333 replies to this topic

[tmek]

I took a look at some of the earlier videos from the past two weeks and particularly like the darker lighting and more intense flashers (ie: very nice how the flasher reflects of the side of the cabinet).
Eg:
https://youtu.be/jfL-uH-VRig

Will it be feasible to support the adjusting of lighting levels in real time whilst playing maybe with in-game sliders? Would be great to see at some how a table looks in a really dark room.

The physics look very good and the reflections are impressive.

 

I felt lighting was a critical component to get right (second to physics) so I spent a LOT of time working on how the playfield lights work and I'm pretty happy with where that wound up.  The inset lighting has an accurate 3D effect as you view the playfield from subtly different angles.  The insets also have a refraction map for things like starburst patterns as you can see in the videos.  Best of all this is done very efficiently so it runs fast on the graphics card.   

 

For each inset playfield light you can adjust:

 

• HoleShape - a 2D mesh:  a circle, rounded square, arrow, triangle or any custom shape.
• BulbDepth - a scalar value that just affects how far under the playfield the light source appears.
• InsetDepth - a scalar value that represents how deep the bottom of the plastic inset appears (where the refraction appears to come from).
• InsetRefractionMap - a normal map texture that provides the refraction effect for things like starburst insets.
• Tint - the RGB tint of the light.
• Temperature - a scalar value that also affects the tint of the light.  It's black body temperature.  (for example 6500k for LED style lighting, 4200k for warmer, incandescent style lighting)
• Lumens - a scalar value that adjust the visual approximation of the light's intensity/brightness.  
• Overlay - a RGBA texture that represents any translucent decal overlaying the light.
• OverlayScale - a 2D vector value to adjust the overlay scale.
• OverlayOffset - a 2D vector value to adjust the overlay offset. 

All of these can be set dynamically at runtime although tint and lumens would be the only ones that would realistically change.  The light 'hole' can be scaled to any size as well.

 

There will be a user preference that allows players to switch between warmer dimmer incandescent lighting and brighter 6500k LED lighting.  A global setting and per-machine a override.

 

I'm hoping this system would cover just about any inset playfield light.

 

My focus for the next demo build is a demonstration of all the variations you can do with inset lighting. 

 

EDIT: It would be great if you guys could link some images of real world playfield lights that you think are interesting or challenging to recreate and I'll do those for the demo.  (A single light viewed closeup per image I mean)

Edited by tmek, 02 October 2015 - 10:52 PM.

[Ben Logan]

 

If I'm understanding this correctly, this will be for VR goggles only?  What would the input method be?  Keyboard?  And what about things like nudging, etc?

 
It will work on a normal monitor as well, but VR does make for a pretty unique experience.
 

 
 
First - Thanks for joining us, tmek. This is the greatest community. Such a creative, collaborative, supportive, fun-loving group of folks. You make a welcome addition!
 
Second -- thanks so much for building "normal monitor support" into Pinball Labs. My teenage boys give me so much sh*t already about the sheer amount of time I spend on the forum here, and entire evenings in front of our cardboard VP "cabinet." I can only imagine just how much more crap they're going to give me once I don a pair of Oculus goggles and dive into VR pinball in addition! I like having the option of staying in the semi-physical world with them.  
 
That said, I can't wait to grab my own headset as soon as Pinball Labs is released...   
 
 1DobD00.jpg   133.94KB   21 downloads

Edited by Ben Logan, 03 October 2015 - 01:29 AM.

[kruge99]

tmek, your video looks c00L and I enjoy all the high-fives people are giving you... Just a couple of questions.  (i'm not a coder any more so please bare with me because I'm not done with VP yet.)

 

did you look at VP open source yet?  (and was it so terrible you had to go your own way?)

is your project going to be open source at some point?

do you plan to 'sell' your project?  i.e. steam green lite or similar and are we (fans/users) going to have to go to pocket for such a great product?

 

I know there are a lot of excited fans from your first video but I want to see where you're going with this.

 

 

Best Regards,

Kruge99.

[tmek]

tmek, your video looks c00L and I enjoy all the high-fives people are giving you... Just a couple of questions.  (i'm not a coder any more so please bare with me because I'm not done with VP yet.)

