Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 Blog: Course Environments Blog

From EA Sports:

http://www.easports.com/tigerwoods09/blog.jsp

Posted 06.6.2008

Hello Tiger Woods fans. It has been another exciting year working on Tiger Woods PGA Tour. Once again the team has tackled 5 new golf courses, some of which you will find visually exciting and even more fun to play. It is pretty typical for the EA SPORTS Tiger team to work on new courses each year but what we have done special this year is to revamp the older, existing courses. The reason why this is not a normal practice is because it takes a lot of effort and time to build new courses and as you all know, we only have a short year to make them. Rest assured that my team has been very busy this year.

As some of you hardcore fans might have noticed, last year there was some parity in our courses. So this year we took the classics like TPC Sawgrass, St Andrews, Pebble Beach, Riviera, and Carnoustie and converted them to use our new and improved rendering technology. This means that all of the courses in the game this year will have a special look; one that we hope better captures the essence of the real course itself.

TPC Sawgrass #17 ’08 to ’09 Comparison

So what does mean, well we have almost completely re-worked these classics. Let me break down the major changes for you.

- We started by replacing the old trees with our new library created from the 08 title and some newly created trees. This library uses our latest tree shader technology to try and recreate realistic looking trees. On top of that, we went back to the photo reference to be sure that we got the right tree coverage in the holes. Once again we are trying to give you the best experience we can by closely replicating the real course.

- Another area where we improved the older courses was in the lighting. Most of the classic courses had a fairly neutral lighting scheme. So we came up with color palettes and time of day choices for each course. This helped the courses stand out on their own more than previous years

Pebble Beach Golf Links #18 ’08 to ’09 Comparison

- Another large area of work was in the skies. Each course in the game received a new sky this year. Since a large portion of the screen is sky, we sought out a new way to render our skies. We feel that we achieved a solid look for them. The skies played a pivotal point in the lighting and tuning, since it was used as the basis for the tuning.

St Andrews #18 ’08 to ’09 Comparison

- For special areas, like the ocean on Pebble Beach, we wanted to really push the look and make this a standout point. We used new shader technology for Tiger this year on all of the water areas. You will see oceans with waves, rivers with water running through rocky terrain, and ponds with depth in the middle of them.

Pebble Beach #06 with new ocean shader

In the end, the classic courses each have a unique look to them, like never before. Carnoustie for example has a rainy, dreary look to it, much like you might expect in Scotland. TPC Sawgrass has the warm, sunny, feel to it, much like a typical Florida afternoon.

Hopefully you will find that my team’s hard work over the past year has made this year’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour game, a special one. Playing through the classic courses will mean a whole new experience and then you can still experience the five new courses too. As always, the Tiger Woods team is looking to bring you exciting courses to play and to deliver to you the closest re-creation of the actual courses that we can.

Scott Malo

Environment Team

Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 09