Technical questions about the game.

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MrT
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Technical questions about the game.

Post by MrT »

By now I have played almost 400 games in my elected settings and I am starting to play with relative ease on almost all courses (not all of them, but most) and I have more time to concentrate on same technical aspects of the game (I mean Links, not the game of golf per se) and which has prompted a few questions that maybe have easy answers if asked to people who are more in the know than myself.

1) Does a designer control also the Physics of the game besides the features of courses? I mean, I can see that at times hitting from the rough is almost identical to hitting from a fairway, other times it can be quite penalized. On some links course, one is lucky if he/she just gets out of the nasty stuff. So, I am sensing that designers must have some control over how the game plays. The same happens when one ends up in sand bunkers. Some bunkers are actually nice and stopping the balls in there is safer than going on greens and see the balls roll forever out of the green

2) Is the effect of the wind always the same? I mean, after nearly 400 games I think I have accumulated some experience. If I play two different courses one after the other, it is not unusual to discover that the type of shots that worked in approaching the greens on one course do not work on a different one. This seems to be an even bigger issue (and this I want to ask really bad) when going over water. Today I was showing the game to a friend of mine and I was playing at Blue Monster where there are a couple of par 3s with water in front. Both myself and my friend kind of wondered if the ball was really slowing down more while going over the water than when traveling over fairways. I could not set up a real experiment, but having two people noticing the same thing is also a bit telling. Can a designer slow down how fast the ball travels depending on over what it travels? I reckon that I could have been emotionally invested, but my friend did not give a dime for whether the ball ended in the water or not.

3) I also noticed that on, several courses, there are the odd 1-2 holes where if one uses the top view to drive the shots, they do not travel as required. And this was not just a shot. I actually went back to the same holes in Practice Mode and had to over-correct aplenty for the shots to end up on the fairway instead of going into the "bunnies" and that despite having hit the balls in almost perfect center. This has nothing to do with Physics perhaps, but I am starting to entertain the suspicion that not all top views are really describing the course in a very faithful way. It is not the end of the world, but I was convinced that the top view was a miniature of the real hole and that they were in perfect agreement, aside for the size. Is that correct? For definitely it was not the case on a few holes at least.

4) Some holes seem to devour the balls. You put the balls reasonably close and they literally disappear in the cup. It is like there is ball eating monster. On other courses, even if the ball goes in the cup,then the ball starts to rotate around the cup and occasionally even comes out. The fact that this rotation thing happens only on certain courses and not all of them leads me to wonder if designers, again, have a control over how the ball is determined to be in the cup. Do they? It seems that some designers have this rotation around the rim going on much more often than others. Or is itjust my impression? I get the speed factor with which the ball hits the cup, but there were at least a few instances where I was left perplexed (like one full circle and then .. out?)

5) I am also noticing that, despite I select more or less the same settings 99% of the times, the greens play differently, On some greens, despite settings are the same Mc/Mc say, the speeds can be different. In some cases hitting from 10 yards, the ball goes past the hole, on a different course and a very similar green, the ball stops 2-3 yards before the hole even! So, this lead to my question: do designers have control over how a green reacts in terms of speed or is it left to the general algorithm like when one sets certain conditions? Talking about the same kind of greens and not hitting uphill on one and downhill on another. Just to be sure that I am not going to get that as an answer.

6) Last one. This has nothing to do with Physics per se. I am getting to the point that I can recognize who designed course X or Y (even for courses that I hardly ever play). It is the features when playing on the greens. Now, with fictional courses, that cannot be avoided, of course. But do designers also put some of their "personality" even in designing real courses for Links? In one particular case, I was playing a course which I enjoy because it is actually near where I was born and I do happen to know one of the members ( I will not name the course as that is not my point) who play on that course in real life. So, I was playing reasonably well until I got to a hole that was a complete nightmare. Like +5 on that single hole because the ball kept rolling past the cup no matter what I did. But, the green also looked too wild to me. (I have seen skiing bunny hills that are less extreme!) So I sent pictures and a video to the member who was happy to see his local course in a game. But then he told me that, "yes, during tournaments we set the stimp at 11 or 12 and so the greens become slippery", but he added that no hole of their plays that wild and that the contours were a bit overboard in his opinion although he agreed that their greens are definitely not the flat type. That cause me to think about the issue of designers' personalities in creating the game version of a real course. And it would also explain why on different editions of a same course, they are not necessarily equally difficult. Sometimes the old ones are easier, sometimes the new ones are easier for probably they are designed better. For instance Waialae, I am much better in the new version than in was in older ones (in terms of overall scores and despite now I play in Mc/Mc or even higher vs. the M/M or so in older versions).