 

did you look at VP open source yet?  (and was it so terrible you had to go your own way?)

is your project going to be open source at some point?

do you plan to 'sell' your project?  i.e. steam green lite or similar and are we (fans/users) going to have to go to pocket for such a great product?

 

I know there are a lot of excited fans from your first video but I want to see where you're going with this.

 

 

Best Regards,

Kruge99.

 

Hi Kruge99,

 

These are good questions and glad you asked because I certainly don't want to mislead anyone.  If I'm reading you correctly, I agree it's a good idea to temper expectations of what Pinball Labs may or may not become.  Right now it's just a personal project of mine, although one I've become pretty passionate about and I'm enjoying sharing progress on.  No one should make any hobby-altering plans based around it.  Development has seemed to move at a fast pace but that's because I've been working on it full time everyday for the past 5 weeks.  While I have a feature set in mind, It's conceivable that I could hit some wall or road-block that makes moving forward slow, difficult or impossible.

 

The idea to do a VR pinball game came primarily out of from my enthusiasm for the VR resurgence in the past few years.   Professionally, I've been a business software developer my entire life but always tinkered with game development as a hobby and aspired to someday make a living doing it.  I created a few early VR demos that got some attention and I've been hooked on trying to come up with compelling VR and gaming experiences ever since.  

 

This pinball project started out laughably bad but got reasonably better pretty quickly (VR pinball progress video playlist).

 

This led me to doing a lot of research on pinball and computer pinball.   But in general I'm very new to computer pinball and the related communities.  I had never heard of Visual Pinball, Unit3d or Future Pinball before this project.  I've read up on them a good bit but I've yet to actually use any of them.  

 

> did you look at VP open source yet?  (and was it so terrible you had to go your own way?)

 

I may be wrong on this but from what I've seen Visual Pinball isn't graphically a real-time 3D engine is it?  If so, that would pretty much exclude it from being made into a VR capable game.

 

> do you plan to 'sell' your project?  i.e. steam green lite or similar and are we (fans/users) going to have to go to pocket for such a great product?

 

Given that you put the word "sell" in quotes I'm hopefully not about to vilify myself too bad here, however...

 

IF (Big IF) I'm able to get the demos far enough along that a number of people would want to support me and see me develop this full-time, I would love to make it a commercial product and be able to do that.  Doing a modest Kickstarter and being Greenlit on Steam wouldn't sound bad to me either.  If I were to sell the game and editor, I would imagine the price would range from $15-$25 depending on if it was on sale.  I wouldn't put any DRM on it.  Or try to charge or prevent anyone from sharing machines they designed with the editor that they wanted to give away (or sell from their own site if they wanted).  In fact I would likely provide an in-game service that allowed free downloads of any original creations users wanted to freely share with others, and of course people would be able to download machines from any website.

 

If I'm dreaming big, I think it would be cool to have a pinball machine store where pinball creators could sell their original creations for $0.99 or $1.99.  The makers would make money and I would take a small percentage for providing the store, bandwidth, payment services.  If I'm dreaming ludicrously big there's the idea that pinball manufacturers would allow the sale of officially licensed machines within the pinball labs environment.  But that is not very likely to happen.

 

So I'm not excluding the possibility of any of the above.  I'd just be tickled pink if I were able to work on something like this full time and make a moderate living at it.  If I create something people think has enough value they want to pay me money for it. I'd be very happy selling it. 

 

>  is your project going to be open source at some point?

 

I'm a huge fan of John Carmack, the creator of popular Doom and Quake video games.  I've learned a lot from studying the older Doom and Quake code bases he open sourced as their newer commercial editions came out.  If I ever have a commercial software company/product I would follow in those footsteps.

[Ben Logan]

Great answer. Detailed, honest, and interesting.

[Ben Logan]

Just installed on my Windows 7, Core i5, gtx750ti. Smooth ball movement and beautiful lights. Pretty convincing physics!
 
Also -- I can confirm gameplay works on regular monitor without installing Oculus Runtime 0.7.
 
A note for those with kids: "Funny" song plays in background. My family is over at the in laws' place. Otherwise, the joke would have been on me. I'm not disapproving, just saying watch cranking your speakers with the family around! 
 
