SL Golf? Thoughts after reading Philip's blog entry

After reading Philip's blog and his musings on a golf course in SL I got to thinking about it... espcially since I was a Nicklaus-course-design-aholic for a couple of years. I may not be able to play bogey-golf in real life, but I can ride the carts with the best of them and I always enjoyed the challenge of laying out a course.

The biggest problem that I see with course layout in SL is the size issue. Now I could be completely whacked here if my primary assumption is incorrect - that is, that a grid is 256 x 256 meters.

Unfortunately, any non-par-3 hole laid straightout from tee to green will exceed the maximum length of a straight line in a sim except for the hypotenuse (corner to corner of the sim) is approximately 395 yards. Most par-4s are longer than that. Let's not even consider par 5s or 6s for now.

Consequently, within the area of a single sim, the best one might hope for (if we assume "standard length" drives for an average golfer using a driver to be between 220 and 260 yards) is a simulated par-3 course if length alone is considered. Now, add in a width for each fairway of a minimum of 30 yards without a thin rough, much less a thick or second or third rough, and you might be able to arrange a short nine hole course within a single sim.

To do so, you'd have to be at least above average in creativity or you'd be left with nine shotgun-straight holes. Boooring. However, if you engage in sharing greens and possibly tee boxes.... possibly using intersecting, crossing or even shared fairways and maximizing the use of hazards by careful and strategic placement, one might be able to work out an interesting and playable nine.

This is the crux of the real problem with golf in SL as I see it. The programming/scripting necessary to simulate the physics of golf is far from insurmountable. Animations of golf swings are not particularly difficult, I don't think. We don't even have to worry about the safety issues of getting hit by wayward balls.

But, to place a full, private club length course in SL is likely to require a minimum of a three sim investment not couning the area required for a club house, driving range and/or practice putting green. The area appropriate for a full clubhouse should be about that of the Chalet Linden in the snow sims considering that it would likely function as a combination store/mall and gathering area (casino/disco?). And of couse, just as the Chalet has a parking area, so would the clubhouse. Another way to consider the required land investment is to look at the amount of area required for ski runs/the snow sim chairlifts - obviously analogous to fairways.

This is not to say that it can't or won't be done in SL in the foreseeable future. However, I think the real USD investment will be the biggest hurdle to be surmounted... Unlike a private sim mall, I don't think the "owner/operator" of a three or four sim course would be able to support the appropriate tier fees and startup costs (even over a six month period) from business generated alone.

Unless of course, LL were to donate the required land....

These are just preliminary thoughts. Any one care to comment?

Its a big idea, and big ideas in SL aren't viable unless they gain enough dwell and end up on the developer incentive lists (more accurately named Dwelloper Incentives) to be supported somehow. In the end, its the ideas that pack avatars on a property that matter, and given that golf is a somewhat sparse activity in relation to the size of land involved, I don't know how much the system will reward you for this particular idea. One suggestion would be to bow to the necessity of dwell, dictated by the system in place, and condense your idea down to a smaller plot, perhaps in a minature golf format.

Coupling this with a club or a mall would be a good idea as well, since those activities are amply rewarded in SL, as mentioned above. I wish you luck with your idea, but remember, the game design rule here is that dwell is king, to exclusion of all else. That is, if the system remains the same as it has for some time now. If things change, then your expectations will have to as well.

Just to clarify.... my comments were a response to Philip's blog entry.

I have neither the money nor the time to pursue this idea except as an idea.

Can we settle... minigolf? Zany golf? I used to play with early versions of that Jack Nicklaus golf construction course game and it was a lot of fun.

But... Jack Digeridoo has had a minigolf course in Blue since 1.1!

if the void sims are 4 sims on one processor, that kind of technology could be used to make golf course sims. so land for these kind of sims could count for 1/4 of tier costs.

these kinds of sims are not only good for flying and boating, they could be great for low density developments like golf courses.

The code for MiniPutt is free, public domain too (AND OLD!!). Parx Fonzarellie put up 18 holes for a while. Parx's Putt Putt, it was in the top PG for dwell for a couple weeks. Not sure if it's still there. Even with free code, it's very hard to setup 18 holes. The course Parx setup was amazing.

The thing that would break the illusion is when you got into a golf cart and tried to drive to the next hole. Vehicles need better physics, or we need some better free vehicle scripts.

I would love to have 16384 m2 for the price of 4096

it would have 1/4 the usual prims too. do you still love it?

I think you could make a heck of a golf course - and probably club house also - with just the prims allowed for a 4096 plot.

Well over 97% of the course landscaping, prim-wise, is trees. Miscelleaneous things like bridges, benches, and cart paths comprise the remaining 3% of the required course accoutrment. At most, 3 prims each for 18 flags.

A huge amount of the course could be done without using trees or plants if that were desired.... and still the course could be made interesting. It's been done in real life using only terraforming.

Assume temp rez for carts and attachments for clubs and you save some more.

That would leave the majority of the prim allocatin for the clubhouse and general prettying up/whatever else I think.

Of course I would! I want people to keep the hell away from me. SL is so god damn cluttery, house after house after house, with no spacing / roads / anything between them!
I want to be surrounded by trees and water, not ugly boxy builds!!!

