New blog on Creating Realistic Sky and Clouds
Also:
If you are not on Twitter but have a question you would like to ask, post it here and we will tweet it to them.
New blog on Creating Realistic Sky and Clouds
Also:
If you are not on Twitter but have a question you would like to ask, post it here and we will tweet it to them.
Latest Blog on TGC Audio & Commentary: http://thegolfclubgame.com/2014/02/1...-of-golf-club/
DEVELOPMENT DIARY: JOHN MCCARTHY, SENIOR AUDIO DESIGNER
Golf can be a relaxing game…if you let it. I’d like to let you relax while playing The Golf Club. The ambiences are lush, the music is chill and the commentary keeps things casual. I hope the cumulative effect of this is a soundscape that helps to ease people into an escape from their noisy lives for a while.
Golf-Recording-Diptic
Recording SFX for The Golf Club
SFX
We’ve sourced as much original content as we could for the sound effects in the game. I’m a strong believer in making your own library of sounds to pull from when making a game like this. We went out to the local golf club here in Lunenburg to capture all of the club-hitting-ball sounds. The great guys at the pro shop even let us on to the driving range before it was open to the membership! I can’t say enough about the folks up at the Lunenburg Golf Club. Above are some photos of me capturing some of the sounds for The Golf Club.
The other big part of the soundscape in TGC is the ambiance. I have recorded some great stuff in various places in Nova Scotia to use in our game. Each course theme will have its own flavour of ambiance as a bed with other ambient elements on top. One cool part of the ambiance system is some fancy code that our Technical Audio Designer cooked up that will find the closest batch of trees to the golfer and place an audio emitter in those trees with some sounds that we recorded in the forest like birds, chipmunks, etc. The other ambient element that really puts you in the environment is the wind system. I’ve tuned the wind to only be present when it has a chance to affect your shot. So it doesn’t start to peak out of the mix until the global wind speed get to around 10-12km/h. I also tie the wind volume to the height of the camera so when it follows the ball through the air – or gives you a flyby of the current hole – the wind gets a bit of a boost. When the ambient elements start combining with the ambiance bed, you get some really neat immersion happening. So when you aim your shot and the camera flies to the predicted landing area, you actually hear the perspective shift with the camera.
MUSIC
The musical element of the soundscape is also very chill and relaxing. I wanted to present my own take on ‘golf music’ for a next-fen video game. I was listening to a lot of Emanciptor, Susanne Sundfør and the soundtrack to Oblivion when I came up with the tracks in TGC and this really helped to focus in on where I wanted the music to go. Here is a taste of our main menu music:
COMMENTARY
TGC-Venn-Diagrams
Speech Target for The Golf Club
The speech system in The Golf Club was built during the development of Rugby World Cup 2011 with traditional play-by-play commentary in mind. This means it is quite complex BUT that doesn’t mean it HAS to be used in a traditional context. In keeping with my theme for the soundscape of The Golf Club, I wanted the commentary to have a casual vibe. There are still elements of TV commentary like our semi-official sounding intros/outros and inter-hole score updates to keep you in the loop as your round progresses. There are also little comments that get triggered pre-shot with info like distance to the hole, info about your lie, etc – sort of like a caddy. You may get a little light-hearted ribbing when you mess up but it gets balanced by much praise when things go well. My hope is that when it all comes together, you will have a nice balance of relevant information and entertainment.
The cool part for me with regard to commentary is that I’m not only the designer but I am also the voice. I recorded a lot of placeholder speech early on so that I could communicate the tone I wanted to go for with the speech in TGC and I think it started to grow on people. Then after hearing good feedback from various neutral third-parties the decision was made to stick with my voice which gives me a lot of advantages over the traditional means of implementing commentary in a game. The traditional flow for recording commentary for a sports game goes like this:
Design –> Schedule voice talent –> Record –> Edit and implement samples –> Maybe book pick-up sessions
The thing that makes this workflow so inflexible is that you are dependent on the availability of the talent. We’ve taken that hindrance out of the loop and so since I’m implementing the speech and am also the source of the speech, the turnaround time is minuscule compared to the traditional way of doing things. I can just sit at my desk and play the game and if I get an idea, I pull the mic over, hit record, and after a half-hour I have brand new speech in the game. Needless to say, I am super excited to see how we can evolve the commentary post-release.
The commentary is always on my mind and will be constantly evolving after release. We will be pushing out updates in the months to come and the commentary will evolve with each update. I really want to tap into the community to get feedback and suggestions of how our commentary can progress. I’ve even set up a twitter account to try and keep in touch with everyone. I’m also using it to take a deep dive into golf and sports gaming on twitter by following all my favourite golf personalities and sports game journalists. Thanks to those of you who tweeted me questions for me to answer in this Dev Diary! If you still have audio questions, just hit me up at @NewVoiceOfGolf on Twitter.
A lot of interesting stuff there. I like what he is trying to do, especially the ideas about ambient sound.
More editing
Creating holes from scratch
Club distance charts and info
http://thegolfclubgame.com/2014/02/2...istance-chart/
From dev thread
A clarification to the "Normal" / "Drive" terminology. Drive does not mean you are hitting the ball off a tee. We allow for full stance contol. So, you can add loft or deloft your club as much as you want. The Normal yardage comes from a situation where you have added 0 degrees of loft. So, at impact you are striking the ball with the exact loft printed on the club. Those are the arcs you are seeing in the Shot Arcs pic. The Drive yardage numbers come from a sitiuation where you have either added loft or delofted the club to gain maximum distance. The loft at impact here would be different than the stamped loft on the club. This is called the dynamic loft for those Trackman junkies out there. With an 8.5 dgree driver for example, the ball is played closer to the front foot, adding say 3 or 4 degrees of loft, making the dynamic loft at impact about 11.5 degrees. This generates more back spin for the Driver causing the magnus effect to carry the ball further thna it would normally. Now for the short irons, the magnus effect works against you for max distance shots. You generate a TON of back spin which causes the ball to climb very quickly and it follow a higher, shorter arc. Now, if you were to deloft the short iron you would gain more distance but significantly less backspin. The ball will travel further but won't check up. Not really what you'd usualy use a short iron for. It's like the oppsoite of a flop shot. That being said, we don't stop you from doing it. One thing to note is that in our game, the more you mess with the dynamic loft the more difficult the shot becomes to execute. For instance, hitting the lob wedge 138 yards needs a significant change to the dynamic loft to achieve. Unless you are perfect, you are hooking, slicing, skulling, or whatever other horrible thing you can imagine will happen to your ball.
Info on tournaments and tours
http://thegolfclubgame.com/2014/02/2...s-tournaments/
More on terrain design
Some coverage of the pc beta
While I like the option of playing from other fairways I do hope we have an O.B. option if wanted on some holes. Also, from what I have seen the difficulty scoring will be on the greens......long game looks very easy.
Adding objects
Very excited to know my courses will have places for "doing my business"
Dang! I talk to myself a lot in this thread
Thanks for the coverage SC I'm definitely intrigued by this one but my biggest problem with golf games is how easy it is tee to green and its just glorified darts.
More beta coverage. This guy has several vids for those interested.
In game wildlife, sorry J.B. no sheep, yet...................
I'm pretty sure there is more sheep banging in Montana than Nebraska, so are you trying to mask your own fetishes?
The dude abides.
Beta play through on a bay hill replica, part 1.
Originally Posted by JBHuskers
I'm pretty sure there is more sheep banging in Montana than Nebraska, so are you trying to mask your own fetishes?
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