Inspiration

After a lot of success and aclaim in making virtual courses for first Links 2001 and then later, Links 2003, I found myself being contacted by various real golf design companies and developers who wanted me to provide photorealistic pictures and 'flyby's' of their planned new courses, renovations and redesigns.

Since getting my start with Kevin Atkinson at Phelps/Atkinson golf design, I've been fortunate enough to have been able to work with some of the biggest names in the golf design business including Greg Norman's course design company, Fazio design, Robert Trent Jones II, David Kidd golf design, Tim Liddy design and many more.
I can't tell you how much I've learned both about the finer points of golf design and also about the more down to earth aspects such as budgeting, construction and environmental issues that real designers must deal with on each design.

It's been a few years since I put that knowledge to good use on any of my own personal designs but that's about to change. I'm in the process of designing and building a brand new course for Links which I hope will be the best I've ever created. So why now?

Although the last of the Links series of golf games/sims produced for the PC was way back in 2003, constant patches and updates have been produced by Mark Hulka (one of the original 'Links' programmers)and the team at apcd-courses.com led my Mick Prendergast and Andrew Jones. Their passion for the game of golf and links in particular has ensured that even by todays standards, the visuals and gameplay are still second to none. There have also been recent significant additions which now allow the use of much higher resolution textures to be used in the making of courses in the 'apcd' (the cad based tool used for creating courses for Links).

Several designers notably Rob Miller, have used these new opportunities to take the game to new heights of visual fidelity. Rob's renditions of great courses such as Pinehurst no.2, Shinnecock and Bethpage Black (co designed with Domonic Bois) have raised the bar on what is possible. Over the last few years I've developed a good friendship with Rob and after doing much playing and testing on his courses and giving my input on where I felt things could be improved even further, I came to the decision to put my knowledge and skills into creating a brand new course of my own. Several close friends offered encouragement and so my mind was made up!

I lost no time and immediately set about researching the kind of course I would create, it's geographical location and it's style. I've made my name in virtual course creation and visualization by striving to create courses that are fun to play, look natural but more than that - courses that look 'REAL' I also wanted to create a course that would appeal to all standards of player be they an absolute expert or a comparative novice.

I'd like this blog to give an insight into the process of creating a brand new course from scratch and with hindsight I would have started to write it before any work had begun. As it's turned out' I'm already well into the design process but over the next few weeks I'll be blogging about what has been done so far, what is being done now and what is still to be done in the future. I hope that following this blog will be worth your time!