Thank you.
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Jimbo
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Re: Technical questions about the game.

Post by Jimbo »

Hi Mr. T:

I''m not a designer (and I don't play one on TV :laugh: ) but after nitpicking a few courses and playing almost all of the real ones, I'll share my experience as a player:

1. As far as the physics are concerned, I find that if I hit into regular rough I can use any club to get out...even though your caddie usually gives you more club than you need (if you hit a "clean" shot back onto the fairway, you'll get at least 10 extra yards of roll (depending on wind). Britiah bunkers can be a pain (for which we can blame Mr. Brooks! :naughty: ) but there are a couple of ways to extract yourself, depending on your lie and how close you are to the green. The full "bunker swing" only needs to be used when you're not in a green side bunker. I find that adding one club to your normal shot will get you where you want to go (again, depending on the wind).
Green side bunkers use a partial swing-it takes a little experimentation to get it right-beware...plugged lies are dangerous and do not take as much swing to get where you want to go.
2. Wind can add/subtract one (breezy) to 3 (windy) clubs, depending on whether you're hitting uphill or downhill. If it's blowing across your path you can either aim right/left or play draw/fade. The wind direction is not always consistent (I suggested a prevailing west wind at St. George's in Toronto but it couldn't be done).
3. I find that he overhead shots are more a "guide" than anything-I treat them like a club website guide! :smile:
4. I wish I had your luck-I get more lip-outs than anything these days!
5. Agreed, but golf is an imperfect game, isn't it?
6. I'll leave that one to the experts!
Last edited by Jimbo on April 2nd, 2022, 5:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
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MrT
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Re: Technical questions about the game.

Post by MrT »

Thank you Jimbo.
Yes, I play windy a fair amount and I came to the conclusion that for my way of playing in RTS, If I have the strongest headwind, the shots will lose 30 meters or 33 yards, so, like yourself I tend to go up 3 clubs or roughly that as well. Of course, if I am hitting downhill maybe I go up 2 clubs.

But, this was more about whether the wind is causing systematically the same effect as on a per Links algorithm or if designers can alter some parameters in the game to make rough tougher to get out or less hard to get out, etc. I am starting to suspect that there are parameters that one can set at the designer's level.
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Re: Technical questions about the game.

Post by pmgolf »

I'm pretty sure about my answers, but for the guys who love to correct everything others say, I do admit that I can make mistakes. I try not to, though. Don't be like Nixon.

Caveat: ----------------------------------------------------------------
Chart the distances if you doubt it, but do you think you can hit 2 shots exactly the same - ever? And also: "can't prove it but it might be true": a good programmer would figure out a way to put a tiny bit of randomness into a golf shot. Did Access do that? Perhaps. It would be the same for all players, favoring no one!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

You have basic terrain properties like rough, high rough, fairways, cart paths, sand, and greens, and course designers try to assign the right property to the particular texture. High rough can be called heavy rough or deep grass, but it's still high rough. High rough needs the distance to be multiplied by 20% in order to go as far as it would out of plain rough. Rough and high rough both tend ro run farther when landing. I believe "fringe" and "fairway" play the same. Same with rough and 1st cut. Cart paths, concrete, asphalt and hardpan are all the same - property-wise. Terrain that's part sand and part grass can be assigned the sand property or a grass property, but if your ball lands in it and your caddy gives you a club for a explode shot or a pick shot, the property is sand. There is no property for rough-A, rough-B, and rough-C. If it's rough, it will play with the plain old rough property. I believe it's possible to change the properties a little, but holy h-e-l-l will be raised by the players so I doubt if any course developers will do that.

The wind effect is always the same. Your nerves affect how far the ball travels over the water. 30 years of playing Links have taught me that! Nerves also affect whether or not your ball gets over the water in real life, too!

There is no connection of the a:top view to the b:regular course view. They are simply 2 views of the same thing - neither one influences the other. They are pretty dog-gone close though. Understand though that the top view is pretty small - don't cut your clearances too close. If 2 shots aren't exactly the same, are you sure that there isn't a 1 pixel difference in the 2 swings, or a wind change happened for 1 second - or maybe the caveat above is involved?

