It's time for another release, so here's the TL; DR

• Fix bystander camera from clipping into the ground
• Fix missing sky box in tutorial
• Fix accidentally being able to set CPU players in tutorial
• Winner of the previous hole now gets the honour of first tee (thanks mikekelly for the suggestion)
• Add option of Gimme radius to game rules (thanks to JS for the suggestion)
• New achievement - Hole in one million
• New achievement - Gimme Five
• New achievement - Gimme Ten
• New achievement - Day Job
• Stats for tracking number of gimmies taken
• Stats for tracking time played on a course
• New platinum trophy - for those ‘extra special’ achievements.
• Birds now flee the scrub when hit by a stray ball
• Add crowd reaction to near miss
• Add wandering crowd and animated props
• Add game rule description to lobby menu
• Add newsfeed from itchio
• Added option to display distances in yards/feet (thanks JS for the suggestion)
• Minimap now adjusts zoom to best fit the current hole
• Putting grid transparency now adjustable in the options menu
• Putting courses have a 6 stroke limit instead of 12
• New putting course ‘Terdiman Cliffs’
• New Ball - Rubber Duckie
• Add announcer voice over to billiards games
• Add snooker to the club house
• Mod kit: add exporting paths for props and crowds to follow from Blender
• Mod kit: add exporting Blender speakers as audio sources
• Mod kit: allow storing multiple sets of pin/tee data in Blender file and exporting only selected
• Mod kit: Blender export warns if tee/pin data was missing
• Mod kit: Model converter now supports animated textures

This release fixes a couple of small bugs which managed to find their way through in to the last release, as well as adds some new features. First, a couple of gameplay features as suggested by players mikekelly and JS - The winner of the previous hole now gets the honour of teeing off on the current hole, and there's now an option to set a gimme radius at the hole. If you're unfamiliar with the gimme rule, it allows taking a point for the hole by landing the ball within a given radius of the cup. The lobby menu now allows setting the radius to 'inside the putter' or 'inside the leather' when choosing game rules, which means a gimme is awarded if the ball lands within the radius of a putter's length, or the length of the leather on the handle of the putter (ie a smaller radius).

Secondly there are a host of new cosmetic features, including animated textures, new props, moving vehicles and the option to display measurements in imperial. The latter is an option which can be found in the audio/video menu. The options menu also now allows setting the transparency of the grid overlay shown when putting, as another new feature added in this update is the putting course. These courses are more akin to mini-golf where the player must putt the ball from end to end of the course. The newest course named 'Terdiman Cliffs' is a putting only course, and can be selected from the lobby menu when hosting a new game.

Other new content includes a new ball, the rubber duckie, new achievements related to the gimme rule, and a new game added to the club house: snooker. The billiards mode now has an announcer voice, as well as new sounds added to the golf spectators, such as the near-miss reaction.

The mod kit has also been updated for content creation of these new features, including exporting Blender paths as motion points for vehicle props to follow, and exporting Speaker objects as audio sources in maps. The model converter now supports animated materials, an example of which can be seen on the new blimp model, or the advertising sign.

In the previous post I mentioned a new feature which would allow creation of custom playlists for user made golf courses. This is still on the agenda, although the biggest consideration right now is whether or not these should be sharable, as allowing the game to transmit arbitrary user generated data to any other player is an obvious security risk. The most likely outcome is that the playlist creator will be added, but users will need to specifically share their files with friends, in order to be able to play these in online games. Local play will remain unaffected.

In relation to online games one of the most frequent comments I get is how much of a pain it is to get the networking set up correctly with port forwarding. This is unfortunate, but with a small game features such as automatic NAT punch through are not easily afforded without the backup of a large game service such as Steam or Epic's online services. I have been investigating the possiblity of integrating one these into the game, however I've not made any hard decision. If I do decide to use one of the services then it is highly likely that the game will have to become paid-for or become fragmented into paid-for and open source versions. If you have any thoughts on this (or feelings about a game being tied to a particular service provider) please do comment and I'll take it into consideration.

For now though, I hope you enjoy this release, leave a comment with any thoughts or suggestions, and as always thank you for your support!