SL Golf would be interesting. Can make it interesting even, maniacs runnin around with machine guns as you try and make the putt. Heh or something similar. But realistically.. if a real golf course was to be considered for real length, yes probably only a par 3 course would do, since 1 sim is only about 256m and (I think) the average golf course is probably double that.


But none the less, golf is an interesting idea.

Korg,
Why not start with a 1 or 2 hole course? Develop game and scripts on a small scale. Once you have a fun playable game, seek endorsement for the 18 hole course and all the trimmings. It would be a waste of resources to start this project as a 1,2, or 3 sim project when the game isnt even coded yet. I think it's a totally doable project, it just needs the foundation laid prior to a major land commitment. I would volunteer to code this, but I suspect you have no need for a golf ball that says, "Hello, Avatar".

Well, if the greens are a hybrid Kentucky Bluegrass, Featherbed Bent, and Northern California Sensemilia, you might find additional investors.

"The amazing stuff about this is, that you can play 36 holes on it in the afternoon, take it home and just get stoned to the bejeezus-belt that night on this stuff." - Carl

I suspect I would play alot more golf if we had courses like that.

I have been mentioning in various places for some time now that if SL had started with a larger base grid unit size, we would have a lot more freedom to build large things, like golf courses, parks, city blocks etc. Even if the prim limit remained at 15,000, you could still do a lot with that in 262,144 square meters (512x512) or 1,048,576 square meters (1024x1024) if most of that is just landscaping or large simple structures.

Unfortunately it's probably too late. I imagine such a transition would break a lot of assumptions both the LL devs have made in the client/server code and the scripters have made in their builds.

It's quite a horrible shame. One of my biggest desires in SL is to build a large (at least 4 sims in size) city park, but the land costs are too prohibitive for something that big, and I really don't need 60,000+ prims for a park anyway.

Every time I think about the situation we're stuck in at 256x256, I get really disappointed that large open builds will likely remain highly impractical.

My only hope is that the island program is someday expanded to allow you to buy a server and create more than one region on that server.

Aren't there script functions for landscaping? Couldn't you just have a course that only had one or two holes at a time? Once someone completed a hole, then the course could rearrange/reshape itself for the next hole. Doing this, you could put a lot more in the way of details as all the prims would be donated to the current hole.

In this way, you could have an unlimited number of holes/courses. . .

of course, this would mean that only one group could play at a time, but that group could be as large as you wanted.

Perfect solution! Great thinking Oneironaut.

The problem with most solutions offered so far still remains hole length. A diagonal on a 256 meter square is only 395 YARDS long - a short to mid-range par 4.

Even sticking 2 256 meter square sims adjacent to each other is only a partial solution if you are to mimic real world length - not necessarily a requirement, but it is the current "yardstick" that we are working with. 2 x 256 remains 512 meters long - not all of which is actually available to the hoole as you have to have buffer areas or any slightly mishit shot could go long/off-world/out of the sim/out of bounds.

Thus, to get a "championship length" par 5, you need a 4 square setup that then gives you 1 790 meters long diagonal along which you can place at most three par 5s - though most par 72 courses have 4 per 18.

Now, something that hasn't been broached yet in this discussion is that there is no logical reason that holes could not be vertically stacked foro the purpose of saving space.... say a set of holes at ground level.. another at 100 meters, a third set at 200 meters.

The benefit here is that you could place more holes in the same length-width area...but you are still lilmited to the straight line dimension of the longest side/hypotenuse of the sim box.

The stacked course solution might work, but the prim requirements could get substantial since you will need to cover a lot of territory (fairway, rough, hazards) with prims instead of land.

While a linear diagonal is somewhat limited, does the hole (well, fairway) have to be linear? Can't it curve around? I suspect space will still be a problem since one would want to avoid serious kinks in the course, but it might offer some flexibility.

This then begs the question of scripting, will their be options for curved shots, that kind of thing? I'm thinking Golden Tee type shots. May not be difficult, but my experience with scripting physical objects is rather limited.

Oh, and build the balls so there is a random chance of slices, the more expensive the club (from a duly authorized seller), the less likelihood. It's golf, the evil has to get in somewhere.

Wow, I didn't know about this... so I gotta check it out. Shame about the cart, though. That sounds like a nightmare of Tiger Woods-not-having-a-good-day proportions!

since scale is irrelevant, wht if the physics of the game treated 256 as 512 m. to play everything would be half scale including avatars. so everyone would have to make a half size avatar for golf.

Actually the difference in FOV (field-of-view) between SL and RL makes areas in SL appear to the viewer to be about 5x larger than they would be in real life. It's a longer discussion to explain why, but just imagine if you looked at the real-world through a fisheye lens - stuff 10 ft away looks to be 40ft away.

So this means that a golf course will 'feel' about right on a sim or so - about 1200 yards long. So probably a nice 18-hole course could be done on one sim, I suspect.

Well, they could always do what they did with the VOID sims, run 4sims on 1 server, and just have the prim limit of 1 sim for all four.

I dont see why this would be a big problem. If its goingt to be just a city park, chances are it will never have many many people, or scripts that put heavy load on the server.

Ironically, to pay for a 'to scale' golf course the charge to play would have to be the same as a real life golf club

Sometimes things like this make me chuckle.

If someone does make one, I wanna see it... it would be extremely cool.

Siggy.