3889 replies to this topic

[dark]

I think Jimmy has the right of it, the new reflection feature looks good as is, the reflection should be sharp but it would be nice to have "blur" as an option.  What I do think it needs is less opacity - or more transparency - this would also be a great option for this feature.

 

While on this topic, there's something that's been bugging me a long time, there's no way to simulate plastic ramps plastic material within VP (or any simulator to date) in a realistic way.

 

Here's what I'm talking about, although this ramp has a bit of a 'bumpy' 'frosted' texture to it that you don't normally see in ramps, it does still exhibit the features of a plastic material that I'm referring to.  Real plastics bend light and distort the image behind it especially in bent sections of the plastic like where walls meet the floor.  You can see in the right image how the things are more distorted on the lip of the ramp wall where the plastic bends.  You'll also notice that anything we view through the plastic has varying degrees of blurriness and distortion.  I know it's probably too much to ask for at this point, it's just something I wanted to bring some attention to so that perhaps devs can keep this in mind for future features.  I know the reflection distortion part is almost certainly out of reach currently but it would be nice if there was a way to just blur what ever is displayed through the ramp slightly.

[fuzzel]

The reflection amount can be changed by using the reflective strength of the ball reflection on the playfield. There are a couple of issue we have to solve first before you can really use it:
1. The mirroring only works for static elements so it looks a bit strange at the moment
2. The reflection doesn't fade for tall elements. If you have a huge toy on a table the complete primitive reflects on the playfield but normally you would only see a small part of the element which is near the playfield. So a distance fade would be nice..

For now you have to activate this feature for every table. Not all current test tables look good with that option, especially AMH because the table has it's own reflection handling.
The reflection amount can be changed by using the reflective strength of the ball reflection on the playfield. There are a couple of issue we have to solve first before you can really use it:
1. The mirroring only works for static elements so it looks a bit strange at the moment
2. The reflection doesn't fade for tall elements. If you have a huge toy on a table the complete primitive reflects on the playfield but normally you would only see a small part of the element which is near the playfield. So a distance fade would be nice..

For now you have to activate this feature for every table. Not all current test tables look good with that option, especially AMH because the table has it's own reflection handling.

[jimmyfingers]

The reflection amount can be changed by using the reflective strength of the ball reflection on the playfield. 
 

Hey fuzzel, could you please consider not tying the PF reflection to the ball reflection as those settings have potential good reasons to be independent.  For me personally, I disable the built-in ball reflection on all tables and use my custom routine because it has more configuration elements and dynamically updates / fine tunes the overall ball reflection image position to be more table / viewer angle relevant based on the X / Y position of the ball on the table plus has the ability to be turned off and on with triggers (can show also while on wire ramps / above the playfield which the native one cannot) - also why at some point I'd like you guys to look at it and see if you want to incorporate some of it into the core code. It's a reasonably easy routine to add but does rely on a couple other things like ball tracking for instance.  I also don't see why in general for the code and as far as general design of the program that the playfield reflection of table objects should have to be linked to other options this way and hope that in planning / designing this feature that it is not hard coded in a way to forever be linked to the ball reflection options enabling / disabling and value / strength for the same reasons.

 

Point also in general being, I think at a basic VP options level it would make sense and be good for the program to not have options that are forced / tied to other ones and that was part of the reason I originally asked Toxie to decouple the playfield reflection on ball effect from the ball reflection on playfield effect (or at least be able to do so with a level / value setting - enabled for instance but value set at 0 for one or the other).  Maybe you are referring to using the new PF reflections this way just while it's in the early stages but I really hope that it becomes independent at some near future point otherwise I know I'll never be able to personally use this great new PF reflection feature and a custom ball reflection routine ever again because obviously it will produce doubling up and misaligned effects by having to leave the native table ball on playfield reflection on and at a level high enough for this other new object playfield reflections to be used and / or look "right" (and I will stand by the extra features of the custom routine even if it's not as easy to configure as, again, native is great if possible at least in general - but is limited as far as the current ball on playfield reflection / angles implementation ).  We generally, as authors / modders, should always be able to add-on / extend some features with our own creativity / customizations for some elements / areas like this and disable certain native VP visual features - locking these two different reflection types into one setting is going to kill that in this case.  If nothing else just linking the ball reflection and PF is limiting in customizability in general and, with some ball images / texture mappings, a different value may be desirable than that of what looks good for the rest of the table objects reflecting off the table, even if not discussing custom ball reflection routines at all.

Edited by jimmyfingers, 17 July 2015 - 12:52 AM.

[dyopp21]

I know this may be a bit early since VPX is still in Beta and I certainly don't expect it to be perfect, but I'm a bit frustrated and I'm just wondering if I'm the only one experiencing this problem with VPX.

 

For the most part, it is AWESOME!  I can't wait until it becomes the new standard and we are creating tables for it.  I'm looking forward to this winter because I really want to be a bigger part of that process. 