I've never played a first person shooter game before (except for Turok, Dinosaur Hunter on Nintendo 64, if that counts). i can't for the life of me get a better view of the table than the attached screen grabs. If I "crouch" I can "hover" over the table at reasonable height, close to how I'd want to view a real table. But, I can only see about 25% of the playfield, from the flippers up. If I hit "C" again to "stand up" I can get a full view of the table, but it's like I'm dancing on the ceiling.
 
Any advice for us non-Occulus owners?
 
Love the project, tmek. Just amazing.
 
 Capture.JPG   130.25KB   21 downloads  Capture2.JPG   116.08KB   21 downloads

Edited by Ben Logan, 03 October 2015 - 03:37 AM.

[tmek]

Not to bash, but you've already beat TPA (The Pinball Arcade) for realism.

 

 

 

I don't know if I can accept that praise just yet.    There's not even a completed table,  but I will accept that there is the potential for that to be true!

 

My family is over at the in laws' place. Otherwise, the joke would have been on me. 

 

 

Doh, sorry about that.  I should have warned there was some PG-13 content in there (it's a "song" from the TV show "Rick and Morty".)

 

If I "crouch" I can "hover" over the table at reasonable height, close to how I'd want to view a real table. But, I can only see about 25% of the playfield, from the flippers up. If I hit "C" again to "stand up" I can get a full view of the table, but it's like I'm dancing on the ceiling. Any advice for us non-Occulus owners?

 

 

 

 

There's nothing immediate I can suggest for non-Oculus users for this build.  

 

However, anyone that does have an Oculus can go into their configuration tool in the windows task tray and raise or lower their profile height if they feel too tall or short.

 

Regardless, I agree all users could benefit from being able to adjust their height in game.

Edit:  Oh wait you shouldn't be seeing the floor like in your second image when crouched.  Do you have a mouse connected?   If so, you should be able to change the "pitch" of your view by moving it forward or back.

When on a normal monitor, and crouched you should be able to "look" up and get a view like this:

 

Edit 2: Ah, I see now that you're playing it on your virtual pinball cabinet monitor in vertical/portrait mode.  

Edited by tmek, 03 October 2015 - 03:45 AM.

[Joe]

 

 

  In fact I would likely provide an in-game service that allowed free downloads of any original creations users wanted to freely share with others, and of course people would be able to download machines from any website.

 

If I'm dreaming big, I think it would be cool to have a pinball machine store where pinball creators could sell their original creations for $0.99 or $1.99.  The makers would make money and I would take a small percentage for providing the store, bandwidth, payment services.  If I'm dreaming ludicrously big there's the idea that pinball manufacturers would allow the sale of officially licensed machines within the pinball labs environment.  But that is not very likely to happen.

 

That may get you some legal trouble

[Ben Logan]

Thanks for the replies, tmek.  Yes - I can get that third view you suggested. And it's a good one. I'm hoping down the line to get a view like this one:

 

 cosmic.JPG   116.23KB   25 downloads

 

Also - for folks who are interested in testing, what kinds of feedback is helpful? At this point, it's probably not helpful to hear, "I got a ball stuck behind the post in the upper left playfield."

 

[tmek]

 

 

 

  In fact I would likely provide an in-game service that allowed free downloads of any original creations users wanted to freely share with others, and of course people would be able to download machines from any website.

 

If I'm dreaming big, I think it would be cool to have a pinball machine store where pinball creators could sell their original creations for $0.99 or $1.99.  The makers would make money and I would take a small percentage for providing the store, bandwidth, payment services.  If I'm dreaming ludicrously big there's the idea that pinball manufacturers would allow the sale of officially licensed machines within the pinball labs environment.  But that is not very likely to happen.

 

That may get you some legal trouble

 

 

Hi Joe,

 

Did you miss the "original creations" part? (or maybe I'm not seeing something myself).  Where would the legal issue be in allowing creators to give away or sell their completely original virtual pinball machines?  I'm not talking about recreations of games (e.g. Adams Family, Twilight Zone, Fish Tales, etc).

 

Tmek

[tmek]

Thanks for the replies, tmek.  Yes - I can get that third view you suggested. And it's a good one. I'm hoping down the line to get a view like this one:

 

cosmic.JPG

 

Also - for folks who are interested in testing, what kinds of feedback is helpful? At this point, it's probably not helpful to hear, "I got a ball stuck behind the post in the upper left playfield."

