3889 replies to this topic

[toxie]

That should definetly do the trick then. The rings are by far the worst part here (as said, the ball is actually a larger cube for some parts of the collision routine :/).

[sleepy]

A great start, to be sure.

 

Shockman was asking about beveled Kickers. These are also known as Saucer Kickers, which is a Kicker with a large angled or rimmed ring around it, inserted like a (usually) broad-diameter shallow concave conical inlay saucer or shallow bowl carved into the playfield surface with the smaller Kicker in the center of it. Like Mata Hari. Like Xenon at the top arch. These are definitely not gobble holes, or holes at all.  When a ball rolls into the outer concave rim of a saucer kicker, it usually rolls around that rim and may or may not roll to the center of it where the actual kicker is. It may instead roll out of the outer saucer rim area, missing the actual Kicker. Sometimes the ball rolls lazilly around the saucer rim and out, never making the Kicker.

Pardon me, but I don't see that type of inlay broad-rimmed kicker available from the menus. Is it being worked on?

 

And Great Job on the sound panning feature! I assume this is due to the use of the BASS.DLL sound .dll. Is this correct? Is the ball.X position the source of the panning control parameter value? Does the ball.X value require transposition to the panning value? Is the Pan Value range 0-255 or 0-127?

Is this bass.dll callable from script, to control the parameters, including panning? Can we send custom soundwave data (numerical user data) to it to generate our own real time synth sounds from script? Is the wave output port accessible?

I see that the VP Sound Manager is greyed out for now. Can we use Ogg Vorbis files? 5.1 Surround files?

Edited by sleepy, 03 February 2015 - 02:05 PM.

[dark]

Hey UW I tried your MB WIP out briefly this morning, I noticed the purple flashers seem to highlight surrounding objects, how is that being accomplished?  Is that just a flasher/alpha image? Or is it actually highlighting it somehow?  In any case it looks good.  The ball kind of looks like it has a bit of outline to it but maybe it just looks this way on my smaller PC display.

[randr]

Looks great can we up the Polly on the toys now?

[toxie]

And Great Job on the sound panning feature! I assume this is due to the use of the BASS.DLL sound .dll. Is this correct? Is the ball.X position the source of the panning control parameter value? Does the ball.X value require transposition to the panning value? Is the Pan Value range 0-255 or 0-127?

Is this bass.dll callable from script, to control the parameters, including panning? Can we send custom soundwave data (numerical user data) to it to generate our own real time synth sounds from script? Is the wave output port accessible?

I see that the VP Sound Manager is greyed out for now. Can we use Ogg Vorbis files? 5.1 Surround files?

 

The sound system is basically the exact same as in VP9.9, so for the script everything works the same as before.

 

It just uses BASS for playing the music now instead of the old builtin code, mainly though because of the 64bit port of VP.

But the inclusion of BASS should indeed allow you to play OGG files now (and all kinds of other sound/music formats of course).

And i found one major reason for the slowdown with the ring collisions, so even if you leave them in, it will be much faster later-on today.

(but its still a good idea to delete them from the collidable mesh )

[sleepy]

Are Saucer Kickers on the to-do list? This is a feature that has been needed since the dawn of time, VP-wise.

There are arbitrary equational workarounds, but they don't duplicate the freestyle ball behavior when it rolls into the saucer area.

[unclewilly]

@randr. Those should be the high poly toys if i remember correct. Ill check

[Shockman]

A great start, to be sure.

 

Shockman was asking about beveled Kickers. These are also known as Saucer Kickers, which is a Kicker with a large angled or rimmed ring around it, inserted like a (usually) broad-diameter shallow concave conical inlay saucer or shallow bowl carved into the playfield surface with the smaller Kicker in the center of it. Like Mata Hari. Like Xenon at the top arch. These are definitely not gobble holes, or holes at all.  When a ball rolls into the outer concave rim of a saucer kicker, it usually rolls around that rim and may or may not roll to the center of it where the actual kicker is. It may instead roll out of the outer saucer rim area, missing the actual Kicker. Sometimes the ball rolls lazilly around the saucer rim and out, never making the Kicker.

