Unlocking a golf course for editing

[BruMu]

The meshes for all MS courses were extracted at one time. Back in the days of APCD Courses, Mick (may he rest in peace) had them all and would give them to anyone who wanted to redo the courses.

Problem was, it was only the mesh and they were pretty messy, in need of a fair bit of cleanup. Still, they were a starting point.

No idea what happened to them after APCD closed and Mick passed.

[dorse72]

Like Bru said, they were extracted years ago by AJ (Mogulbasher) actually, not Mick, Mick had no clue how to do it, AJ was the genius behind all the APCD add-ons and hacks. I have a couple of the old Links LS courses with the hopes of re-doing them.

Here's the bad news, they are terrible! just start your course fresh, you will be so much better off. If you need help doing the terrain, there are a few here that can get you started I'm sure, or just lay out the topo-lines like I do and take your time, then start meshing in your course.

Lots of great courses in Michigan to add to the Links community for sure.

[BruMu]

Like Bru said, they were extracted years ago by AJ (Mogulbasher) actually, not Mick, Mick had no clue how to do it, AJ was the genius behind all the APCD add-ons and hacks. I have a couple of the old Links LS courses with the hopes of re-doing them.

Here's the bad news, they are terrible! just start your course fresh, you will be so much better off. If you need help doing the terrain, there are a few here that can get you started I'm sure, or just lay out the topo-lines like I do and take your time, then start meshing in your course.

Lots of great courses in Michigan to add to the Links community for sure.

I never said Mick extracted them, I said he had them. That was based on a post he made on the APCD Forums.

[FOOOOORE!]

Not too long ago I took a look at some of these courses with a hex editor. They seem to be encrypted, not simply made unusable by APCD by changing a couple of bytes here and there. One thing I did notice is the word "lock" in every course, locked or unlocked, appearing only once, and it was spelled with various cases, e.g. "Lock", "lOcK", "loCk", etc. There may be a clue there for someone looking to unravel the method by which they were encrypted, maybe that word and its particular case is itself a key used to encrypt that file (as I used to do in Olden Tymes, using a simple word like that and XORing all the text in a file using that key). I'm actually surprised no one has ever figured it out, but I suppose with it being so old a game there wasn't enough interest.

[woody4077]

Not too long ago I took a look at some of these courses with a hex editor. They seem to be encrypted, not simply made unusable by APCD by changing a couple of bytes here and there. One thing I did notice is the word "lock" in every course, locked or unlocked, appearing only once, and it was spelled with various cases, e.g. "Lock", "lOcK", "loCk", etc. There may be a clue there for someone looking to unravel the method by which they were encrypted, maybe that word and its particular case is itself a key used to encrypt that file (as I used to do in Olden Tymes, using a simple word like that and XORing all the text in a file using that key). I'm actually surprised no one has ever figured it out, but I suppose with it being so old a game there wasn't enough interest.

my thoughts exactly; golf games in general are sort of a "niche" product, and an almost 20 y/r old one is an ESPECIALLY "niche" product.

[Duck Hook]

lol. Yes, I know this is an old post but the guys are right. The extracted mesh was indeed that, just a flattened mesh. No seam blends or clear shapes where you could just go in and change a few textures here and there. Very messy. I acquired the mesh for Cambrian Ridge, looked at it for about a week wondering where to start and then just binned it and made my own. This is what it was like....

CRCapture.JPG (432.46 KiB) Viewed 1888 times

CRCapture1.JPG (783.26 KiB) Viewed 1888 times