The greens only play differently if the speed and firmness settings are different. Mc Mc is the same on every green. So is Fc Fc. See Caveat above.

And your statement: "Like +5 on that single hole because the ball kept rolling past the cup no matter what I did." Sorry, pal. Your putting s-u-c-k-s! jk It's not the course, it's not the hole, it's not the equipment, it's not the cazoombas on the beer cart girl, it's YOU! All of your competitors can make that putt! (I asked them!) If lag-putting doesn't work, then you're playing the wrong conditions for the course. It IS possible to set greens up to be impossible, you know.

Pete
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Adelade
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Re: Technical questions about the game.

Post by Adelade »

The original post posed so many questions - and there being so many different aspects to possibly take into account for many of them - that I think a lot of things have yet to be brought up, and therefore I figured I may as well give my own perspective on all of them while Im at it. In no way am I trying to correct - or even address, for that matter - previous answers. Just making my own, not forcing anyone to read it!

1. There are so many aspects to this question that, a full analyze might take a 10 page essay or more. To go into any kind of detail at all about it, first of all it is very important to know about a certain obscure mechanic of the game which separates the conditions when hitting out from any type of rough into either 'standard' or 'hidden ball' (thats an unofficial term, I dont think there is any official one for it). When your lie is in any type of rough, sometimes the ball will be mostly hidden from view in the lie icon, like you can only see a little bit of the top of the ball, that means you are unlucky enough to be in the 'hidden ball' state or whatever to call it. I dont know the exact numbers, but it is clear that such lies results in more ball speed than usual being taken away from the shot for that type of rough, and possibly there are other ways in which the shot gets effected as well (like ball spin and starting trajectory height for example, but it is difficult to say for sure).

Another big thing that affects the scope of your question, is how well you hit your shot. This might vary a little bit depending on which swing type you use, but I bet it works at least somewhat similarly on them all (except for easy swing I guess, which I believe always hits all shots equally cleanly(?)). Basically, when hitting from any type of rough, there is an additional penalty for poorly hit shots, which is greater than for shots from the fairway. For example, if you misshit slightly a shot from the rough, the ball speed (and I believe also starting trajectory height and ball spin, perhaps along with other shot properties) gets impacted much more than from the fairway. If you have your golfer set to Professional in "difficulty level", you might not notice it much, because the penalty there (at least on Classic swing) is really small regardless, but it is very easy to tell the difference on Champ after a while of playing, and I believe even more so on Elite. For mid- and long irons from standard rough on Champ+Classic, you really need to hit the snap fully perfectly to get a decent carry distance. Not to mention deep rough, where the penalty is yet more severe.

There are more factors to take into account, such as planted grasses (as in grasses that your ball can pass through, as opposed to surfaces), many times when you're in deep rough, you have to deal with those affecting the shot too, but I will skip adressing that beyond this brief mention, it should be easy enough to recognize when those may come into the equation.

With that out of the way, we can adress the designer side of things. Yes designers actually have quite a lot of control over all sorts of shot properties (both ones that matter when hitting from the texture (i.e. surface) and when bouncing or rolling on the texture) and can set those differently for many different textures and then mix and match as much as the designer wants. However, doing this is a pretty inconvenient process, which (along with the reason pmgolf mentioned, about players generally not welcoming it) has led to almost no designer ever actually doing it. So, by and large, you can rule this out. I would estimate that 98% courses out there have fully standard texture properties that Links itself determined, and the rest usually only have a very select few exceptions, which mostly tend to be about sands or fringes. In fact, the only course I've encountered, that I can remember, which did any custom texture properties to any type of Rough, was Inverness Club by Bruce Ditmyer, who made a 'semi-rough' or 'first-cut' rough with properties exactly in between fairway and standard rough. Usually you can find out which these rare exceptions are if you read course notes and any ReadMe files that come with course downloads.

Sidenote: There are also a few courses that have custom properties for the standard fairway and greens, but (since they are in particular fairway or green textures) you will never actually experience those unless you yourself actively choose to play with "Course Conditions" at your green firmness and green speed settings. The custom fringe property exceptions I mentioned above are different, since they were changed by those designers to technically be categorized as Ice or Rough or something else that is not Fairway or Green - just to circumvent the need for the Course Condition setting.