 

 

It hit me today that when you where thanking me for "normal monitor" support you were talking about virtual pinball cabinets with 40+" displays laid on their back and in portrait mode.  Where I was talking about desktop monitors lol.

 

Tomorrow (Today) is my girlfriend's birthday but I think I can get an update to you on Sunday that will allow you to adjust the camera properly for virtual pinball cabinets like yours.

 

Ha, I get a ball stuck there occasionally too, also behind the right drop double bank of drop targets is common.  I think most of these cases are just with the current layout.  A real ball would likely get stuck on a real playfield laid out as casually as this one. 

 

I think for this weeks build just that people are able to start it and run it and it behaves generally as expected.  (frame rate is good, no choppiness, ball physics don't open black holes leading to an alternate universe).    

 

As I mentioned earlier, some photos of interesting/unconventional playfield lights from real machines would be good for me to test how quickly and accurately I can replicate them.

Edited by tmek, 03 October 2015 - 06:25 AM.

[fuzzel]

Tmek, VP uses a full 3d engine but the camera is static. The reason why you can't move the camera while playing is that some parts of the table are pre rendered.

[Ben Logan]

Fuzzel - the mere idea of you and Tmek conversing is pretty exciting. The combined intelligence in the room is inspiring.

Tmek - I'm sure I can find some cool / esoteric lighting photos in my three volumes of pinball compendium. I look tomorrow.

[atarian]

The virtual pinball community is already a mixed bag of open sourced free to use programs and commercial programs all of which live together in harmony . A lot of us use and support both types of software so whatever your final plans ends up being isn't a big deal for most. Early engagement with the community now is what really excites people because we help feed you ideas of what we think really makes the ultimate virtual sim. In fact a lot of the fun for the people on this and other forums is the development process itself - this hobby is sometimes 50% playing pinball and 50% for the rest (eg: forum time ).

For me any new virtual pinball game is an exciting thing and one that offers new tech such as VR is extremely appealing.

What is exciting is you have done this in 5 weeks and you are talking about frequent builds - a bit like how the VP10 build is done by Fuzzel and Toxie. That works extremely well enabling early feedback.

A portrait view suitable for cabs definitely is at the top of the list for most people. On the subject of lighting again what people really like is the opportunity to play night mods of tables. ie: like playing real pinball with the lights out in the room. I think from what you described this can be done, but just wanted to say it is quite an extreme adjustment of lighting.

[kruge99]

 

tmek, your video looks c00L and I enjoy all the high-fives people are giving you... Just a couple of questions.  (i'm not a coder any more so please bare with me because I'm not done with VP yet.)

 

did you look at VP open source yet?  (and was it so terrible you had to go your own way?)

is your project going to be open source at some point?

do you plan to 'sell' your project?  i.e. steam green lite or similar and are we (fans/users) going to have to go to pocket for such a great product?

 

I know there are a lot of excited fans from your first video but I want to see where you're going with this.

 

 

Best Regards,

Kruge99.

 

Hi Kruge99,

 

These are good questions and glad you asked because I certainly don't want to mislead anyone.  If I'm reading you correctly, I agree it's a good idea to temper expectations of what Pinball Labs may or may not become.  Right now it's just a personal project of mine, although one I've become pretty passionate about and I'm enjoying sharing progress on.  No one should make any hobby-altering plans based around it.  Development has seemed to move at a fast pace but that's because I've been working on it full time everyday for the past 5 weeks.  While I have a feature set in mind, It's conceivable that I could hit some wall or road-block that makes moving forward slow, difficult or impossible.

 

The idea to do a VR pinball game came primarily out of from my enthusiasm for the VR resurgence in the past few years.   Professionally, I've been a business software developer my entire life but always tinkered with game development as a hobby and aspired to someday make a living doing it.  I created a few early VR demos that got some attention and I've been hooked on trying to come up with compelling VR and gaming experiences ever since.  

 

This pinball project started out laughably bad but got reasonably better pretty quickly (VR pinball progress video playlist).

 

This led me to doing a lot of research on pinball and computer pinball.   But in general I'm very new to computer pinball and the related communities.  I had never heard of Visual Pinball, Unit3d or Future Pinball before this project.  I've read up on them a good bit but I've yet to actually use any of them.  