Pardon me, but I don't see that type of inlay broad-rimmed kicker available from the menus. Is it being worked on?

 

And Great Job on the sound panning feature! I assume this is due to the use of the BASS.DLL sound .dll. Is this correct? Is the ball.X position the source of the panning control parameter value? Does the ball.X value require transposition to the panning value? Is the Pan Value range 0-255 or 0-127?

Is this bass.dll callable from script, to control the parameters, including panning? Can we send custom soundwave data (numerical user data) to it to generate our own real time synth sounds from script? Is the wave output port accessible?

I see that the VP Sound Manager is greyed out for now. Can we use Ogg Vorbis files? 5.1 Surround files?

 

Yes. Exactly what I was talking about. I could have sworn that I read that and the drop targets thing in the todo list. I could have been dreaming though, and mine never reflect reality, always much better, or much worse. The workaround for saucers that actually use bevels (ramps) instead of magnets, shows that VP ball physics handle it perfectly.

 

Funny, the first thing I did was try to make rings non-collidable and found them part of the ramp model. I too get bad stutter at a point. Not just wire ramps for me with, VPM, but constantly. I don't have a good enough GPU to complain about that though.

 

All these issues have workarounds. No good VP tables came inside the box. Workarounds is VPs' legacy.

[toxie]

btw: Something i just noticed on my two test systems here: Please revisit the "Max prerendered frames" setting in the video preferences.

Before it was always best to have it set to 2 on my systems, now it seems like 0/disable is best. Of course there are also not many tables to test yet, but maybe the people with stuttering problems can also revisit that setting.

[chepas]

Toxie. What has changed with the trough?

 

I'm sure as I've updated these vbs it's broken my games. Must be something silly I'm missing but it's got me confused for an hour now. I tried added the "new" .isTrough but normally when table is loaded the balls get added with .balls = 4, but not being added.

    ' Trough
    Set bsTrough=New cvpmBallStack
    
    bsTrough.InitSw 0,81,82,83,84,85,0,0
    bsTrough.InitKick BallRelease, 80, 6
    bsTrough.InitEntrySnd "Solenoid", "Solenoid"
    bsTrough.InitExitSnd "ballrel", "Solenoid"
    bsTrough.IsTrough 
    bsTrough.Balls=4

It could be that the P-ROC bridge needs updating.

 

Edit: Right, it's because I went and replaced the vbs files from here, bad move. Need to use the ones specific for the P-ROC controller.

Edited by chepas, 03 February 2015 - 03:19 PM.

[randr]

Toxie so I can import music or does it still need to be in music folder?

Uw but could we go even higher if they are higher poly versions? Think high poly was like 2000 or so? But they looked better at 6000

[unclewilly]

Hey toxie. Can you set the default prerendered frames to zero in the next build?

Hey shocky,
Do you have a pci express slot 16x?
@shocky. What graphics card do you have?

[toxie]

@randr: it still needs to be in the music folder (for now).

we can change all that in a later version of VP (10.1??), when we need to touch all the other sound code, too.

 

@UW: i would rather wait until more people report their findings with it. is it better with 0 on your system, too?

Edited by toxie, 03 February 2015 - 03:53 PM.

[lio]

Wow, that release was unexpected! Thanks to everyone involved!

 

I had the ball pass through the bottom left slingshot peg once (cradled ball on left flipper, attempted post pass and the ball went through the peg and ended up sitting inside of the slingshot rubber) but that happened before the build was updated again and I haven't seen it happen since.

 

Tons of new stuff to discover and I am amazed how good the material system looks! Great work there!

The 3D ball with the light reflections looks really good, too!

 

Once thing I don't quite understand is how the screen aspect ratio affects the rendering output.