Lastly, Im sorry if this is too obvious, but it should to be said that the bounce & roll distance for shots from Rough and Deep Rough depends so, so much on what the terrain looks like. If the hole is situated 30 feet below your lie and there is only downhill fairway and green between you and the hole, you can hit it much further from the rough than if it had been from a fairway lie. At least on the more realistic green firmness and speed settings. On the flipside, if its mostly rough between you and the hole and its uphill, and its a far enough shot where you cant carry the whole way anyway, you might only get half the distance compared to if you had had a fairway lie even if you hit it perfectly (at least on Champ Classic). Whether the lie itself is uphill or downhilll can have a really big effect as well.

2. I have nothing to back me up here, but I wholeheartedly think your experience here comes down to an "illusion" so to speak, and I also think it is not an unusual illusion to experience. Well, what I can say is that there is no way for designers to change how much the ball slows down while in the air above textures. Hmm, I realize now that I say that, that there is a way to do it with basically-transparent smoke as 2D objects lol, but I cant imagine anyone would be so committed to sadism to go through all the trouble of doing that (on top of the massive trouble of learning APCD in the first place) just to saboutage players on purpose. Im pretty sure we can rule it out lol. Anyhow, I think it is a common phenomenon for players to be surprised at how much carry you need over water, partly because we tend to mostly account for where the ball should be after the full shot, rather than how long the carry of shots is. Also, it is a natural thing for the ball to lose speed on the horizontal plane towards the end of the ball flight compared to the start of it.

3. I dont know if it might exaplain your experiences or not, but one thing I remember noticing back before I stopped using the top cam (which, to be fair, was a really, really long time ago), was that the graphic for the ball location on the top cam always, to me, seemed to consistently be displayed a tiny bit too far up compared to where the ball actually was. Judging by the top cam alone, it often seemed like the ball just barely had cleared a hazard, when it in fact had not. Other than that, Im pretty sure the top cam is a fully accurate display of exactly where the terrain lines go (to scale, of course), as long as you take into account 2D object top views (normally just trees) being separate from the terrain (the 2D object top views are often not particularly accurate). Also, a bunch of courses have improper texture properties very close to where two different textures meet, where for example what visually looks like the last bit of fairway in fact physically counts as rough. Where this is the case, you can usually tell by putting the Aim marker there, and the terrain it displays on the left of your screen, which always goes by the physical one rather than the visual.

Lastly - again - sorry if this is too obvious, but just in case: Remember to account for the fact that the projected club distances by Links include the carry plus the bounce & roll. If your Driver says it goes 285 yards, that doesnt mean you should expect it to clear a water hazard that ends 280 yards away, given no height difference nor wind.

4. Yeah, Links 2003's cup physics appear slightly unnatural in that sense for some types of ball interactions. I believe it is just your imagination about it being different on some courses, because designers have no control over that. On the other hand, in my experience, you encounter more unnatural swallow-incidents the harder you tend to hit putts, and in Links 2003, compared to real life, it is in my opinion much easier and much less often punishing to have as strategy to bang putts in really hard. Therefore I think a lot of Links 2003 players have that as habit, and especially so for people who mostly play on the sluggish pre-mod green settings, because then you kind of need to hit quite hard to begin with, and the ball goes from really high speed to completely still pretty quickly. This habit we've been trained into by the game, tends to show quite clearly, when we at those rare occasions actually do miss short putts, and we tend to get really quite frustrated and surprised when our ball goes past the hole so terribly far. Some course designers tend to design greens that are less appropriate for faster green settings, and then if you use slower settings for those compared to other courses, I could imagine you might notice the odd swallow incidents happening more often on the courses with more unrealistic "rollercoaster" type greens.

5. Seems very mysterious to me, I have not had the same experience at all. The only explanation I could even remotely think of is with those very rare few courses that have custom green properties, but like I said earlier, you wont experience those unless you choose to play with "Course Conditions" for green firmness and speed, and Im assuming you havent been.

6. Yes, even if we only talk about real courses, a designer's personal touch is there to a rather great extent for most real courses out there, since most of them were made without any accurate green elevation information, and many times even without any elevation information whatsoever! The designer is then forced to do what they think is best, which definitely had varying results depending on how much one values realistic greens. Before I continue, I want to point out that I very much do not mean to complaining about that, we all need to be very happy that designers still made real courses without having any green info (I know I am!), or else Links would probably never have taken off at all.

