Registration: Phil McCloud Golfnut, The Lizard King, PMM UID: 76116,430 The Maroon Dragon Golf Club acres.zip My entry for the 4th CGA design contest is a fictional course set in eastern Wisconsin along Lake Michigan. Jack Nicklaus Unlimited Golf Signature Edition is more than a golf simulation. I believe that this a limitless creative palette to enhance anyone's imagination and creative talents. The golf game within theis game is a bonus. It gives you a reason to spend an hour enjoying the artists rendition. I had a number of goals I wanted to achieve in designing this golf course for the CGA 4th design contest. I hope I achieved them all. My first goal was to show accolade they have the best "game engine" for a golf simulation already in hand. In my opinion they are lacking just some changes in the ball flight and need to be more serious about the different lies a ball can have. That, after all, is what golf is all about. By changing the palette I hoped to show accolade that if we could have a larger palette with more options and more ground conditions, their golf simulation will be simply awsome. Another goal was to show everyone just how a creative mind can design a course more aesthetically pleasing and challenging than any other golf simulation can be. A team of 5 people running around a golf course with video tapes and using airplanes for aerial views trying to exactly reproduce an existing course still doesn't compete with accolade and the artists that use the palette to create their works of wonder. I have heard that it takes 2 months of hard work to finish their product. It took me two months also. Can other golf simulations change the color of the leaves to reflect the fall colors? When the fairways brown out or they replace the old sand with new sand can they make the changes? No! With accolade, you can. I beleive the design editor transforms a pretty good golf simulation into a game of infinite possibilities. When I planned the design of Maroon Dragon Golf Club, I wanted a challenging game of golf while using the same 256,000 colors that nature herself has to offer, and to bring to the screen her beauty. It took a month of experimenting with the palette editor to decide on the 256 colors I was going to use. Coincidentally, it was right at the height of the fall colors in Illinois and Wisconsin when I made up my mind which colors I was going to use. The colors chosen and all objects were ones I picked and designed. I can honestly say I have seen all the colors of the trees and bushes in the last month. Does nature look this good? Absolutely! I also believe than while scanning is a great way to get an object to look realistic, I think I can show through this design that the drawing program that came with the game can be equally effective. I wanted Maroon Dragon Golf Club to capture more than just a game of golf but THE game of golf and why it is the best sport ever created. It is not only an endless series of games within games, it is your walk through nature that gives you the pure joy of being one with your world. The Maroon Dragon Golf Club hopefully gives you the feeling on this oneness. As winter approaches in the midwest, we know up here what it feels like to be playing golf for the last time in the season. Places like Florida don't really know how it feels to put the clubs in the garage and get out Golf magazine and dream during the winter. It makes the love affair with golf even stronger. Anticipation, sadness, longing, coupled with the most beautiful time of year stir emotions in even the hardest of men. If a tear hasn't formed in your eye while playing this course, then you haven't experienced what golf really is all about. My comments on Maroon Dragon Golf Club. I used one pixel of cart path in the center of the fairways to designate 200 150 and 100 yd marks. I wanted the golfer to experience the difficulties of bunker play, especially pot bunkers. You may take multiple shots to get out, just like I do in real life, even so far as chipping backwards. I hope I haven't made it ridiculous but just as frustrating as real life. If you are in one of these bunkers, it was your fault in the first place that you made a bad shot. That's YOUR penalty. There really aren't enough colors and ground types for my satisfaction so I converted the sand to another type of ground. I probably would have had more traps if I had more ground types to chose from but I am reasonably satisfied with the look. This course was set along Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. The temptation to use the lake often was there, but I chose instead to give the golfer a chance to use all the varieties of terrain available in that neck of the woods. Therefore you will see the fall colors of Wisconsin, alot of trees in areas, and a links type feeling for much of the course. While not quite the ocean, Lake Michigan is the 2nd or 3rd largest freshwater lake in the world, so this body of water is quite intimidating. I limited the use of cartpaths and other human objects. I think golf was meant to be played with a minimum of change to the land. Maroon Dragon Golf Club allows no carts, but you can take a caddy. The advantage of computer golf is you don't have to walk 6 miles like you would in real life. I beleive the contours of the land in this course are very close to the bluffs and rolling prarie typical for this area. Wisconsin and Scotland are pretty closely related by latitude, so a feeling of Scottish links courses was hopefully attained. My use of tee boxes needs explaining. The ladies tees, which aren't used by most people in this simulation, are the maroon tees. These tee boxes won't satisfy the purist, but will satisfy the computer golfers that are looking for a computer golf game to challenge even the best of them. Unreasonably long for a golf course, but hey, we don't approach the consistancy of the computer golfers either, or we would be playing on tour. From this tee box you will have to check yardages much closer because they aren't always what they say they are. I love it when people whine about this. In real golf the pros have their own yardage books they refer to. I suggest you do the same when playing the course from the maroon tees. Spend the extra minute checking the yardages instead of just blasting off. The other tee boxes are more in line with typical yardages and playability. To really appreciate this course, you need to play from all sets of tee boxes. By having multiple tee boxes and using 5 different pin placements, you now have a wide range of playing possibilities. This satisfies another goal I had, which was to ask yourself if you could only bring one course with you to a desert island, which one would you bring. I hope your answer would include Maroon Dragon Golf club in your top ten. I could go into an indepth explanation of my finishing holes, the aesthetics, playability, draws, fades, how to play the course, etc. etc., but like all courses I have designed, that is for you to find out. If I had a signature hole, maybe it would be the par 5 16th, only because the 2nd shot is a very challenging one over trees, and that is only if you made a very accurate 1st shot. I can appreciate the designers that go to great lengths manicuring their courses and making sure each pixel is perfectly placed, ala perfect fringe around greens, etc. However, I chose not to do it this way. I hope you don't penalize this course for what you might see as inconsistancies in detail. I have gone over every inch of this course and I chose to have these inconsistancies part of the course, like heavy rough right next to the green and not perfectly manicured fairways because that's how the original courses were intended. Make a course out of the enviornment, don't come in with 100's of 1000's of tons of dirt and bulldozer's and move everything around. I chose instead to take the original plot and change very little. I want to thank all of the JNSE'rs that I know for their creativity and support that gives me great pleasure in designing and providing courses that other appreciate. I love the competition designing and any thanks I get for my work. In closing, I have a poem from Spider John Koerner that really sums up how I feel about this world and this game. He must be a golfer, for any serious golfers have the same attitude towards our earth, and the game of golf. We are only borrowing the land when we play a round. I think if I ever played the courses in Scotland I could hear 400 years worth of players who stood on the land they borrowed for that brief moment. Phil McCLoud 10/31/92 I have seen stars in the day time, I've seen sunshine at midnight. I have seen good guys do wrong and bad guys do right. I have seen black crows and white seagulls fly the perfect flight, and another day never fails to bring another night. The moon sails around the earth and the earth sails around the sun, and our own turning round counts the days one by one. First breath in a strange land, breathless at the dealing of the last hand, and in between, the dream you dream... and the shifting of the sand.