Dear Golfers,
In this update we present to you two significant changes as well as plenty of bug fixes for issues reported by the community. Regrettably the changes in this update have required us to update the save game format thus rendering saves from previous updates as incompatible.
We endeavor to minimize save game breaking changes and aim to bundle them up into few and far between releases. We're anticipating that the next few updates will be smaller and not break save games. Once we feel we're close to a 1.0 version of the game we'll lock down the save game format and provide forward compatibility from there.
Thanks for your patience.
Day/Night Cycle
At the inception of Golf Club Architect I wanted it to be pretty realistic. I wanted tee-times, accurate day lengths and the course to take a realistic length of time to play. This all sounds good but it's very hard to balance, isn't fun and is complicated to implement.
Previously wee removed fixed tee times in favour of having golfers turn up regularly but in proportion to the rating of your course and this proved much easier to manage and balance. The glaring issue that this left us with was that for a full length 18 hole course a golfer starting at 8am would not finish. We had regular complaints about this. It's very difficult to get the golfers to play a pace that is sane as there are so many factors involved in completing a round.
As of this update the day/night cycle is broken down into discrete segments. The current segment for the day is displayed as an icon in the top left next to the date. These segments are as follows:
- Dawn
- Morning
- Midday
- Afternoon
- Dusk
- Night
Golfers will only turn up during Morning, Midday and Afternoon and those that turn up in the Morning and Midday segments are guaranteed to finish their rounds. The Afternoon -> Dusk transition will be postponed until those golfers have finished. Golfer spawning in the afternoon will play until they deem it to be too dark to continue.
The other reason for introducing segments is to support the next feature we've added...
1v1 Challenges
At the heart of the game is playing your course and until now we've only offered the ability to do this through practicing a hole or a round. As of this update a new challenges window has been added to the top bar and within this will be any challenges that have been made to you.
Challenges are unlocked after you pass the "Local 6 Hole Course" milestone and come in three degrees of difficulty. Easy, medium and hard.
The frequency at which challenges become available is based on lots of factors, chief of which is the rating of your course. The better your course the more often challenges appear.
To accept a challenge visit the challenges window using the trophy button on the top bar and click the accept button for the challenge you wish to play. Once accepted the UI will change over to Play mode which has now been enhanced to show a live leaderboard and the score of the golfer currently playing their shot just like live TV golf.
Ending a challenge, either by winning, losing or quitting will show the competition results window which will tell you how much you did or should have won.
Implementing challenges has been a large effort that's required considerable changes to the way the golfer AI is written. We've done considerable soaking of the game to unearth any issues so we're hoping we've covered everything. The surface area of the game is getting large now so we please ask for your patience and understanding if any small issues are found. We would also ask you to report any such issues in our Discord and we'll jump on them right away.
Quality Of Life
We've also made some minor changes and bug fixes, these include but are not limited to:
Added a light at the cursor location for the Night, Dawn and Dusk segments so it's easier to build.
Fixed being able to paint other surfaces over green presets.
Fixed terrain Level Of Detail not always drawing correctly leaving seams.
Fixed an issue with shot selection which caused golfers to take shortcuts across non-fairway surfaces.
As always we're eager to hear your feedback on the changes we make. If you've not already done so please join our discord community.
Thanks and happy golfing!
The Golf Club Architect Team
