Medomsley Marsh Beta2

[gmanuk1965]

In July last year I entered a course on this forum but under Completed Courses named The Big Elm Club which was slated by a number of players including a Twitch streamer called WhatAboutAmeobi. I am not complaining about the slating as my course deserved it and it showed me where I was at with golf design for 2K21. I took some of the advice on board and created another course which may be unfinished which is the one in the title.

Taking in the advice I was given on my last course, the thread being tgctours.proboards.com/thread/28994/ could people check out the new course and tell me what they think? I would also like WhatAboutAmeobi to check it out too if he still exists.

[fargo]

Yeah mate it can be demoralising when you've put time and effort into something and then it gets criticised. Doesn't feel nice but it's really a good way to learn and to improve. That streamer generally has good feedback and while I didn't watch the stream with your course, yes at times he can be quite critical. Good to see it looks like you've taken criticism in the right way by using it to improve.

I'll play your course tonight Australia time, so in about 12 hours.

[fargo]

Ok mate I'm playing it now, back tees and pin 1, default conditions.

I'm no expert, this is just my opinion and everything i say is meant constructively.

Long grass and other planting on fairways and light rough - I don't know if it's placed grass or auto-gen grass but a lawnmower has to cut that light rough so it probably shouldn't be there. This happens quite a few times throughout the course.

The green on the 2nd hole - I know you want to increase difficulty. But that's not a great way to do it with the big slope down to the water. There are very very few instances on real golf courses where a ball hit onto the green will roll down 15 feet into a lake. The entire right portion of the green is unusable, so it doesn't really need to be there - why not just cut the water closer to the green it something? If the entire green is lowered so it's sitting closer to water level you can get better more natural transitions between land and water - it's pretty tough to make a 15 foot difference look great unless it's a rocky cliff or something. If the green is down by the water you can actually bring the water more into play without it looking contrived.

I want to talk for a minute about those fences around the tee box areas. They're well putt together and they do serve their purpose of framing the tee shots somewhat. But every time I see one when I'm on a green I think - there's no way I'm walking all the way around past the ladies tee to get to the next tee-box. Thinking about how a real golfer would get around the course and including that in the design really helps to increase realism and make the course more immersive. The fencing also gets a bit repetitive every hole.

That also leads into another point - the holes feel very spread out. There's a hell of a lot of empty ground between the holes. A tighter routing tends to help things as you're more likely to get views of other holes from around the course, and there's less space to fill between holes. If your routing is tighter you can also incorporate the same plantings and natural land formations into more than one hole, and you can more naturally transition from one hole to the next, so the course feels more cohesive. The planting you do have is pretty good and of course you don't need to fill everything but at the moment the course feels a little spread out to me.

Hole 4 green - the mounding on the green looks very artificial. If, for example, you had some raised land behind the bunker which wrapped around the bunker at the back and then you had a nice slope off that mounding down onto the green, then that would give a similar effect but would look like it belongs there.

Hole 5 looks really nice. Simple clean hole down to the water. See how this low lying green looks a million times better than hole 2?
This is by far the best hole on the course so far. There's some grass on the green though, and the green sculpting could do with some love. And personally I'd drop the front two tee boxes down a bit so I can see down the drive a little better. But those are relatively small things.

Hole 7 - I see what you're trying but there's a couple issues - nobody's going to go down to the right, but if they did the hole is completely blind from there. Be careful with bunkers facing away from you, like that one on the right. You can't see it, and also bunkers are almost never cut like that, into the back of a hill facing away from your line of shot.

On the 8th tee I feel a sense of relief that there's no fence on the right. I really don't like them.

8 is a really ambitious hole. It's really hard to get this kind of hole design to work. This isn't the worst but it's a little too extreme. I can't make it over on the right and then I'm left with a shot I can't make with a 3 wood into the wind. It's just a little too much. It's also not actually increasing options off the tee - if the wind allows it you go right 100% of the time. If you leave the player in doubt as to which option to take then it's a more interesting hole. It's hard to achieve in game.

Watch your fairway spline points, there's a few weird looking zig zags here and there.

I'm on the 15th hole now. I've spent 14 holes where all the holes are very well spaced apart, there's heaps of vacant land all over the place, and then all of a sudden there's a complex of buildings ludicrously close to the green. Again I can see what you're trying to achieve but this is just completely out of place in the context of this course. And it's also one thing to get close to a built up environment, but no course is going to have a green tucked right up behind a property like that.

16 tee shot is blind

17 why is that bridge there?

18 can be nice but the second shot is blind to a pancake flat green and surrounds, which looks unfinished. Good bones.


There's some nice stuff, most of the planting and construction is well put together and many of the holes are decent golf holes. My biggest one suggestion is to try to tighten up your routing and work towards making the course more cohesive, rather than a collection of holes plonked in a giant field somewhere.

Hope this helps a little bit

[gmanuk1965]

You must have been playing the wrong beta but the only things I changed were the slopes of the greens in beta2 as in the course you played a lot of the greens the ball just rolled off. I do take all your points on board especially on lowering greens closer to the water, getting rid of all those fences, better sculpting and better routing (I think the routing was my main error because when I think about it I did very little routing). The bridge you mentioned on the 17th; I don't know why I put it there either, I must have thought it was a river not a road. I deleted it in beta2 and it was this that made me realise you were playing the first beta

Two problems I think I had in this course creating was
1. Next to no routing
2. This course took me around 6 months to do so far but it wasn't constant. I kept leaving it unfinished several times over the 6 months period that it got to the point that I had lost my initial ideas in creating the course. I think I done about the first four or five holes then left it for a month playing other games. I think doing a bit almost every day would rectify this.

Well I think it's back to the drawing board. I think I've carried out the unintentional blindness out OK (I think holes 16 to 18 were rushed so forgot about the UB and problem 2 would have been the cause of that). I think I will leave this course as unfinished and start again and take on board and rectify the 2 problems above.

I can also see that PC TGC golf is much more professional than PS4 TGC golf, the latter giving me very little feedback and the feedback given wasn't the feedback I needed.

[fargo]

Haha yes, it looks like I did play the wrong beta!

I don't think there's anything wrong with taking your time and being inconsistent with the time you spend working with your course. That's what I do, my last course took more than 6 months. Many people like to punch them out quicker.

Regarding the routing - I think there' a reason man people like making desert courses or courses through large waste bunkers / scrubland - you can spread the holes out and work on each individual hole as a discreet unit, and you've got something more interesting between the holes that looks good and ties the course to its environment. But that doesn't really work if you've got a parkland course like this one with large swathes of uninteresting grass between holes. It's not a bad way to go, then when you start to nail the strategy and the aesthetics of individual holes the next step is to start thinking about trying the holes together in interesting ways.

Also, as you go through the course you will naturally get better at various aspects of designing, when you make a breakthrough with some aspect of technique it's a good idea to go back and fix up 0reviiusoy designed holes to bring it back up to a consistent standard.

There is plenty to like here, like I said there's lots of good elements with regard to technique and strategy and it's a good foundation to keep getting better and better.

Anyway that's just my opinion, others have different approaches.

[gmanuk1965]

As routing is a major concern for this course it would mean deleting most of the holes and recreating them closer so it would be better to start a new course with better routing which I have already done. I've completed the routing for it