 

The issue I'm having is with occasional ball stutter.  Just when I think I've found the source of the stutter, I'll be playing for a while and all is well and then BAM, another small stutter.  Sometimes a single stutter, or maybe even a three stutter skip of the ball (especially during mulitball).  It probably stutters an average of a few times a minute.  While that's minimal, it's still annoying as heck.

 

I have three machines and they all display the exact same symptoms on all tables (with the lone exception of that Smurf table as near as I can tell).  Two are in cabs and one is a test workstation.  Two of them have a GTX 660 and one has a GTX 760 with plenty of processing, memory and power supply.  They have all performed well with zero stutter with all other version of VP and FP.  I was maybe thinking it was my choice of processors (I lean AMD), but one of my systems is Intel so that's not it.  I've spent hours and hours turning off services, adjusting GFX settings on both the card and withing the software to no avail.

 

So hear is my question/s.  Is anyone else experiencing this?  Has anyone found the solution for their particular problem or anything in particular I should be looking for?

 

I hope this doesn't sound like I'm bitching.  The software looks and plays great except for that one issue, and I'm just hoping by the time it makes it to the final stable version either I or someone in the community will have figured this out.  If I'm the only one seeing this, it has to be something I'm doing in common on my systems  (such as having Team Viewer or the like) or something maybe I've overlooked on the install process

 

Again, not bitching, just hope to figure this out.  And as always, many many thanks to all of our great devs.  Incredible work! 

[toxie]

@dark: currently thats difficult to achieve, but in general there is a lot that we would need to improve for transparent objects.

 

@dyopp21: no clue, honestly. maybe you're on the limit of gfx memory for some tables? and then the driver has to swap in/out at some point? but could be a lot of things.

[fuzzel]

@jimmy: no worries. The mirroring of elements on the playfield has it's own switch. only the reflective strength of the ball reflection is used for both.

@dark: what you mean is translucency and when done right it's a real performance killer. The same goes for correct volumetric lighting. VP isn't designed for such things at the moment.

[toxie]

we could fake a bit of the glossy transmission or refraction, but as you say, it won't be exactly fast. also it won't work easily if you have many levels of transparent objects (ramp on top of bumpers for example).

 

but actually before all that, currently we cannot even draw a single ramp "correctly" even with the current simple transparency. 

 

EDIT: i also wanted to commit the optional reflection blur stuff, but apparently sourceforge is down since XX hours.  :/

Edited by toxie, 17 July 2015 - 12:00 PM.

[dyopp21]

@dark: currently thats difficult to achieve, but in general there is a lot that we would need to improve for transparent objects.

 

@dyopp21: no clue, honestly. maybe you're on the limit of gfx memory for some tables? and then the driver has to swap in/out at some point? but could be a lot of things.

I'll continue to play with it, and, barring everything else will do a clean install of win7 on one of my systems and place only VPX on it to see if that fixes it.  I WILL have a stutter-free VPX if it's the last thing I do! 

 

If I figure out it's a setting somewhere, I'll report it here... but I'll make darned sure it's fixed before reporting it this time.  

[jimmyfingers]

@jimmy: no worries. The mirroring of elements on the playfield has it's own switch. only the reflective strength of the ball reflection is used for both.
 

Hey fuzzel, that's some separation but actually really the reverse of what one would need to enable the mirroring of elements on the playfield and disable the ball reflection on the playfiled via the strength setting to 0.  Right now with the switch for ball reflection it has only 1 enable switch for both ball on playfield and the playfield on ball effect, so if one still wants playfield on ball (second value field) but not ball on playfield, it has to be configured as follows:

 

 Capture of ball reflection settings.PNG   3.64KB   27 downloads

 

However, that means that even if the mirroring of elements on the playfield has it's own switch but still relies on the ball on playfield strength (in this case 0 for in practice actually disabling just that effect and leaving playfield on ball) then the for mirroring of elements on the playfield strength as you say will also be picked up by this first column and therefore also at 0 so will be effectively off even if it has it's own switch and that is set to on.  That still leaves the situation at not being able to have mirroring of elements enabled and using no ball on playfield natively while still at least wanting to use the playfield on ball effect (even though I know the latter is new to VP10 and still a bit of a work in progress - looks good enough now to still use and be desirable).

 

Could you just add a 3rd field for strength like was done already in the main ball reflection settings area for the 2nd field of strength of playfield on ball reflection but for the effect of elements on playfield and that way we can continue as has had to be done with only the one ball reflection switch but the strength of any one of the 3 values (if added vs. currently 2) for the 3 effects now could still independently be set to 0 and not affect the others?  Alternatively, each with their own switch of course and strength value would maybe be most intuitive but, in any case, as you described in your last post will still yield the same problem I was first writing about.

 

Thanks for your work on this latest feature and working on it to allow for all situations that people may use for their tables.  I can send you an example of the custom ball reflection mod I was talking about but you may already have it from that AFM GI8 / BMPR WIP mod I sent you way back for testing and if needed I could show you some screen captures and expand on some of the issues with the native ball on playfield reflection implementation and why it is still highly desirable to be disabled (strength = 0) and replaced with a custom approach mainly for table viewing angle issues that do not appear to be considered / calculated in the current native coding.