 

> did you look at VP open source yet?  (and was it so terrible you had to go your own way?)

 

I may be wrong on this but from what I've seen Visual Pinball isn't graphically a real-time 3D engine is it?  If so, that would pretty much exclude it from being made into a VR capable game.

 

> do you plan to 'sell' your project?  i.e. steam green lite or similar and are we (fans/users) going to have to go to pocket for such a great product?

 

Given that you put the word "sell" in quotes I'm hopefully not about to vilify myself too bad here, however...

 

IF (Big IF) I'm able to get the demos far enough along that a number of people would want to support me and see me develop this full-time, I would love to make it a commercial product and be able to do that.  Doing a modest Kickstarter and being Greenlit on Steam wouldn't sound bad to me either.  If I were to sell the game and editor, I would imagine the price would range from $15-$25 depending on if it was on sale.  I wouldn't put any DRM on it.  Or try to charge or prevent anyone from sharing machines they designed with the editor that they wanted to give away (or sell from their own site if they wanted).  In fact I would likely provide an in-game service that allowed free downloads of any original creations users wanted to freely share with others, and of course people would be able to download machines from any website.

 

If I'm dreaming big, I think it would be cool to have a pinball machine store where pinball creators could sell their original creations for $0.99 or $1.99.  The makers would make money and I would take a small percentage for providing the store, bandwidth, payment services.  If I'm dreaming ludicrously big there's the idea that pinball manufacturers would allow the sale of officially licensed machines within the pinball labs environment.  But that is not very likely to happen.

 

So I'm not excluding the possibility of any of the above.  I'd just be tickled pink if I were able to work on something like this full time and make a moderate living at it.  If I create something people think has enough value they want to pay me money for it. I'd be very happy selling it. 

 

>  is your project going to be open source at some point?

 

I'm a huge fan of John Carmack, the creator of popular Doom and Quake video games.  I've learned a lot from studying the older Doom and Quake code bases he open sourced as their newer commercial editions came out.  If I ever have a commercial software company/product I would follow in those footsteps.

 

 

Thanks tmek for the honesty and please don't take my questions as criticism - I was merely wondering where you plan to go with this project. 

 

Back when TPA came out there were suggestions from TPA that cabinet support was on their roadmap and I threw money at TPA (that could have been better spent elsewhere) for both the mobile and the PC/Steam version in the hopes that I was somehow funding their cabinet support project.  Unfortunately since then TPA has placed cabinet support on the back burner.

 

That being said, good luck, I am excited to see where this 'train' goes even though I myself won't be able to participate in the occulus rift testing - it's completely out of my budget.  If you go the steam greenlight/kickstarter route, I'll definitely throw $15 at it to help it along.

 

 

Best Regards,

Kruge99.

[tmek]

 

 

tmek, your video looks c00L and I enjoy all the high-fives people are giving you... Just a couple of questions.  (i'm not a coder any more so please bare with me because I'm not done with VP yet.)

 

did you look at VP open source yet?  (and was it so terrible you had to go your own way?)

is your project going to be open source at some point?

do you plan to 'sell' your project?  i.e. steam green lite or similar and are we (fans/users) going to have to go to pocket for such a great product?

 

I know there are a lot of excited fans from your first video but I want to see where you're going with this.

 

 

Best Regards,

Kruge99.

 

Hi Kruge99,

 

These are good questions and glad you asked because I certainly don't want to mislead anyone.  If I'm reading you correctly, I agree it's a good idea to temper expectations of what Pinball Labs may or may not become.  Right now it's just a personal project of mine, although one I've become pretty passionate about and I'm enjoying sharing progress on.  No one should make any hobby-altering plans based around it.  Development has seemed to move at a fast pace but that's because I've been working on it full time everyday for the past 5 weeks.  While I have a feature set in mind, It's conceivable that I could hit some wall or road-block that makes moving forward slow, difficult or impossible.

 

The idea to do a VR pinball game came primarily out of from my enthusiasm for the VR resurgence in the past few years.   Professionally, I've been a business software developer my entire life but always tinkered with game development as a hobby and aspired to someday make a living doing it.  I created a few early VR demos that got some attention and I've been hooked on trying to come up with compelling VR and gaming experiences ever since.  

