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No posts for a while...

Posted by Chris on Tuesday, December 08, 2009
...which can only mean plenty of activity up at Nerd Towers.
And you'd be right - we're busy working away on an online golf course editor. Yes, yes, we've already done one of those. But this time, it's different.
This time, not only do you get to drop trees and bunkers onto a pre-made map shape, but you're actually drawing the map that appears on the ScoreSure device itself!

After the partial-success of the bitmap drawing routines we had to decide which would be the best format for saving/displaying bitmaps on the device. RLE (run-length-encoded) bitmaps are nice and quick to draw, use up very little memory - both on the microcontroller and in storage - but lead to very small colour palettes. True-colour images are possible, but take up huge amounts of storage, cannot be buffered or loaded into RAM and are quite slow to draw onto the screen (streaming a single pixel of data from eeprom via two calls to extract two bytes means drawing the screen is quite slow).

So then we got to thinking about RLE bitmaps and how they could be used to draw things like sprites. And then we figured, it would be nice if we could make full use of our colour screen by displaying a little digital map of each hole as they are played. And then we thought "that's a lot of work, creating bitmaps and accurate data for all holes on all golf courses, all over the world!". So what better way to offload some of this workload, than to give the user the tools to create their own golfing maps?

They wouldn't even have to stick to designated golf courses. Got a mini-golf in your back garden? You could create your own online golf course and download it onto your ScoreSure device. Suddenly, there are a world of opportunities - and all because users can create their own maps. What we need is a Flash-based golf-course editor!

Here's how it works:
Find your favourite golf course using the integrated Google Maps editor.
Click the appropriate button(s) to select which "layer" you're going to draw on (there's a separate layer for the fairway, the green, and any bunkers/water)
Draw shapes over the top of the Google Map (changing the transparency to allow other layers to show through as necesasry). In the example, below, you can see we've started drawing the putting green.

When you're happy with your colouring in, hit the "next" button (currently "save") and you get the change to rotate, resize and generally mess about with your map, to get it to fit inside a window that will fit on the ScoreSure screen (at the time of writing, 100x240 pixels).


One of the holes at Whitefields Golf Course, Thurlaston, Rugby in the map editor

With the map in place, facing the right way up and so on, you can then drag and drop the rest of the "furniture" in place - trees, flag, teeing off points and so on.
The idea is that whatever you put together in the Flash editor will be used to recreate the map EXACTLY on your ScoreSure Golf Pro handheld device.

So if anyone has any disagreements with the maps on the device (a range of ready-made maps will be made available for download from the ScoreSure Golf website) they can go off and create their own!

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