Hello folks! Another month has passed us by, so it must be time to share some more of what I've been working on.

The biggest addition has to be the new course, Fairland Rock. This is a full sized course, featuring a similar theme to the putting course, Terdiman Cliffs. It also has sheep 😁

Speaking of Terdiman Cliffs, the putt camera has been updated to much improve the view of ball once it has travelled far enough away from the player camera:

And, while we're here, courses with smaller holes such as Terdiman Cliffs will now automatically zoom on the minimap.

Updated Input

I've also been trying to address player feedback as much as possible. I've had a couple of requests to implement 'thumbstick swing' - that is to be able to play by drawing back the thumbstick on the controller and pushing it forward again to take a stroke. I've dubbed the implementation "Swingput" - a terrible pun on the word input 😅 It works both on controllers and the mouse. Swingput is always active so the player can choose whether to take their current shot using the existing input mode, or with the thumbstick/mouse.

Also on the input side of things, controller assignment has now been made automatic, and is no longer done when selecting a player. Controllers will assign themselves to the player with the same ID - that is controller 1 will be used for player 1, and automatically reassign themselves if a controller is disconnected or reconnected mid-play. This way sharing two controllers between 3 or 4 players is much more fluid. It also prevents other players interfering with your shot with their own controller 😉 Thanks to an updated version of libSDL Playstation controllers are now natively supported in all versions of the game. This means that they'll work automatically even if you don't have a wrapper such as DS4Win installed.

Graphical Updates

Lots of tweaking has been done to polish up the graphics. On the technical side the way the ball movement is calculated from network data has been updated to make it appear much smoother. Most noticable is the removal of 'jitter' from the ball shadow, which has been something that irked me for a long time 😅 I've also added antialiasing options to the configuration menu, so it's now possible to render the course with up to 8x MSAA. Whether this suits your tastes in a supposedly retro themed game is, of course, up to you 😁

If you've played the game previously then you may also notice the the pavilion model has been updated. It is now much more detailed, and is re-textured to better suit the art style which has evolved somewhat since the model was first made.

Also, based on feedback, it's now possible to see which players are CPU controlled by looking at the scoreboard. These icons are reflected across network games so it's possible to see when other participants are using CPU controlled golfers. Instead of a network quality icon, players will have a small microchip next to their name 😁

There are, of course, many other small updates and improvements, too numerous to detail here. Once the update is released I'll post a full list of changes.

Thank you for the continued support of the project - the release of 1.10 is so close now I can almost taste it 😅 - if you haven't already then make sure to wishlist the game on Steam to be notified when it's released, and follow me here on itch. I have plenty of (unannounced) ideas for the game beyond the next update, and if you're curious then this is the place to hear about them first!