Greetings golf fans! Welcome to another monthly update on Super Video Golf's development progress. Previously I hinted at new content coming in the next update - and I've been busy working on not one but TWO new courses! However these are still very early development so I won't be showing anything of those just yet. This isn't the only progress I've made, however, so let's take a look at what else is coming in 1.15. Firstly I've added a night time mode - it's now possible to play golf in the dark! Perhaps not the most realistic mode, however I do find it adds a new and interesting atmosphere to the game.
The above gif was taken from Spooky Video Sunday - a special Halloween event held on Super Video Sunday which, if you didn't know, is an event every Sunday where anyone is welcome to join in and play Super Video Golf online. If you want to join in then check out the Steam group here. Another visual effect I've been working on is the previously mentioned weather system - I talked briefly about it a few months ago, although it hasn't made it into the game yet as it's not quite ready. Rain, fog and even rainbows are implemented and will hopefully be polished enough to make it into the beta soon.

These effects will be controlled by the host of the game, and synchronised across clients, so all players will get to experience the same weather [hr][/hr] On a more technical note I've also been working on improving the UI and menus. Usability has been improved in places like the options menu where the sub menu tabs will now auto-select sequentially, and the player profile menu where pressing escape while updating the profile name will now cancel the edit and restore the existing name. I've also enabled pasting text into the player name box while editing, using the keyboard shortcut ctrl+V. On the topic of profile management, the default player profile is now associated directly with your Steam ID - this fixes an issue with Steam cloud where profiles could get duplicated or overwritten, depending on the quality of the available connection to Steam. Text rendering has also been updated with the aim of supporting more non-latin alphabets, such as Greek, Cyrillic and Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters. And, as a side effect of this, there is now also rudimentary emoji support (Apologies for the poor Google translation )
Other Operating Systems Work on the SteamOS native build is ongoing, where I've fixed issues with Steam workshop items not installing correctly, as well as some text input problems. The SteamOS version is still available in public beta, for instructions on how to access it, see this post. I've also coaxed the game into working on macOS - however due to Apple's seemingly unending list of rules, conditions and paywalls the beta is not yet publicly available.
As always you can find the current public beta on the 'beta' branch in Steam if you'd like to try out the new features - just right click on the game in your library, go to properties, and select the 'beta' tab. Do please leave any comments or suggestions you may have, or join in on the official chat where you can hang out with myself and other players and talk about all things Super Video Golf. Thank you all for your ongoing support - you make the game what it is! See you next time