 

This pinball project started out laughably bad but got reasonably better pretty quickly (VR pinball progress video playlist).

 

This led me to doing a lot of research on pinball and computer pinball.   But in general I'm very new to computer pinball and the related communities.  I had never heard of Visual Pinball, Unit3d or Future Pinball before this project.  I've read up on them a good bit but I've yet to actually use any of them.  

 

> did you look at VP open source yet?  (and was it so terrible you had to go your own way?)

 

I may be wrong on this but from what I've seen Visual Pinball isn't graphically a real-time 3D engine is it?  If so, that would pretty much exclude it from being made into a VR capable game.

 

> do you plan to 'sell' your project?  i.e. steam green lite or similar and are we (fans/users) going to have to go to pocket for such a great product?

 

Given that you put the word "sell" in quotes I'm hopefully not about to vilify myself too bad here, however...

 

IF (Big IF) I'm able to get the demos far enough along that a number of people would want to support me and see me develop this full-time, I would love to make it a commercial product and be able to do that.  Doing a modest Kickstarter and being Greenlit on Steam wouldn't sound bad to me either.  If I were to sell the game and editor, I would imagine the price would range from $15-$25 depending on if it was on sale.  I wouldn't put any DRM on it.  Or try to charge or prevent anyone from sharing machines they designed with the editor that they wanted to give away (or sell from their own site if they wanted).  In fact I would likely provide an in-game service that allowed free downloads of any original creations users wanted to freely share with others, and of course people would be able to download machines from any website.

 

If I'm dreaming big, I think it would be cool to have a pinball machine store where pinball creators could sell their original creations for $0.99 or $1.99.  The makers would make money and I would take a small percentage for providing the store, bandwidth, payment services.  If I'm dreaming ludicrously big there's the idea that pinball manufacturers would allow the sale of officially licensed machines within the pinball labs environment.  But that is not very likely to happen.

 

So I'm not excluding the possibility of any of the above.  I'd just be tickled pink if I were able to work on something like this full time and make a moderate living at it.  If I create something people think has enough value they want to pay me money for it. I'd be very happy selling it. 

 

>  is your project going to be open source at some point?

 

I'm a huge fan of John Carmack, the creator of popular Doom and Quake video games.  I've learned a lot from studying the older Doom and Quake code bases he open sourced as their newer commercial editions came out.  If I ever have a commercial software company/product I would follow in those footsteps.

 

 

Thanks tmek for the honesty and please don't take my questions as criticism - I was merely wondering where you plan to go with this project. 

 

Back when TPA came out there were suggestions from TPA that cabinet support was on their roadmap and I threw money at TPA (that could have been better spent elsewhere) for both the mobile and the PC/Steam version in the hopes that I was somehow funding their cabinet support project.  Unfortunately since then TPA has placed cabinet support on the back burner.

 

That being said, good luck, I am excited to see where this 'train' goes even though I myself won't be able to participate in the occulus rift testing - it's completely out of my budget.  If you go the steam greenlight/kickstarter route, I'll definitely throw $15 at it to help it along.

 

 

Best Regards,

Kruge99.

 

 

 

Thanks Kruge99!  

[tmek]

So what features do you guys look for in a cabinet mode?

[atarian]

1/ Backglass rendered to a second screen.
2/ Moveable DMD to another screen, etc.
If Pinmame is used PinDMD support should work
3/ Configurable buttons
4/ Adjustable lockable playfield view per table

Edited by atarian, 03 October 2015 - 05:53 PM.

[Ben Logan]

Dual monitor support makes the cab experience great:

Playfield on monitor one
Backglass on monitor two

Playfield is landscape view, with graphical pinball table image rotated 90 degrees to the left. You compensate by physically rotating your monitor to the right, and laying it horizontally to simulate a real physical pinball play-field's orientation.

Backglass is portrait mode.

Vpinmame support and ROM control aren't cab-specific, but really make for a standout experience vs. (with all due respect) future pinball and The Pinball Arcade (both of which I enjoy).
Ha! You beat me to the punch, Atarian! Pretty much echoed your sentiments...

[gigalula]

For cabinet features...  I'm really impress by the demo so far so you can count me as supporter (3 monitor support please)

Edited by gigalula, 03 October 2015 - 05:58 PM.