I might be off, but I would estimate maybe 60-80% real courses out there were made without accurate green elevation charts. 3-inch charts, from what I've seen, gives pretty accurate forms when seen from afar, but when putted on you can feel quite a bit of designer's interpretation still. 2-inch charts are fairly accurate, but putting is such a fine art that you can still tell the difference in terms of gameplay based on how careful the designer was. 1-inch charts seems to give such little room for interpretation from the designer that it can largely be neglected in that sense, but in more subtle ways you can actually still tell many designer characteristics. For example, I hear different designers use slightly different amounts of APCD measurements per inch of chart height. Also, different designers use varying amounts of vert densities, which can have very slight (and largely insignificant) effects even on 1-inch charts. Last but definitely not least, how the designer places pins on their greens tends to have rather huge consequences of how they feel for the player to putt on. Now, after saying the above, I feel the need to put a big disclaimer here, because I know how much time it takes to create greens in APCD using different methods, and I want to be very clear that in no way do I think it is reasonable to expect any designer to do their greens or whatever in any certain way. Sure, I may sometimes wonder how it could feel worthwhile to spend so much time making a course without getting the pins reasonably right, when they are such a big gamechanger to players, but that is always the designer's own choice and I would never expect any designer to do anything beyond what they themselves feel like.
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MrT
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Re: Technical questions about the game.

Post by MrT »

Thank you Adelade. That answers a lot of questions. If you tell me that there is no desire by designers to "trick" players, I do believe that. Besides, what would be the purpose, honestly?

I am starting to play in champion mode and I was noticing that errors from rough seemed to be punished more, yet I thought maybe it is my imagination.
Your comment prepared me.

Elite level I am not sure if I will ever play it. I find the ability to judge a course without a top view assistance to aim shots quite deceiving. I mean, even on a 25 each display the view that I get is too compressed vs. what eyes see on a course and what they see through a display screen on a PC. Only way would be to literally memorize a course and, frankly, I hope that I never get there, non now in my 50's and not even in my 80's, if I am lucky enough to get there.

And thank you for confirming to me that even real courses are not exactly an identical copy of real ones. I mean, I already made up my mind when I started to send short videos and static pictures to people who are members on some of the courses or who at least played there and they said something along the lines of "similar, but not quite". At least your honest answer confirmed what I was hearing from these people. I am known to be the opposite of shy when it comes to contact people in the know and I was inquiring on my own. 20+ years at Wall Street kind of forces one to be pretty daring in approaching people and ask (there is no penalty for asking, worst case scenario they don't answer)

I also suppose that, as you pointed out, on "water holes", the need to stop the ball immediately after the water is the real culprit and we tend to put less speed in our shots for that reason (in particular in RTS this might be more the case as tensing up a bit can do that). It makes sense.

IF I MAY ASK ONE MORE QUESTION. You mentioned certain conditions as being the "Course conditions". Some time ago, someone told me in a different forum not to use those conditions and that they only work on some courses. I accepted that explanations and never inquired. But, since you brought them up... What/How should one use "course conditions"? And what do they mean? Does it imply that the course will play with the actual stimp as in real life?
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Jimbo
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Re: Technical questions about the game.

Post by Jimbo »

Just like real life 2 rounds of golf should never be exactly the same no matter what the conditions might be. Once that happens people will move on to other things.
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Captain Nemo
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Re: Technical questions about the game.

Post by Captain Nemo »

Thanks Adelade for the Links version of War and Peace. I always thought I might write it, but now I'm too old. :smile: Seriously it is a great summary of the key features of Links and Links course design capabilities and featrures. If I could remember how to save stuff I would do that.
Casptain Nemo: :cheers1:
I always wanted to write something intelligent in my signature. Now that I think about it, I guess I just did! :clapping: :smile:
pmgolf
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Re: Technical questions about the game.

Post by pmgolf »

Mr. T: "What/How should one use "course conditions"? And what do they mean? Does it imply that the course will play with the actual stimp as in real life?"

Course conditions are selected by choosing "Course Speed using Course Conditions" and "Course Firmness using Course Conditions" in the drop-down menus when choosing green Speed and green Hardness for your round. They have nothing to do with Stimp.

Pete
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MrT
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Re: Technical questions about the game.

Post by MrT »

Ok. Pete but what is the practical implication vs. choosing the other settings?
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