Dear Golfers,
Welcome to the first major update of 2024! This update introduces a new water simulation, a replacement navigation system, and many bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements.
Water Simulation
In the previous version of the game, water was just a single plane in the game world, limiting players' ability to create new ponds and rivers.
This update introduces the foundations of a new water system where water flows and accumulates as expected, in real-time, as terrain is edited. We are also providing some initial props to get you started:
- Water Outlet for spawning water at a location.
- Water Drains for removing water.
- Gully Tool to create streams easily.
- Pond Presets.
The new water system also opens up the possibility of integration with gameplay elements later. For example, golfers being stuck in water/drowning, course wear and flooding, heavy rainfall causing problems, and trees/foliage absorbing water. These features are all to come.
Please note that the new water system is more computationally expensive than the previous approach. Let us know how it performs for you.
Navigation
Until now, we've been using a popular third-party library for our AI navigation, which only took us so far. One of the hardest technical challenges in this release was developing a bespoke navigation system that is both fast at finding paths and responsive to water changes. We believe we've found the solution, but we would love your feedback and testing.
The new navigation system also opens up the following possibilities for future releases:
- Multiple layers of navigation for golfers to avoid walking over bunkers when they shouldn’t.
- Buggies navigating correctly with turning circles and favoring paths.
- Better handling of feature bridges and eventual custom-shaped bridges.
- Different navigation graphs for different agent types, such as animals.
We have some more work here to improve the paths and performance but first we wanted to get something in your hands to play with.
## Quality of Life
We've fixed many bugs and tweaked minor elements. Here is a small sample:
- More practice greens.
- Gully and ridge terrain tools.
- New terrain tool icons.
- Better tooltips.
- Bridge placement decals.
- Resolution scale option.
As a development team, we feel that these features are the last really risky changes we’re making. We anticipate that we can resume our schedule of more frequent updates for the rest of the year. If you find any issues, want to discuss features or make any suggestions please feel free to join our Discord.
Thanks for your patience and happy golfing!
The Golf Club Architect Team