Finding Courses on TGC

[Bentley]

In anticipation of getting TGC, I had a question...with 80-something thousand courses available, how is the search function? I imagine a good number of those courses are not really desireable for some reason (either not well made or poorly designed, too long/short, too firm/fast, etc). Is there a good way to find well designed, playable courses without having to weed through thousands and thousands of courses?

[Bubba22]

A lot of sim tested courses will have ProTee attached to its name so search ProTee. Ther are a few threads here that list top courses as well.

[mthunt]

If you go to HB Studio's Forum, you'll find a forum on new courses. I don't mind 7000 yard plus courses so I go there and check out courses a lot. There's also TGCTours.com that lists courses. If you search "Protee" you'll find courses designed for sims. They usually are 6300 to 6500. You can easily search for courses on Protee. Ie, Merion with find anything with Merion but with 80k in courses, you may find a lot of Merions. Searching for Driving Range brings up 13 pages. It's best to keep a list.

Here's my list:

Courses

-Augusta National 2014 (Sunday)
-Cog Hill C.C. #4 (Dubsdread)
-Magnolia National, Georgia (Sunday)
-Cypress Pointe Golf Club
-Woodlands Golf Club, Australia
-Royal Montreal
-Bethpage Black Official Pin B
-Blue Monster Doral
-TGC Oakhill
-Royal Birkdale
-Grizzly's Driving Range
-TPC Sawgrass (Sunday Edition)
-Hazeltine G.C. (2016 Ryder Cup)
-Kiawah Island (final addition)
-St. Andrews Old Course 2015
-Sand Piper National
-Kahiko Beach Golf and Surf Club
-Caledonia Plantation
-Wildfire Ridge Golf Club
-The Capilano Club
-University Links
-PGA West (Palmer)
-Chambers Bay, WA (Sunday)
-Royal Balwearie Golf Club, East Lothian, Scotland
-Spyglass Hill 2015
-Royal Ballylough
-lady erskine of mark
-Wadi Siji Golf Estates
-Merion East, Ardmore PA
-Freshwater Golf Club
-Muirfield Village GC
-Delta Wisner Grand National
-The Links Tropicana @ McCarthy's North Shore
-Oceanic Athletic Club
-Powderfinger GC
-Pebble Beach (blacks)
-Pumpkin Ridge
-Nighthawk Canyon Golf & Country Club
-Spyglass Hill 2015 by yeltzman
-Wolf Creek Deffinitive
-Ye Olde Douglas Harbor
-TPC @ Boston
-The Kiltlifter- Scottish Highlands Course
-The Walker Course, Clemson, SC

[SFR]

Thanks for taking the time to list.

[Bentley]

What does it mean that a course is designed for a sim? Do the console game players hit their shots farther than real players?

[mthunt]

Correct, for example, all console players hit the ball farther than say a 50 year old 20 handicap. It's a lot easier to hit it straight in a video game than with a real ball. Sim courses are often shorter and not as tight.

[ks-man]

Pardon my ignorance but how does playing a course on a simulator work? Do you first search, find your course on the PC and then install it to the hard drive and then have it listed as a local course to play? Assuming it is that how much hard drive space does a course take up? Or am I wrong and you essentially stream the course while playing (thus needing a good internet connection to play each course)? I

[MarkSC]

Pardon my ignorance but how does playing a course on a simulator work? Do you first search, find your course on the PC and then install it to the hard drive and then have it listed as a local course to play? Assuming it is that how much hard drive space does a course take up? Or am I wrong and you essentially stream the course while playing (thus needing a good internet connection to play each course)? I

The TGC courses are streamed while playing, so you will need a decent Internet connection.

[ProTee United]

Let me try to explain this a bit more in detail. There seems to be some confusion about this.

TGC has a couple of courses that ship with the installation package. When your internet connection drops or you choose to play offline, you can play these local courses.

When you want to browse the 82,000+ course database (rapidly growing!) and want to play one of these, you will need an internet connection.
When you select a course from the cloud servers, your "local" game will download this course (completely) onto your computer. How long this download will take depends on your internet connection. The size of a course can be anything between 400k and 110Mb, all depending on the level of detail. This is one of the reasons why we recommend a broadband internet connection.

The other reason why you need an internet connection is to store your scoring information and stats on the cloud servers. Saving and loading this info, keeping track of players, polling online friends, etc also requires an internet connection. Most of this happens in the background while you are playing, but this could cause hick-ups if your internet connection is too slow.

If you want to play online you also need an internet connection. To publish courses you also need an internet connection. In other words, without an internet connection lots of things will not work.

