b101 Routing Challenge Design - BETA

[cer1949]

After participating in b101's routing challenge, I decided to finish the holes to see how my routing worked out. I have published a beta of the course as BETA CER 1949. Except for the trees on the borders, I have done no planting. I spent a couple of days trying to plant long grass and bushes, but my meter kept maxing out. This morning, I deleted all that planting.

Attached is a scorecard for the course.




The first hole in the published beta contains an extra bunker that I must have copied and pasted when I was planting. I have deleted this bunker in the course in case I decide to publish it as final. Without the extra bunker, the first hole looks like this:



Here is a short flyover of all eighteen holes:




If you play the Beta version, I would appreciate any comments for improving the course; also any tips on keeping the meter from maxing out when planting grass (aside from single planting several acres of grass which I'm not going to do, lol). Copying and pasting seemed to be working pretty well for filling in large areas, but the file grew too quickly for me to finish more than a handful of holes.

[sandgroper]

Wow, tough course in very high winds playing masters.
There are some great holes out there that require better course management than I have.

Planting on these courses is always a fine line in managing the meter.
Have you got grasses and plants on maximum in the terrain? Free auto planting can fill up some areas.

[cer1949]

Are you referring to the auto-generation settings when you first start a new design? Those I always set to zero. If there is some other setting I need to consider for plants, I need to learn about it. I noticed some talk on the forums here about splining to plant grass. What is that? The only time I use splines is when I lay down surfaces. I guess I still have a lot to learn, lol. My memory and object meter are now around 52% after deleting all my grass planting; they were both up over 80%. But my game file maxed out at 100%. When I deleted the grass, my game file shrunk all the way down to 5.6%. So it was just the grass that was causing problems. It looks like I can plant greater quantities of grass with less problems if I do not have too many varieties of grass in the mix. I noticed when I deleted about half the varieties, that my game file came down quite a bit.

I did a lot of copy and pasting. I started with maybe seven or eight grass varieties and created a small patch in which I varied the heights and rotated the shapes. I then copied that patch and pasted the copy next to the first one. I then copied both and pasted them next to the first two, etc. I created a "grass farm" of sorts in one large patch of grass that resulted from this process. I then used that to copy from and paste grass, in different patch sizes and shapes, in different locations around the course. But I could tell after the first couple of holes, I was going to run out of capacity because the game file was ballooning.

Thanks for playing the course, by the way. I always appreciate it. I've not played this course in anything stronger than medium winds yet, and I haven't gone quicker than firm and fast conditions. Because of the restricted size of the land plot, this course is about 1,000 yards shorter than some of my previous designs. So I was surprised to get two long par 5s out of it. I wasn't really trying to do that. It just worked out that way. Having to make everything fit into the routing resulted in a pretty diverse mix of holes distance-wise. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to find holes in the tract. I don't have b101's eye for that, or his skill in shaping a great course out of the topography (I'm sure I moved a lot more dirt than he did), but it was fun to see what would result.

[sandgroper]

In Settings-Terrain-Grass crank that up to max. You just need to watch where the autogen goes as it sometimes creeps into playing surfaces so I always run the Clear Generated Objects along all my splined edges.

Do you use the AutoHotKey HyperPlant?
tgctours.proboards.com/thread/26720/fast-planting-script-autohotkey-controllers

Planting grasses that are native to your theme doesn't "cost" as much in file size.
You can find these by going to the plant grass menu and clicking Y on the controller.
If you use "imported" grasses then the file has to "remember" them in the file as they are not native to the theme, which increases file size.

Here's the Countryside theme with grass set to zero


and again with it set to max


So free grass! There are 11 local grasses in the Countryside theme.

[cer1949]

Thanks, this looks promising! I will give it a go with grass. I got away from using the max setting on trees because it planted bushes as well as trees, and I spent a lot of time locating and removing the bushes. But this may solve my mass planting problem with grass.

I have not downloaded or used the hyper-plant, auto-key program for planting although I remember watching the video. I have a controller, but I don't use it to design; I don't often use it to play either. I do almost everything with a mouse and keyboard these days.

[sandgroper]

Same, I use keyboard and mouse in the designer, so auto key works fine with that. You can also play with the script to build out your own settings for it.