Fore! Three Fields

Before teeing off, I take a few seconds to line up the shot. Do I go for the cheeseburgers on the counter or the jars of mayonnaise on the shelf? It doesn’t really matter because the ball’s on fire. I hit it and half the kitchen explodes.

The shot ricochets off the wall and cupboards spill their contents. Tins of soup topple, saucepans clatter. Stacked plates crash to the floor and food splatters the ceiling. My score climbs. I get a huge bonus for smashing a hidden golden ketchup bottle. When the breadcrumbs settle, I look for the flag. It’s an easy putt: off the dishwasher, over the upturned trolley and into the hole.

Dangerous Golf, made by Three Fields Entertainment, isn’t like other golf games. It’s a game of trick shots and high scores rather than five irons and bogeys. “Golf’s boring,” says Three Fields co-founder Alex Ward. But what really sets it apart is its simulation of Newtonian physics – the most realistic ever seen in a video game. Everything in the game’s environments – which range from kitchens to petrol stations to palaces – can be knocked over, spilled and smashed in a completely life-like way.


The game is set for release in June. I’m visiting Three Fields’ small studio of 11 people based in Petersfield, UK, to try out an unfinished build. Nearly everyone at the company used to work at Criterion Games, a UK studio best known for its award-winning Burnout series – racing games in which crashing was often more fun than winning. “High speed action with lots of destruction, that’s our background,” says Phil Maguire. “Dangerous Golf is Burnout with a golf ball.”

Render it quick

Other sports games aim for an accurate simulation of physics. Football games like Fifa, for example, go to great lengths to get the equations that model drag on a kicked ball just right, so that its flight through the air feels familiar and predictable to players. But Dangerous Golf is modelling thousands of objects at once. “It is terrifically complex,” says team member Paul Ross. “That’s why you haven’t seen it in any other video game until now.”

The team began by studying scenes in action films like Inception and X Men: Days of Future Past. For example, in X Men there is a fight in a kitchen in which hundreds of pieces of debris and objects fill the screen. “At the end of the scene there’s a massive mess,” says Maguire. “That was a huge inspiration. It got us thinking, how far can we push games in that direction?”

A flaming good shot Three Fields

Films tend to look a lot more realistic than games, but they have it easy. Computer generated scenes – like the kitchens in X Men or Dangerous Golf – are created by crunching an enormous amount of data, which describes the positions of objects, the direction they are moving, the lighting effects and so on. The process is called rendering. For a film, render farms will run overnight, taking weeks to produce a second of footage, says Ward.

That’s fine for films. A scripted scene may only need to be rendered once. Not so in games, where the screen has to respond to your actions immediately. Instead of weeks, it may need to render a scene 30 times a second. And to get the data needed for each scene, Dangerous Golf first simulates the physical interactions of up to several thousand objects. “Most games – even big budget ones – have maybe four or five objects active at a time,” says Ward.

Faking flaws

The team is using techniques developed by Matthias Muller and Miles Macklin, researchers at graphics chip maker Nvidia, to model the way liquids flow and different materials deform or crack. First, they model the physical properties of each object – its mass, centre of gravity and friction. “We looked up the densities of a lot of materials to make sure we had them correct,” says Ross. Fluids are modelled as tiny particles. There are about 5000 particles in a bowl of soup.

When a player takes a shot, the simulation tracks the energy transfer from the golf ball into the objects it hits – a wine bottle, say – and calculates how it would move or fracture. Then it does the same for any object hit by shards from the wine bottle and so on, in a domino effect across potentially thousands of pieces.

But even that isn’t good enough. “It looks too perfect,” says Ross. The simulation must also account for the tiny differences between real objects. “Every plate that’s manufactured is slightly different,” he says. “It has different numbers of atoms, it has a slightly different mass. We had to take these little differences and put them into the simulation.”

Why go to such lengths? Many video games look the part but the realism is spoiled if the physics is just slightly off. More detailed physics models could make games even more immersive – even if it is just to smash up some crockery.

Smashing fantasy

“It’s just a bit of stupid fun,” says Ward. But destroying things is cathartic, he says. Many people have fantasies about knocking things off supermarket shelves or smashing priceless statues. For that feeling to come across in a game it has to look and feel totally believable.

In the last few years games have reached a very high level of fidelity, says Ross, especially with techniques like photogrammetry, where many pictures of the real world are stitched together and used to model virtual replicas. It’s not always convincing, however. “Everything looks real but the world is static.”

On to the next hole. I line up a shot that takes out most of a public toilet. It may be stupid fun, but Dangerous Golf is pushing for greater realism than we have ever seen in games – environments that are not only photorealistic, but where things break when you knock them over. “We’ve got fully destructible urinals,” says Ward.