I used to run VP in 1600x1200 windowed on a 1920x1200 screen because otherwise it would always produce distored views unless I compensated by changing the Y scale.

Now it seems that using 1920x1200 is OK as long as the X and Y scale settings are equal.

Obviously the wider resulution shows more of the scene to the sides but it no longer stretches the view.

Now I would have expected 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 would show the same view of the table just that 1600 would be cropped by 160 pixels on each side - turns out that is not the case.

Possibly the FOV settings produce a different result for different aspect ratios - at least you cannot put the 1600 render on top of the 1920 render and expect things to line up, the difference is quite big actually.

[Shockman]

...

Hey shocky,
Do you have a pci express slot 16x?
@shocky. What graphics card do you have?

 

AMD Radeon HD 8670D on the motherboard.

 

I did not make it clear, I can tell after reading it back. It does well generally, and no stutter with the VP10 default table, or anything I tested. The constant stutter is with VPM running, on a ramp or not, but not all settings options have been tested yet.

I did not believe I had much power to spare before, and expected lower performance.

I don't mind VP10 being the mark to meet when it comes to a GPU upgrade, and I know there are quite a few up to the task.

I want nVidia, so I will have to get a power supply with the 6 pin power port. I had to do this with my last HP too. but i don't have the power supply, or the GTO card anymore.

 

I have a AMD A10 6700 with 12gig ram. 

[toxie]

i have the same stutter on my laptop with this table, so don't give up hope just yet  , maybe i'll discover something "interesting" such as the other issue with the right ramp..

[dyopp21]

Great job on the beta release of VPX.  Kudos to the dev team!

 

I've read mention of drop target changes (or lack thereof) in VPX, and I was wondering if there will be a change to the behavior of drop targets in this release or a future release that does a more realistic job of a double target hit (hitting directly between two targets and taking them both down at the same time) than the current tables have?  The only table I'm aware of that does this well is Centaur (there may be others, but I'm only aware of Centaur because it's always an "AHA!" moment when I manage a double drop on that table).  It's the one thing in all iterations of VP that I've always thought has been overlooked.  It's especially showing in tables with lots of drops, such as Mata Hari, etc., where you simply never have a double target drop, or a steep angled "glancing" blow that takes down many targets at once.

[unclewilly]

...

Hey shocky,
Do you have a pci express slot 16x?
@shocky. What graphics card do you have?

 
AMD Radeon HD 8670D on the motherboard.
 
I did not make it clear, I can tell after reading it back. It does well generally, and no stutter with the VP10 default table, or anything I tested. The constant stutter is with VPM running, on a ramp or not, but not all settings options have been tested yet.
I did not believe I had much power to spare before, and expected lower performance.
I don't mind VP10 being the mark to meet when it comes to a GPU upgrade, and I know there are quite a few up to the task.
I want nVidia, so I will have to get a power supply with the 6 pin power port. I had to do this with my last HP too. but i don't have the power supply, or the GTO card anymore.
 
I have a AMD A10 6700 with 12gig ram. 

Ive got a gtx 250 1 gb nvidia card collecting dust. If you would like it just pm me your address and ill send it to you

[dark]

One small issue I'd like to point out with primitive transparency and stack order.  I know depth bias can be used to determine stack orders so that transparent primitives will show other primitives behind them (which works fine) but what happens when you have part of a transparent primitive that overlaps itself?

 

If you look at the right ramp in JPark Lost World you can see a portion of it overlaps itself and the section of ramp behind or below it is invisible and since it's all part of the same object depth bias won't help this.  I had considered making the ramp separate sections to compensate for this but this would cause a seam where they meet and the table was already nearing release by the time I noticed this.  I was hoping something could be done to address this in future updates of VP10 perhaps.

 

Edited by dark, 03 February 2015 - 05:39 PM.

[zany]

I did notice that aswell....transparency over transparency doesn't seem to work. The transparent part in behind dissapears.