Hello All!
We are back and we have a nice update for you all. Let's jump right into it!
Bot Speech Bubbles
Whenever you are playing a bot and they complete a hole, land in the water, or launch a ball out of bounds, they will now share a fun or comedic comment on how they feel about their accomplishment (or lack of). We are very excited about these new speech bubbles as they add a lot more life and entertainment when playing with bots.
Speaking of playing with bots...
Play with up to 7 Bots at a Time
When you beat a bot, you can play against them in online or local gameplay modes. With a little bit of programming magic, we have made it where you can play with up to 7 bots at a time.
You can even configure which types of bots you want to play with, such as random, easy, medium, hard, or competitive. You can even turn them off if you prefer.
I have to admit, playing a match with bots everywhere can be a ton of fun, if that is your kinda thing.
Bots Bots Bots Achievement is Fixed
Yes, this achievement is finally fixed. If you have already beat all 50 bot challenges, just go play and beat Joe Duffy again and the achievement will unlock for you. For those that haven't beat all 50, keep trying.
I know you can do it!
Improved Golfer Transparency
If you are anything like me, you have found it pretty annoying when other golfers blocked the view of your putt. There is good news for you. In this update whenever another golfer is blocking the view of your putt the game will fade the golfer to transparent. We also made a couple of adjustments to the golfer transparency shader so the quality will be improved there as well. The golfer transparency works in VR as well.
Can you even see the golfers blocking the putt view above? Nope. Okay maybe a little bit.
Introducing Practice Mode
If you are anything like me, you were very frustrated when you built courses and just wanted to test the 17th hole during gameplay. Previously, that meant you had play through holes 1 through 16 just to get to the hole you want to test...and you only had 1 chance to test it. In addition to that, you probably had some times where you wanted to play around or experiment on a couple of holes but not keep score or have it affect your statistics (hello double bogey).
There is good news for you. In this update we introduce to you Practice Mode.
Practice mode allows you to pick any course, especially the ones your are designing, and select whichever hole you want to play over and over and over again. The one thing you need to know, you can only select practice mode when you play a local match. The great news is you can have up to 7 bots practice your course with you. I hear bots are great for testing courses. :)
Performance Updates
We have updated to the latest version of Unity engine and swapped out the Steam integration module. This has allowed us to pass on to you the following bug fixes and performance benefits:
- The game is now built with Unity's IL2CPP technology. To make a long story short, the game runs much more stable and faster.
- We enabled a new Unity feature called Incremental Garbage Collection. I'm sure many of you all have played many games that are built on Unity engine that suffer from occasional stutters or what feels like slight freezes in framerate. With Incremental Garbage Collection, those moments should now be a thing of the past.
- Framerate slowly dropping in VR is fixed. This issue is referenced here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/537630/discussions/0/2590022385670619613/
- Clouds rotating strange in VR when looking a certain direction.
- We have tuned the course loading code so it is much faster and smoother.
There are many minor bug fixes, performance fixes, and quality of life enhancements. These are not listed here but do add to the quality of the game experience.
And Finally, a Thank You
Folks, I'm going to be very upfront with you all. Last year around this time we put out a huge update. Shortly after that both Shake and I suffered very serious personal losses. We were both pretty down for a long time. A very long time, actually. It wasn't until November 2019 that we even had the energy and motivation to seriously get back on the game and move it forward.
I want to personally thank you all for your patience, kind words, and good reviews of the game. It really does affect us and keep us committed to getting this game to a full release for you. We are almost there.
Moving forward, we are going to spend a majority of our time focused on getting the game out on the consoles. The good news there, whatever features we add for console release will come over to the PC versions at the same time or earlier.
Again, we thank you all for your support and appreciation for this game.
Thanks again and have fun with the update!