Edited by jimmyfingers, 17 July 2015 - 02:32 PM.

[freneticamnesic]

nevermind the answer was right in front of me. as usual.

Edited by freneticamnesic, 20 July 2015 - 12:23 AM.

[realkungfupanda]

For those of us with a realdmd using pindmd2, are there any plans to support pindmd2 without using their vpinmame.dll file?  (I'm assuming that it isn't compatible with the vp10 beta, but haven't tried it.)

[KieferSkunk]

I would think pindmd and such would be a factor of the VBScripts, so theoretically separating pindmd and vpinmame should be doable independently of VP10. I think the vbs files basically assume you're using VPinMAME, but they don't necessarily have to.

[Carny_Priest]

XDMD is the library on which UltraDMD is based. XDMD supports pindmdv2. Now, I don't know if UltraDMD takes advantage of the functionality or it if it is only virtual dmd. It would be good to know. 

[Dozer316]

Just a quick question and sorry if it's been answered before - Is there a way to prevent crash.dmp and crash.txt from being generated when the editor falls over?

 

Thanks in advance.

[toxie]

Not so far. Is this an issue?

[Dozer316]

Hey Toxie, not a big one, just sometimes when it does it writes to disk for quite a while (2.7gb dump file) before destroying it's UI and allowing me to restart.

 

First world problem really, just me being impatient

[fuzzel]

The thing is, when you disable it and got a crash you don't have something for us to look at And reproducing a crash isn't always easy...

[Dozer316]

Yes I understand.  I only get them during authoring though when I don't quit and restart for quite a while, never in play mode on the cabinet.

[arngrim]

maybe have the option to disable it, i have less than 10gb on my cab and it descreases every week with new or upgraded tables, performance can also be an impact, not everybody participates to the beta topic, just a thought

[saito]

Hi guys,

I have followed this topic since the beginning and downloaded every release to play around with this beta. First of all, thank you for trying to improve the visual pinball software. You already done a good job and I really enjoy the new features .

 

The new rubber object, the 3d mesh import improvement and the material editor are my favorite improvements. My only complain to date is about the new physic system. With VP9 Physmod 5 I was able to fine tune my pinball table and it was not so far from my real pinball machines.

 

So here is my humble feedback based on the 2112 revision :

• Friction settings

The friction setting doesn't seems to give correct behaviour. With the default setting, it's like the ball is rolling on an adhesive tape !!! With high friction value, I would expect the ball to have some difficulties to roll at beginning, but I would not expect the ball to stop accelerate. If you release a ball at the top of the playfield with high friction value (very dirty playfield), the ball will not slide due to the high friction value and start to roll to the bottom with a constant acceleration due to the gravity force. The friction will only lower the acceleration value.

• Momentum

The ball lost is momentum too rapidly. In real life, with a pinball machine well maintained, the ball is able to do a lot of small bounce on the pinball shaft. It's a bit hard to explain, but in visual pinball 10, the ball bounce only 2 or 3 times and seems to be stuck on the rubber, even with high elasticity value (0.8) and very low friction value.

• Flipper settings

I have spend hours to fine tune the new physic and there is still a huge difference playing my virtual table and the real one. I really miss the old Oblique correction setting. Without this setting I'm not able to do realistic backhand shots.

I set the flipper shaft open angle to be similar to my real pinball machine, and I tune the power to be able to do the main ramps easily, but the ball should have lost some speed at the top of the ramp, due to friction and gravity. Once the power is set-up, I try to reproduce the main shots I used to do on my pinball machine, but there is something wrong (especially the backshots).

 

Current tradeoff :

• Friction : I set the friction to very low value, decrease the gravity value too.
• Flipper shaft : To be able to do some backhand shots, I increase the open angle a bit and I add some power. It become unrealistic as the ball have to much power but backhand are more easier to do. (for exemple, in no good gofers pinball machine, you should be able to do the left outer loop with the left flipper, and the right ramp with the right flipper quite easily)

Here is my current settings :

 

Flipper

• Mass 1.8
• Strength 1600
• Elasticity 0.6
• Elasticity falloff 0.4
• Friction 0.01
• Return strength 0.15
• Coil ramp up 2

Global

• Gravity 0.72
• Playfield friction 0.014
• slope 6

Keep up the good work , and don't be upset by my feedback, I only want to improve this wonderful pinball simulation software.

 

Real input data ?

 

I own some pinball machine at home (like stern monopoly), so if you need some real input data, I can manage to record a specific video with some specific shots to easily compare the physic. I would be nice to compare to the visual pinball 10 monopoly table if it exist.

 

Don't hesitate if you need those kind of input data.

TLDR (for those in a hurry !! ) :
This new version of visual pinball is really promising, I enjoy the new rubber object, the 3d mesh import improvement and the material editor a lot. However I think that physic could be improved, especially on friction setting, and perhaps flipper shaft setting. Backhand shots are pain in the a.. to reproduce !!

Edited by saito, 20 July 2015 - 04:38 PM.