Hi everyone,
Welcome to another WGT community post. “Community update?” “Dev blog?” “Ramblings of someone who has been in too many video meetings this week?” Admittedly, this post is coming out later than I wanted, but I didn't want it to get in the way of the downtime announcements that we’ve had to make recently — which I also want to address here.
Most often we take down the servers so we can deploy new updates, features and fixes on a regular basis. Recently we've encountered some hardware issues that have caused extra downtimes and have required us to replace some hardware.
Our intention is always to limit the amount of time WGT is offline and in the last few weeks we have (unfortunately) had to be much more than normal. We’re all truly sorry for any games that have been interrupted by these issues.
We are planning to have our regular downtime next week and we'll post an announcement for that when we're closer. After that we expect to return to monthly updates, and will minimize the number of additional downtimes as best we can.
Now let's get into the good stuff!
First, let's talk about the items in the last post that we released already:
- Adding additional camera views where possible - Many courses and holes now have additional views available!
- Improving the Toptracer box positioning - The Toptracer stats box is now anchored in the top right of the screen
- Adding an "Add friend" option for players in multiplayer lobbies - Multiplayer lobbies (like Skins, Match Play, Alt Shot) now have this button
- Improving the aimer on the minimap - There are now limits to how far it can be moved, it can no longer be dragged all the way off the screen
We're also making some great progress on other items from our last post:
- Improvements when using 1920x1080 in windowed mode - We have a working version now, and I can say without hesitation that it is much better than the current version. We expect to release it in this state (as a major improvement), while we continue exploring how we can make it perfect.
- Improving the options menu to be more intuitive - We're in the early stages of this. We tried making various changes to the current UI that didn't feel quite good enough, so we're exploring a full redesign that looks more standard to other PC games.
- Improving mouse scrolling - We have a great version of this right now that we expect to release soon. It improves the mouse scrolling from "almost not scrolling at all" to "hey, this is normal scrolling!”
- Adding an in-game restart button for rounds that can be replayed - This is something I get a ton of requests for and I'm happy to say we’re making great progress on it. I expect we’ll be able to release this very soon and I'm happy to be able to stop rage-quitting after I 3-putt on a par 4 and start rage-restarting.
- Improving the lobby "ready" timer to better indicate the status of the player - This one is proving to be a bit trickier than we expected: TBD.
- Improving tournament leaderboards - We have a version now that we've tested a bit and have had really positive feedback from players so far. While it's already a huge improvement, it's not 100% just yet. We may do more tests with it soon, so don't be alarmed if you see a new leaderboard.
A couple extra things we’re working on that I wanted to share:
- Keybindings - Yes you can toggle a camera with spacebar, but what if you could open chat or remove the flagstick? Well you will be able to very soon. The first version of keybindings is coming together. “But what if I want custom keybindings?” That’s coming too, but not in the initial version. We won't have the list in the game for keybindings at launch so expect another post from me after we release with the list of keys and what they do.
- In-game menus - You may ask, why is there a right side and a left side menu? This is a good question that we wondered too. So we're combining them into ONE left side menu. (You'll also be able to open and close it with the ESC key.)
This is not a complete list of what we're working on as we continue making changes and improvements to the game, but we’ll be posting these updates regularly to keep you in the loop.
Thank you for reading and thank you for playing WGT Golf!
_CHAMPION
P.S. Please keep sending us your feedback.