve also worked on making replays/online play less deterministic – on other PC’s/graphics cards. So those issues where you see a shot go down the hole in one replay and not in another should be greatly reduced.

We’ve looked at issues with the cup that people have reported to me and made a few small tweaks. It’s been a busy, busy few months.

I’ve booked a slot with Sony and Microsoft for next week, so I’m hoping we’ll be out after that as some point.

Anthony