It's update time! Here's what's new:

• New course, Moulin Plage.
• New cascaded shadow maps which mean ‘high’ quality setting shadows are drawn for greater distances
• Shadow quality ‘high’ setting now also increases the resolution of shadow maps
• The game no longer needs to be restarted to apply shadow quality settings
• Fixed distorting shadow maps for wind-affected treesets
• Fixed rendering intro video and post process effects on AMD cards (thanks Bunni_Butt for pointing this out)
• Fixed a crash which could happen if no audio renderer was available
• New post process: cinematic
• Custom courses can now be hidden when hosting a new game
• Course editor now has button to show exported files in the current platform’s file system browser
• Modkit: terrain material presets have been added which can be loaded by  the model converter.
• Modkit: placeholder Blender file has been updated with new prop models
• Modkit: grass colour/tint properties are now part of the shrub file definition.

This is a slightly smaller update this time, as most of the changes are technical, but there is a new beach course, Moulin Plage!

Under the hood I've been working on updating the shadow rendering which, when set to high, now has an increased render distance and much higher resolution. It's also now possible to change the shadow quality mid-game, without having to restart which makes things a little more convenient.

Also, quite importantly, this update addresses a bug which would cause images to render as black squares on AMD graphics cards on Windows. If you were seeing a black intro screen or were unable to use post-process effects then this update should fix it.

Another bug experienced by a small amount of users was a crash caused by no audio hardware being available. This is now fixed.

As a small quality of life update I've now added an option to hide custom courses from the lobby list when hosting a new game. This makes it less cluttered when cycling through the course list in network games, as custom courses are not available in network games anyway. The course editor also now has a button to reveal saved course files in your system's file browser, so it's easier to maintain/delete/rename custom courses if needed.

The linux release has been updated to contain the *correct* libraries - it's only taken me 4 releases to realise libBullet3Collision should be libBulletCollision... 😅 So if you were having missing library errors this may well fix it for you.

Finally the mod kit has been updated for this release, with material presets for the model converter to help streamline converting custom course models. The Blender file containing the asset library for prop models has also been updated with more of the prop models from the game (although I haven't had time to add them all yet - this will coming in the future). Some of the shrub definition files have been renamed to something a bit more coherent, but may cause some existing custom courses to fail to load with the error 'unable to load billboards'. If you experience this you can simply re-export your custom course from the editor and it should load again.

As always thank you to everyone who has commented, suggested features, reported bugs and supported this project on itch! You really make the game what it is 😁 Please do comment if you have any ideas or find any bugs so that I can keep on trying to improve the game.

Until the next update, happy swinging! ⛳🏌️‍♀️