Burnīs Old Links latest news
Burn's has turned out to be more challenging technically than I imagined it would be when I started this project back in late July. For a start this course brings together many different types of bunkers, each with their own unique construction technique:
The wooden faced Prestwick style bunkers:
The typical links revetted face bunkers:
The shallower sand washed face bunkers:
and finally the fringed rugged looking bunkers that lurk menacingly ready to trap the unwary!
Play the very oldest links courses and you will find a mixture of bunkering just like this.
The key to any good links course creation lies I believe in the green complexes. An otherwise great course can be spoiled by lack of natural looking elevation and lack of imagination in the green area. Too many otherwise great courses come unstuck in this area and I'm taking about real courses as well as ones created for links. In real course construction the advent of the usga specification green construction techniques has caused more than a few problems when it comes to creating flowing elevations around the greens, ie slopes that start around the greens and carry into the greens unbroken. Its less expensive and much easier to seperate the green from its surroundings and make internal green elevations that have little flow from the surrounding terrain. The real challenge I believe in both real course architecture and sim recreations like links is to make the greens flow with the overall contours of the land with sweeps, hollows, ridges, humps and bumps that make the green look like it was always meant to sit right in that spot. With the old links courses they didn't have to worry about usga spec greens!! They had all the natural drainage they needed from the sandy soil and so the greens you will find on such classic courses as St Andrews, Muirfield, North Berwick etc have few equals.
With Burn's Old Links I believe I have created my best green complex elevations yet. Time will tell if that is so or not, it's probably not up for me to decide so I'll have to wait and see what other people think!
Making the course "sit" in a believable enviroment has been a challenge too. I decided from the outset that the course would sit very close to the "Old town" and thus the 3d buildings were going to be in close proximity to the course. Making them in 3d mesh wasn't a possibility with 100s of houses being used so I used the 3d buildings from MS's St Andrews course which gave exactly the look I was after. The textures on them could be higher resolution though so I decided to set them back slightly from the road that borders one side of the course. The road is complete with pavements and custom road textures, don't park on the yellow lines though, you will be towed away!!
As the course moves further away from the town, the New course at Burn's runs alongside the Old for several holes. This meant I had to create some new holes on the wrong side of the out of bounds fence in order to create the illusion of another full course. I think it adds a lot to the ambience and in real golf you'll see other courses in very close proximity to St Andrews, Royal Birkdale and many other courses that sit on prime golfing linksland.
On another note, on my links style courses I usually use a set of what are called "mid" textures. This means that when a texture moves into the distance , the rendering engine switches the graphics file over to the mid texture and you can create some very nice effects by fiddling around with these to make dry spots in the grass and humps and hollows in the distance etc It also helps to break up the effect we know as "tiling". That's when the same small peice of texture is repeated over and over and looks pretty bad in the worst cases. The flip side of using the mid texures this way is that when using seam blending (which I do A LOT !) it can occasionally cause the dynacam view to show an unblended edge where the texture switches over from the close textures to the mids when in fact the edge is blended in the normal view. My priority at all times when I make a links course is the main camera view, that's the view that you would have when playing a course for real. The close up view in Links 2003 is even better and more realistic than the normal view we had before IMO. Given a choice between making something look perfect in the top or dynacam view or making something that looks great in the main view and I'll take the main view all the time.
Texture blending - well I've gone a bit OTT on the blending this time!! Lighter humps, darker hollows, dry patches, bad turf, worn areas, dirty sand in the wildest of the bunkers, sand splashed lips, rough grass around bunker edges etc. It takes time, lots of it in fact, as any designer will attest but the effects lift the visuals into another dimension. Every time I make a course I think of a new use for the mapping abilities of apcd 1.5. That's not a bad thing, but as I try and keep adding what I have learned to my new courses, they get more and more complex. Sometimes I long for the early days of apcd. Northern Dunes for Links 2001 was completed in 3 weeks part time now they take 6 weeks full time but I trust you can spot the difference!!
I hope you like the preview pics and some of the behind the scenes news, Burn's Old Links is in Alpha testing at the moment and will not be released until I'm 100% happy that it's as good as it can be. I'll post more news and pics soon, thanks for reading!