[ks-man]

Thanks for the update. I'll definitely have broadband internet access. Right now I'm trying to determine if I can get an ethernet cable to my pc location in my upcoming simulator room or if I'll have to go with wifi. If I go with wifi I'll have an access point nearby with 802.11ac however in my experience whenever you can go wired you should.

Is anybody using TGC over a wifi connection? Have you noticed any issues with it? Thanks.

[mthunt]

I used wifi on my first pc. No issues.

[Js1010]

I use WIFI as well - Have a pretty strong 802.11N connection and I am fine loading Courses.

[wbond]

ProTee United
When you download the "local" game, can you then disconnect from internet? Does this course then remain on your computer for future use as well?

Let me try to explain this a bit more in detail. There seems to be some confusion about this.

TGC has a couple of courses that ship with the installation package. When your internet connection drops or you choose to play offline, you can play these local courses.

When you want to browse the 82,000+ course database (rapidly growing!) and want to play one of these, you will need an internet connection.
When you select a course from the cloud servers, your "local" game will download this course (completely) onto your computer. How long this download will take depends on your internet connection. The size of a course can be anything between 400k and 110Mb, all depending on the level of detail. This is one of the reasons why we recommend a broadband internet connection.

The other reason why you need an internet connection is to store your scoring information and stats on the cloud servers. Saving and loading this info, keeping track of players, polling online friends, etc also requires an internet connection. Most of this happens in the background while you are playing, but this could cause hick-ups if your internet connection is too slow.

If you want to play online you also need an internet connection. To publish courses you also need an internet connection. In other words, without an internet connection lots of things will not work.

[rdh]

I don't believe it does that. i.e. if you play pebble beach, then open the software later without an internet connection, I don't think you can select pebble beach. It downloads it from the server every time. That would be a good improvement for a future update...it's not great to have to download the same course every time it's played if nothing has changed.

I find the search options in TGC very limited. I'd like to start a database of some kind that is simulator-specific. It could be as simple as an Excel file that people could download and filter, or it could become an online search tool. The criteria I was thinking of tracking are listed below. Let me know if anyone has any other suggestions. I think some of the rating stuff would be subjective, so it would be best if users submitted their own opinions on some of the ranking stuff after playing so that the numbers would reflect a consensus average. It would be a community effort to build up the database.

Course Name
Real World (Yes/No)
Theme
Weather
Par
Length (This one is critical!)
Avg. Length Per Par Stroke (This would make comparison easier...i.e. a 6300 yard par 72 is actually shorter than a 6250 yard par 70...maybe it's overkill though)
Weather
Style (Links / Parkland / etc.)
Fairway Width (Ranking - Wide, Typical, Narrow)
Green Size (Ranking - Large, Typical, Small)
Green Slope/Difficulty (Ranking - Severe, Difficult, Moderate, Subtle/Easy)
Errant Shot Impact (Ranking - something to indicate if the course has lots of hazards / thick forest / OB or is generally playable even if balls are wild left or right)
Design/Visual Rating - Some kind of scale to rank whether the course looks basic/rough (1?) or very polished and impressive (10?)

Not sure if i'll actually do this...or if somebody else might want to...but I think it would be great for new ProTee users. It would be a good way to watch for new simulator-friendly courses to come onto the list as well.

[SFR]

Is anybody using TGC over a wifi connection? Have you noticed any issues with it? Thanks.

I have always used wifi in my shop. The router is about 30 to 40 feet away and goes through 2 walls to be used in the shop. The signal is a bit weaker but not sure that the speed is any slower. Our speed here is terrible to begin with. Less than 5 whatever bites they are. I have played on line but there have been issues with others and playing turn based. Not sure if it was due to my system or something else as I was not the only one that had sync issues. Red Chain was seldom an issue on line.

[Igor-247-golf]

Get an extender thst you plug into a power socket, it will bring your speed up threefold.

I have always used wifi in my shop. The router is about 30 to 40 feet away and goes through 2 walls to be used in the shop. The signal is a bit weaker but not sure that the speed is any slower. Our speed here is terrible to begin with. Less than 5 whatever bites they are. I have played on line but there have been issues with others and playing turn based. Not sure if it was due to my system or something else as I was not the only one that had sync issues. Red Chain was seldom an issue on line.

[Js1010]

HB Studios now has an API that I know TGCtours.com uses to pull player scores and data for display on their site. Be cool if they allowed others to use the API to pull Course data which could then be used to create a better search on some sort of webpage. Better wilcard search while also being able to filter by length, holes, themes, Time of Day as I hate the dark courses (Some course look ok a monitor but very hard to see on a projector especially with shadows..