Golf Sim Clubhouse Forum

Me unnerstand. Me crash men's tour too, beat up on dose big guys! Which reminds me that I've been putting off the finish of my own season for a couple of months now and need to finish it up.

I haven't had the opportunity to look at your lists yet, but I'm finally through with the Keep and will probably get to them in the next day or so. I am interested in seeing how you dealt with the putting anomoly (sp?) I never have figured it out, nor why with similar characteristics, 3 or so players (besides me) have dominated the 2011 tour.

I don't think you can overcome the quirks in the AI, only work around them by making sure you don't play in your group with the same golfer twice. What the three of us did was just normalize eras of golfers. The AI will most likely still give some fits in gameplay. The only "tweak" we gave the stats was to automatically drop the putting figure for everyone. But the AI will still almost never chip a ball in or hit a hole in one or sink the short putt when it should or have a realistic percentage of long putts drained. I think we concluded this is not possible unless we are adept at hacking the game and rewriting code for the AI itself.

In our testing of the players, they did reasonably well but we did see some of those same frustrating things take place. But we felt the tournament results were more realistic and we also felt that the players ended up on the leaderboard where you might expect them to a greater percentage of the time. I think when we ranked the golfers first and then applied the statistics to them, this helped out.

In real life the stats that PGA 2000 uses do not present a complete picture of the ability of the golfer in question - hence there are numerous other categories that have been created to analyze a golfer's performance. The weakness of using too few statistics is that the computer AI can meet the demands of the statistic without actually being forced to do it in a realistic fashion. The AI kind of plays like Walter Hagen used to - it only takes one good shot to outweigh the 3 bad ones and a par is made. Or to put it another way, when the alogorithms repeat as they do you do not get the truly random result that is needed to make the percentage for each event believable. Yeah, who knew we could think?! Just did not want you to get your hopes up over these lists - we love using them but they have not solved our ongoing issues entirely.

Judging from what I saw in your season replay - Annika doesn't light a candle to your cyber golf game! Looking forward to your latest release - the three of us are considering using it as a host course for some of our ATG bracket matches. I think Carolindi is already on the list of courses we preselected to use.

I didn't expect any miracles with the AI. I'd just like to understand why it took over 3/4 of the season to reach >$100,000 for 2 of my players while 2 others have 6 wins between them; why some consistently finish in the T10 while others rarely make the cut and if they do rarely rise above the 20-30 rank. There's not a huge varience in any of their stats that would explain it, but their ya go. In reality I certainly understand why a golfer can shoot the daylights out of Course A and fail miserably on Course B, or even why on Thursday he's -6 and on Saturday +3, but not in this game. I've even observed those golfers with the earlier tee times on Thursday and Friday who have "finished" playing before the "live" game begins and those who are "playing live" at the same time I am; I simply have never found any coherent pattern. I just accept that that's the way it is and live with it.

Hey Gang! One thing I've learned is to check the players (FINISHING IN TOP 3) in every season tourny starting about 15 or so tourneys into a season to see what there stroke average is. For example since the computer AI normally makes the golfer average go lower it rarely makes a golfers average get higher. So if a golfer goes under a 67.5 average I delete that golfer and reinstall the orginal with actual averages that he started the season with. I keep a 2nd file in my documents. This helps keep anyone from dominating because of an AI problem. This is of course based on the best of the best golfers true avg. of around 69.5. I still might tweek the 67.5 and make it a little higher but I don't want to eliminate anyone having a short hot streak

These are now up on the Utilities Page at the bottom of the PGA 2000 Players section.

Thanks Brian for posting the files - enjoy all!