Faterson:
Johniedino: Happens every rd. and any shot.
But what can you say its "a computer problem"
Yeah, it very well could be. I happen to be currently testing the Avast! Home anti-virus software. This software installs a nice little icon, a small blue ball with the letter a inscribed on it, in your Windows tray area. The interesting thing about this icon, this little a is, that it starts spinning whenever the anti-virus software is doing something on the PC.
Johniedino, you'd be shocked to see how frequently the anti-virus software becomes active. At seemingly illogical moments! I see the small a spinning approximately once a minute, at irregular intervals. Most antivirus software packages monitor all your HTTP traffic by default (i.e. what happens in your browsers).
I kept watching the little anti-virus icon while I was my playing my last few WGT golf games. Yep, that's exactly what was happening: during the game, the icon was sometimes spinning, and sometimes it wasn't. It was probably spinning whenever WGT's game was downloading, in background, more components necessary to display the course I was playing.
Now, Avast seems to be good-quality anti-virus software, and I didn't think it was disturbing my swing meter. (And I happen to be currently playing on an old notebook with only 512MB of RAM, yet the game on this site is performing fine for me; in contrast, I couldn't make a single shot over on TWO when I tried it earlier today – the shot meter kept freezing all the time.)
What I mean to say by all this: there is a lot more happening on your computer, at any moment, than readily meets the eye. Every time your shot meter stutters, this can actually be caused by a background process running or being launched on your computer, without you realizing it, such as anti-virus software starting to check something (for example, WGT courses components being downloaded in the background). Not all anti-virus software is so delicate as not to disturb your swing meter; some anti-virus software might be pretty heavy-handed and aggressive.
My best advice therefore: just let the meter pass all the way to the right without clicking the mouse, then take another swing. I find that the meter rarely stutters on several successive repeated swings. Also, make sure always to close the original browser window from which you launched the game pop-up window; an aggressive ad being loaded in the background, or your Friends panel being updated in the background, could very well cause meter stutter.
Kudos to Faterson for this very concise description of his experience with background services! Thanks for taking the time to post it. This subject has been beaten like a rented mule, and to have the patience to go about lucidly describing one of a myriad possible causes of the meter problems yet again, is admirable.
However... just like what is evidenced by the multiple duplicate email notifications that I am frequently forced to deal with, the "relationship", or lack thereof, between WGT's servers is also a problem that must be dealt with before we'll ever have a chance of seeing a stutter-free meter.
Any graphics intensive application, and especially one that incorporates an element like the swing meter that involves timing, presents a very fragile situation that doesn't take much to interrupt. But I've found that this interruption in the "fluidity" of the motion of the swing meter is only a graphics problem. What I mean by this is: If I use my own timing to click the mouse when the center line reached, and effectively ignore the sight of the stalled meter, the swing still reacts as it would have if the meter didn't stall/jerk.
Unfortunately, one needs to be able to see the meter to play the game effectively, because this is the way it has been set up to be played. Think of it this way... if, for some reason, WGT somehow designed the game to be played WITHOUT the VISUAL swing meter... instead having a player rely on only his own "internal" timing to accomplish an ideal swing... the distracting potentially jerky graphics element of the swing meter would be eliminated, hence reducing pushed/pulled shots. But like I said, the design of the game makes viewing and using the fragile, graphically represented swing meter essential.
Side note: I'm just wondering if an audible tone would be as fragile as the current graphic... a meter consisting of an "audible tone" rising in pitch as the center line is approached... when the "ideal tone" is reached - click the mouse button. I don't know...
With all that can cause an interruption in the smoothness of the meter, I don't think there'll ever be a fix for it - we'll just have to learn to accept the fact that it will continue to occur, hopefully not too frequently, and hopefully not at crucial times.
Look below at how it recently added frustration to a single play round I had... as if the 17th hole can't be unnerving enough, in and of itself. Just as the meter got close to the "ding line", it jerked and helped to feed the lake. The meter was fine up to that point in the game, but was terrible on those last two holes. Anti-virus kicking in? Server swapping? Who knows. Oh well...
