Behind the scenes of PGA TOUR Pro Golf’s courses
PGA TOUR Pro Golf, one of the latest games to join the Apple Arcade lineup, brings the excitement, the beauty and even the hazards of some of the world’s greatest golf courses right to your fingertips. This game stands apart from others by giving players the opportunity to tee off on iconic real-world golf courses, from Pebble Beach Golf Links in California to Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill Club & Lodge in Florida and many more in between. Experience the thrill of playing on these world-class courses while competing against players from around the globe in true PGA TOUR-style tournaments — with authentic PGA TOUR scoring and cutlines, you’ll feel the pressure and excitement just like the pros!
One hallmark of PGA TOUR Pro Golf is just how true-to-life the digital recreations of the golf courses are, allowing players to get a real feel for what it’s like to play at these historic locations, all from the comfort of their own phones.
And just in time for THE PLAYERS Championship, TPC Sawgrass will be added to the lineup of courses in the game. While you’re watching THE PLAYERS, why not take your own shot on the very same course?
To learn more about how these courses are created, we spoke with John Sousa of HypGames, Inc., who leads the development of new golf courses in the game.
“We begin by looking for interesting golf courses that our players would probably want to play in real life, if only they could,” Sousa said. “The next step is often a simple request, contacting the course to ask if they’d be interested in joining our lineup.
“If they agree, the HypGames team uses Google Maps and Google Earth to find out what elements are needed to capture the proper coordinates. Then, the team contracts a drone operator based somewhere near the course.
“Once we agree with an operator, we contact the course and they come up with a fly plan,” Sousa continued. “It typically takes less than a day to accurately capture everything we need — topology, terrain, tree placement, stuff like that. The term for what we do is ‘photogrammetry.'”
The drone also does fly-through videos of every hole, which are used for promotional purposes and as references for game artists. Lastly, they capture a panorama of the course from 500 feet so that artists can be familiar with the environment in the distance and blend an accurate backdrop seamlessly with the course.
The drone captures between 2,500 and 3,500 photographs to create an “orthomosaic,” a mesh of 10 million triangles produced by a software that processes the thousands of images captured by drone.
“Because we can’t use 10 million polygons in the game,” Sousa said, “we outline all the holes with curves to create a disk that gets ‘dropped’ over the orthomosaic. The process is called ‘shrinkwrapping.'”
The curves are also how the boundaries of the course are recognized in game, he explained. When your shot lands on the fairway, those curves are how the game knows to tell you that you landed “on the fairway.” The developers have a set of materials for every terrain type, so that the ball’s physics are precise and accurate to the millimeter, based on exactly where you landed on the course. Curves are also used to define the out-of-bounds areas, which then keep the golf balls and cameras within the constraints of the hole.
Sousa also noted that trees are an interesting feature in the game because of their variety of materials. If you strike a tree on the trunk, for example, your ball will bounce backward, but if you go through the leaves, it may change your flight trajectory in a random direction.
“We place every tree precisely where it is on the map from the drone scan onto the mosaic,” said Sousa. “So every time you hit a tree, don’t blame the game devs. … Blame nature, or perhaps the real-world golf course designers.”
Like many on the PGA TOUR Pro Golf team, Sousa has been making golf games for a long time.
“I developed our current scanning process on a previous project,” he said. “It used to take a full week of scanning using a physical camera that we owned, and [our team] had to fly out to all these different places.”
The gear was heavy, and the days of walking the course hole by hole to capture every detail were strenuous. Now, the team can hire local drone operators to get it all done in just a few hours.
“It used to take months to make a course playable. Now it only takes about six to eight weeks,” he says. “Other sports games have adopted this process, too, to scan sports venues like hockey arenas or soccer stadiums.”
And now, they’re using this process to bring the beauty and history of TPC Sawgrass directly to fans. Celebrate the week of THE PLAYERS Championship by teeing off right alongside the pros in PGA TOUR Pro Golf! The game is available exclusively on Apple Arcade and is playable on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Vision Pro2.
Haven’t tried Apple Arcade quite yet? Get a one-month free trial and try for free today! Tap into unlimited access to over 200 games, with no ads and no in-app purchases.
SOURCE: [pgatour.com]
