DrivingRangeTheater

Does your lobby host step away for a bathroom break between games? Do you and your friends often wait for someone to finish something AFK between furious 18-hole battles? This is the mod for you. Add a mod to r2-modman with a /videos folder and it's content will be displayed in beautiful big picture cinema to enjoy as a group while you wait for whoever to finish making dinner, using the bathroom, or having appendicitis (looking at you Baustin).

Don't know how to make a mod? drop a video file over at http://calenray.com/SBG-driving-range-theater-mod-maker/ and it will automatically turn the video file into a compatible mod to view from your very own golf drive-in. Be aware that it's not a quick process to re-encode video files and assemble mod-packages entirely client side (in browser). I am a busy fella so I may or may not get around to efficiency improvements, feel free to open a pull request for the site as it's open source to allow other developers to add improvements! (github for contributors: https://github.com/Calen-Ray/SBG-driving-range-theater-mod-maker)

Speaking of being a busy fella, here is chat gpt rewriting my three paragraph explaination of the mod framework into something more organized. Cheers.

Turns the driving-range leaderboard TV into a video player. Hit the cycle buttons (forward / back) to flip between clips; each client controls their own playback volume from the pause menu.

This mod is a framework. It does not ship with any videos. Pair it with content mods, or drop your own files into Videos/ under any plugin folder.

Install

Via r2modman or Thunderstore Mod Manager: search for Cray-DrivingRangeTheater and install, plus any content packs you want.

Manual install: drop DrivingRangeTheater.dll into <r2modman profile>/BepInEx/plugins/Cray-DrivingRangeTheater/.

Requires BepInExPack 5.4.2305. Every player in a lobby needs the same mods installed, including the same video content, because cycle state is server-authoritative and replicated via Mirror.

Usage

• Original button: next video.
• Cloned button beside it: previous video.
• Pause menu while on the driving range: client-local Screen res, Theater volume, and Screen fit controls.
• If the screen trims the edges of a clip, adjust OverscanCompensation in BepInEx/config/cray.drivingrangetheater.cfg.

Adding videos

Drop video files into any of the following locations under a plugin package — the framework scans all of them at startup and sorts across all matches alphabetically, deduping by path:

• <plugin>/Videos/ — canonical.
• <plugin>/Video/ — also accepted (singular).
• <plugin>/ (plugin root) — only if a same-basename audio sidecar (.ogg/.wav/.mp3/.m4a/…) sits next to it. The sidecar requirement keeps the scanner from picking up unrelated mp4s a plugin ships for other reasons.

Video

Recommended format: MP4 (H.264 8-bit / yuv420p). This is the safest format for Unity's VideoPlayer backend on Windows. Also accepted by extension: .webm, .mov, .ogv, .mkv, .m4v, but decode support varies. H.264 10-bit (High 10, yuv420p10le) will fail with VideoPlayer cannot play url.

Transcode problematic files with:

ffmpeg -y -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -profile:v high -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 22 -preset veryfast \
       -c:a copy output.mp4

Audio

Super Battle Golf has Unity's native audio disabled project-wide, so the VideoPlayer's built-in audio paths are silent. The framework plays audio from a sidecar file next to each video through FMOD.

Ship an audio file alongside every video with the same basename, for example 1 Gwimbly.mp4 -> 1 Gwimbly.ogg. Accepted extensions, first match wins: .ogg, .wav, .mp3, .m4a, .aac, .flac. If no sidecar is found, the video still plays silently.

Extract .ogg audio from an existing mp4 with:

ffmpeg -y -i input.mp4 -vn -c:a libvorbis -q:a 4 input.ogg

Audio is played as a 3D FMOD sound positioned at the theater screen, not as a global 2D mix. Volume ramps linearly from full at 6 m to silent at 45 m — you can stand well away from the screen and still hear the clip, but it fades out before polluting the rest of the range. Sync is maintained by a 2-second drift check against VideoPlayer.time; the framework corrects mismatches greater than 250 ms with channel.setPosition().

Prefix filenames with 01-, 02-, and so on to control playback order.

Authoring a content mod

Ship a Thunderstore package depending on Cray-DrivingRangeTheater:

Cray-MyVideos/
|-- manifest.json
|-- icon.png
|-- README.md
`-- Videos/
    |-- 01-intro.mp4
    |-- 02-highlights.mp4
    `-- ...

The framework scans your Videos/ folder on next startup. No code is needed.

How it works

• Video scan: at plugin Awake, walks BepInEx/plugins/*/Videos/* for supported formats.
• Screen takeover: a Harmony prefix on DrivingRangeStaticCameraManager.ApplyCurrentCameraIndex suppresses vanilla camera activation and drives the theater manually. Active video decodes into an offscreen RT, then gets composited into the vanilla driving-range screen RT with a configurable overscan-safe margin so the existing in-scene display path keeps working.
• Screen resolution: the mod upgrades the original shared match_setup_camera_render_texture in place and rebuilds the six vanilla driving-range camera caches against the chosen size. Supported client-local options are 1024, 1536, and 2048. This keeps the hidden screen binding intact while improving final display sharpness.
• Forward button: the vanilla nextCameraButton remains wired to CmdCycleNextCameraForAllClients. The SyncVar currentCameraIndex still drives playback; the mod just reinterprets the index against the video list instead of the camera list.
• Back button: at scene-start time the mod clones the forward button's GameObject, offsets it, and swaps its DrivingRangeNextCameraButton component for DrivingRangeBackCameraButton, which sends TheaterCycleMsg { direction = -1 }. A server handler updates the SyncVar accordingly.
• Volume slider: a small pause-menu child panel shown while the pause menu is open and the theater is active. The sliders write to BepInEx ConfigEntry<float> values so volume and screen-fit changes persist.
• Audio playback: FMOD sidecar audio starts when the active clip actually begins video playback, then stays synced against the VideoPlayer clock with periodic drift correction.

Building from source

Requirements: .NET SDK 7.0+, a Super Battle Golf install.

git clone https://github.com/Calen-Ray/SBG-driving-range-theater.git
cd SBG-driving-range-theater
dotnet build -c Release

The build copies the DLL into your r2modman Default profile automatically.

Packaging for Thunderstore

pwsh tools/package.ps1

Produces artifacts/Cray-DrivingRangeTheater-<version>.zip ready to upload.

Releasing

Automated via .github/workflows/release.yml — publishing a GitHub Release uploads the attached zip to Thunderstore.

One-time setup. Add a THUNDERSTORE_TOKEN repository secret (Settings -> Secrets and variables -> Actions). The token comes from thunderstore.io/settings/teams/ under the Cray team.

Cut a release:

# 1. Bump version_number in manifest.json and add a CHANGELOG.md entry.
# 2. Commit + tag + push.
git commit -am "Release v0.2.0"
git tag v0.2.0
git push --follow-tags

# 3. Build the zip locally (CI can't build — hosted runners don't have the game DLLs).
pwsh tools/package.ps1

# 4. Create the GitHub Release with the zip attached; the workflow publishes on release.published.
gh release create v0.2.0 artifacts/Cray-*-*.zip --notes-file CHANGELOG.md

License

MIT, see LICENSE.