I’m confused by the mini map after update lol

[dr0negod$]

Ok this may well just be user error/me being dumb, but since the update are the dots on the shot guideline not the same distance apart anymore? what does that mean/how does that impact gameplay, and do they not line up with the divisions on the power bar anymore?

cheers!

[yourjaguarlover]

so actually its an adjustment to an inaccuracy. As you say they were all equidistant before but because a ball in flight has height as well as length, the quartered minimap markers weren't actually accurate to the power bar markers.

So the reason they are not equidistant now is because the minimap not takes into account where the ball-speed is getting more or less distance because it is also climbing, or falling.

It doesn't really make a material difference to how you play, but it more accurately represents where the ball would be in its flight on the minimap compared to the position you hit on the power bar.

If that makes sense :)

[yourjaguarlover]

or in other words, the minimap now mirrors the flight of the ball from a top down view, when including the arc of the ball's flight

[dr0negod$]

ah! ok yeah that does make sense, cheers. just trying to get my head around how it changes how I use the power bar…

[dr0negod$]

I realise that I always thought of the dots as where the ball would first land, not where it was in flight. hmmm.

[Mostly Hairless µC ⛳]

OK, there are a few changes, so I'll attempt to explain them and my rationale 😁

First off, if you're using the "decimated" power bar (set in the options) then the dots on the minimap do not line up. This is an oversight on my part and will be corrected in the 1.18.1 patch which is in the works. 🤦‍♀️

So there are a couple of things which have changed with the ball flight in 1.18. One of them is that the ball flight is now lower overall - previously the ball could reach 50-60yds in the air which, as someone in the discussions pointed out, is kind of ridiculous. In real golf the ball will rarely go higher than 30-35yds. On the face of it this change doesn't do too much, although there is a side-effect which I'll come back to.

As you pointed out the marks on the range indicator on the minimap are no longer equidistant. This is, as yourjaguarlover described, due to the fact the range indicator *ought* to be representing the arc of the ball flight as seen from above, and actually should always have been. The marks on it are indeed designed to display the point at which the ball should first hit the ground, however the introduction of the Clubset Shuffle mode, where you often need to make a short stroke with a long club, demonstrated that for any shot under 50% power the range indicator was wildly inaccurate. This fact, coupled with me wanting to add Flop and Punch shots, drove me to create a separate, stat driven program which I used to generate the input for the new clubsets.

(Hopefully you can see this image of it:)
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2375174713900083529/F2D7BC70EA06A15A695FD2E5C9A11E721ECF2369/

Armed with these new stats I then spent a good few hours on the Driving Range making sure that the marks on the minimap indicator correspond to the initial impact of the ball, and line up with the marks on the power bar at the bottom - which they now do (unless I've broken something in the interim, it is possible 😅).

However there is some supposition that for the ball to hit these marks perfectly you have to make the 'perfect' shot. By which I mean there's no wind, no side spin and that the shot is 100% accurate. Oh, and that the terrain is flat. I mentioned above that lowering the overall flight path had a subtle side-effect, and that effect is that sloped terrain, particularly upward slopes, now more strongly shortens the final position of the ball in relation to the stroke indicator. This is because the height change in terrain to ball height ratio is now a lot, er, steeper, for want of a better word. If you're not sure what I mean there's a section in this guide which attempts to explain it:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2910207511


These variables are all skill based, so the 'perfect shot' rarely happens (I even had wind disabled in the debugger) - and, at the risk of making this all sound like a long winded way of saying git gud (I'm really not trying to say that 😅) your skills will have to adapt to the modified mechanics. When I first introduced them into the beta, the beta testers (without whom I could not keep working on improving the game, they are indeed sage and help keep me grounded) all raised concerns about just how jarring the initial changes felt to existing players. However they quickly became accustomed to them and soon became preoccupied with making ridiculous flop shots instead. And, importantly, no new players have said they can't play the game because of the mechanics. Ultimately, if I didn't think these changes added to the game, I wouldn't have included them.

I realise this is probably not what you want to hear when you sit down at the end of a long week and just want to play a few rounds with some buddies, and I apologise if I've accidentally subverted expectations of gameplay. To that end you can (for now at least) revert back to 1.17 if you prefer, by going to the Beta tab in the game's properties and selecting 'previous version' from the drop down menu. I do highly encourage you to spend some time with the new version though, as I'm sure you'll be used to it very quickly 😁

Sorry for the long-winded post, I hope it clarifies things a bit.

As always if you find any bugs or have any other concerns, do let me know! I'll do my best to address them in any future updates.

[dr0negod$]

hey! thanks so much taking the time out for the long and detailed reply, much appreciated :)

Most of it makes perfect sense, and tbh after playing for a few hours over the w/e I can't really tell any difference in gameplay at all, pretty much feels exactly the same ;)

I am still confused by the minimap indicator tho - not by your explanations, they make perfect sense - it's probably more about my weird ADHD addled brain lol. I'm struggling to visualise how the dots can represent both the (potential) landing point for the ball and points on an arc when seen from above simultaneously. I think this was what was throwing me in the first place. now when I look at it I can only imagine that - say - when I hit 3 on the power bar that the ball is following the arc until the third dot and then...plummeting directly downwards to the ground lol.

but hey! really doesn't matter, and is surely just a weird me thing. game still plays and feels as great as it always has. thnaks again for all your work!

[Mostly Hairless µC ⛳]

Ah! Yeah sorry about the wall of text, I guess the first coffee of the day had just kicked in 😅 - anyway glad to hear you're getting along with the updated mechanics.

When you put it like that I can see how it can be confusing. I guess you can think about it as a group of arcs, each getting longer, and all overlapping each other. You just can't see them because they're all on the same line. Each of the black/grey marks represents the end of one of the arcs, if you see what I mean? From the side it looks like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projectile_motion#/media/File:Mplwp_ballistic_trajectories_velocities.svg