Links Corner Forum

Hi, may I ask a question,

What graphic disadvantages or advantages do I have, when I play without shadows?

It is clear, that the game starts quickly and the hard disk is protected.

How do you play?
. .

Titus

I believe that back in the day, turning off shadows helped either load time or rendering time. I don't know if it's a factor or not. Mine is turned on.

One thing I noticed is that your Display Mode is 1600x1200 at 16 bit as opposed to 32 bit. Is this by design?

I think the majority of those low quality settings are more relevant to 15 years ago, when people had dial up, limited bandwidth, and needed to make a effort to save every kb of data they could. Back then the internet speeds were slow, and so were computers,so it made sense to turn off shadows, lower res quality etc. Especially for playing oline. But these days, I think most people will go for the better quality. Even a budget laptop these days is miles ahead of a good one from 2000.

Cheers, AJ

Titus wrote: ↑July 4th, 2020, 12:10 pm Hi, may I ask a question,

What graphic disadvantages or advantages do I have, when I play without shadows?

It is clear, that the game starts quickly and the hard disk is protected.

How do you play?

Titus

Hi Titus. When you start a round of golf in Links and you are loading a new course for the first time, Links creates a ".sha" (shadow) file in the course directory for that course. Some of the really heavily wooded and planted courses can take a long time to load because of the shadow creation process. However, once that .sha file has been created, it stays in the courses directory so that the next time you play that specific course, it will load MUCH faster, because the shadow file is already there. It won't have to re-create it. So the only difference with, or without the shadows will be noticed the very first time you play the course. After that they load fast. Just be aware that these .sha files can be quite large for some courses, and if you don't delete them periodically, they can take up a lot of hard drive space. When I was playing every day, I would delete my .sha files about once a month to save hard drive space. Me and my pard rarely played the same course twice in a years time, so I didn't feel the need to keep the shadow files.

Dan

Shadows should be on, the courses will look better.

To explain further from what has been said:
In the past you would disable them on "really old" systems for mainly various performance reasons. Another issue back in the day, initial rendering of the shadow file could take some time on an old PC for certain courses. For this reason, you will notice some of the older course releases come with a shadow file included. This was to be installed with the course so the first time a user runs the course the shadows did not need to be built.

Links 2003 was never a very system intensive game even when new on hardware of that time. I can comfortably run the game and older course releases on my around 2000 hardware. This PC was used for Links 2000/2001/2003 (Pentium 4 2ghz, 1gig RAM, 128mb GPU)
Why Microsoft even bothered to include a FPS counter I have no idea. It never told you anything. It made absolutely no sense then, it makes absolutely no sense now.

moin guys, and thanks for the answers.

I knew most of it. I had simply forgotten that the shadows turned off and only noticed it after two months.
I only noticed it because I had no new .sha files.
I didn't notice it visually.

Shadows should be on, the courses will look better.

I wanted to hear that, now I can go through all the new courses again,
I'm always happy when I discover something new.

GoBucks,
One thing I noticed is that your display mode is 1600 x 1200 at 16 bits versus 32 bits. Is that intended?

no, these settings only show links, I don't change anything there.
My settings are 1920x1200 at 32bit 16:10 and I think this setting is a good compromise for a 16: 9 widescreen monitor.
At 1920x1080 on this monitor, the picture becomes even more distorted.

Thanks Titus

Titus wrote: ↑July 5th, 2020, 8:50 am I knew most of it. I had simply forgotten that the shadows turned off and only noticed it after two months.
I only noticed it because I had no new .sha files.
I didn't notice it visually.

That's because the shadows are directly under an object, a 12 o'clock shadow so they don't really stand out.
Links LS 2000 had beautiful shadows that swept across the course and greatly added to the visuals.
Then came Links 2001 which Microsoft completely removed shadows from the game.
Then came users all complaining that they have lost shadows.
Then Links 2003 was released with re-introduced shadows but they are not what they were in Links LS 2000.
It's one of the big plus points of playing the older Links LS 2000, you get nice shadows.

Then Links 2003 was released with re-introduced shadows, but they are not what they were in Links LS 2000.
It is one of the big pluses when playing the older Link LS 2000, you get nice shadows.

too bad, I only have - LinksLS 97, LinksLS 1999, MS Links2001 Edition and MS Links2003

Titus wrote: ↑July 5th, 2020, 11:03 am Then Links 2003 was released with re-introduced shadows, but they are not what they were in Links LS 2000.
It is one of the big pluses when playing the older Link LS 2000, you get nice shadows.

too bad, I only have - LinksLS 97, LinksLS 1999, MS Links2001 Edition and MS Links2003

Shadows in 99 would've been just as good. These old games don't work on Win 10 unfortunately so you need an old system to run them.

Danny D wrote: ↑July 5th, 2020, 2:24 am When I was playing every day, I would delete my .sha files about once a month to save hard drive space. Me and my pard rarely played the same course twice in a years time, so I didn't feel the need to keep the shadow files.

Dan

I even wrote a little batch file to do exactly that, they'll eat up a lot of room if you play many different courses.