The Match at Shadow Creek

[ChuckH]

The Match this year will be in Las Vegas At Shadow Creek on Dec 17th on TNT. It's LIV vrs PGA with Bruce Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau against Rory Mcllroy and Scottie Scheffler. It would be great to have an update on Shadow Creek. Any news?

[sagevanni]

I've kinda handed off the course to Ron Weel.
If Ron does not respond to this thread I can get it ready for play but I can not plant it due to windows 11 limitations on my new comp.
I will be trying to fix my planting issues when I can........I have a very sketchy time importing objects for my object library.
Anyway I'll keep plodding on....................

Sage......

[sagevanni]

I just tried a virgin install of APCD. I opened Shadow Creek and tried planting any number of objects. NO GO. I can not forest plant. I can place objects one by one but none of those are selectable with the "select/all" command. It's like nothing is there.
Alas my planting is not working at 100% and with that, I can not plant a course.
Thanks windows 11......

Sage.......

[Weeler]

I, too, have had issues with planting SC. In fact, my APCD "locked up" a couple of times while trying to plant it, and I ended up losing at least 50% of the textures I had installed. In addition, the wait times for saving anything were unbelievable. I managed to plant half of hole 1, and tried saving it and it took about 50 minutes. It also frequently goes in to "APCD is not responding" mode, I have to "end the task". Personally, it almost seems to me like the course file has been corrupted somewhere along the way, I'm not sure.

Ultimately, I handed the course back to Sage, and told him I was bowing out of the planting tasks. The course originated with Danny D., then Sage started from scratch with a Lidar DEM, and I guess he can decide if he wants to "offer it up" to anyone else that may want to try finishing it. So, that's the latest from me. It's disappointing , I know.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, everyone !

Ron

[sagevanni]

I can get the course ready for play except for planting.
Let me know if I "should" or "should not" try?
I will get it ready if the "should" outnumber the "should nots"

Happy Thanksgiving........................

Sage.......

[Adelade]

My suggestion is that Weeler (if he wants to) does planting on Dan's original course. Sure, it is not a Lidar course, but the greens are made from strackaline 1-inch images (which is much higher quality than base Lidar), and the elevations for non-green areas are done from Google Earth which has high detail in this particular area. Dan never shied away from being meticulous about using a lot of readings - you can see a sample of how many points he used in the image below, which is from the overlay he shared with me for backup purposes a few years ago. The numbers show elevation in relative feet, which he then added manually one by one in APCD.

SCDanOL18.jpg (283.49 KiB) Viewed 6756 times

Add to this that he manually gave additional elevation accuracy to critical areas such as bunkers beyond the Google Earth readings. All in all - is it as good as 2m or 3m DEM (which I believe is the current standard for LIDAR imports for Links)? No it isnt, but it isnt all that far away either, and it does give a really good representation of what the course elevations are like in real life.

Here is what Dan told me about what was left to do from the version he last worked on before handing it off to Sage:

[Besides vegetation planting -] some tweaking around the creeks/ponds, general clean-up, perhaps some creekbed, or creekwater changes, pin planting, and greens texture needs to replace the StrackaLine overlays, hole descriptions need to be created, Splash Screens need to be created.

When I began the course, i looked at what 3D structures would need to be built. I watched videos of the course including a couple of tournaments, and I could never see any buildings. I then decided to not build any 3D buildings. You can't see them from the fairways anyways, they're mostly hidden by the trees, so why waste time building something that can't be seen?

It needs to be gone over carefully. The course construction and altitudes are all done, and I think all of the seam blending is finished. When I started it, it had thick green trees on the google earth view, so I tried to build the wooded areas between holes to look similar [he is talking about texture choices here], but about a year ago, GE reloaded some new graphic updates, and the whole course changed to yellow colors. I have the original overlay before the colors were changed. I made no attempt to change any course colors. That was after I lost my drive and interest in the APCD. It needs to be gone over and re-made into whatever anyone wants to change it to. Or, you can just leave it at it is and see how it looks once its planted.

I cannot commit to doing the planting, otherwise I can probably finish up the rest, or possibly find someone to help with specific parts of it. If you do the planting Weeler, I can make sure it gets finished. Doing it before The Match seems tough... but who knows (maybe an almost-completed-except-for-certain-features-beta if nothing else), and even if it wont be finished until after that, I still very much believe that it would be worth the wait.

[linkster]

Ron / Sage would you send me a pm with the latest version of Shadow Creek that you are working on? The excessive save times makes me think there is a bad path mapping geometry. I only ask for one day to look at the course file, that is if you are currently working on the file to get it ready for Dec 17th.

[Weeler]

Adelade,

Unfortunately, BOTH of these course files.....Dan's and Sage's "lock-up" my APCD when trying to work with them. (I rarely have that happen if I'm making changes to other "unlocked" courses.) They both load into the game, and I can see and play them, but when it comes to the APCD, they end up going into a continuous loop of "APCD is not responding", and I have to use Windows Task Manager to close down the program. So, at this point I really CAN'T plant either one, even if I wanted to.

Which brings me to the fact that the planting on this course ( in order to make it look right ), is pretty detailed and time consuming. I'm pretty sure, since I'm not all that fast at planting, that I wouldn't be able to meet the desired Dec. 17th TV air date. As I said earlier, I think it's best that I don't work on SC altogether. If Sage still wants me to plant any upcoming courses he's working on, I'll be more than happy to give them a shot. But for some reason Shadow Creek and my APCD don't get along. I've always wanted this course to join the LINKS roster myself, and I'm sure it can ,if someone else takes over, but unfortunately not me. Sorry.

Ron "Weeler"

[sagevanni]

Hi Everyone,
Linkster has worked some MAJIC on the course and save times for me are 2-1/2 minutes.
I'm going to get the course as ready as I can in the next few days for planting.
Keep in mind no matter what I do I can not get forest planting to work on my comp. I have tried multiple things and NOTHING works.
Someone will have to step up and plant it.

Sage......

[Adelade]

Separately, regardless of what happens with the Lidar version, I think I have decided to try to get Dan's version fully ready for planting (which might take weeks, or might take years) and then try to find someone to do the planting. Both me and Dan would love to see his version completed one day, he worked so many hours on it over the course of several years.

At one point I promised him that I would, one day eventually, finish the course for him (or find people to help with it), if he wasnt able to finish it himself. I always hoped he would regain health and motivation enough to do it himself, because I think there is something really special with a course fully done by Dan. When he gave it over to Sage, that freed me from my promise, but since Sage decided to start anew from scratch with a Lidar version (it did make me sad, but I do understand and respect the decision), I feel like the responsibility is back on me to get it finished one day again. And I would really love to see Dan's version finished one day too, so its not like Im in it out of obligation. I know my motivation will be highly impacted by whether the Lidar version comes out and how much I end up enjoying that one, but Im going to try my best to not let that effect me.