184 replies to this topic

[destruk]

I'm not stopping you from making the game, go for it Highrise. I told you before, I'm not going to use EMReels for this so please stop pushing.

[TAB]

...and wait
By the way - he wants 950 euro for the complete playfield

[highrise]

I'm not stopping you from making the game, go for it Highrise. I told you before, I'm not going to use EMReels for this so please stop pushing.

what??? sorry, I didn't mean to mention reels and I most certainly wasn't pushing. What I was suggesting, was that you did an overlay of the table over the gifs you are using, as this would make it appear semi-transparent, that was all. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

[destruk]

I'm fully aware of what emreels can do, how they can be used, and how the ball interacts with them. TAB and I thought about using EMReels originally ( over a year ago ), but now, for attract mode, with over 4000 individual frames of animation (20fps x 4 minutes = 4800) for simply a few minutes of attract mode - with features like scrolling panoramic backgrounds and interactive text that changes and moves and changes colors on the fly, like I told you in PM, Reels are not any way to deal with this amount of data. It is a lot more advanced than a 16-frame image of a Scared Stiff Spider, or even more advanced than your score and overlays you did for the Spiderman game. If you want to create a working solution with reels for yourself - go right ahead - I just think after you fully understand the problems involved you'll understand why it's unacceptable to me for this purpose. I can accomplish that with fewer than 300 images - while taking advantage of features VP doesn't have and that Reels just can't handle - but if you're relying on emreels to do everything you're going to run out of memory even before getting 1/10th of the amount of data used and you're going to have to cut out a bunch of effects like scrolling multicolor variable sized text to do it. VPPlus would be my second choice - it provides true window overlay opacity but it swaps images too slow. Plain GIF transparency looks very bad - you get dots all over - opacity would be the ticket if the feature was possible so you can shade and make it look cleaner.
I'm not really upset about this - just I have a bunch of other things to worry about too like my home and a job. I am making what I think is significant progress on the game though - got another 3 stages of attract mode done last night.

[highrise]

well let me just be clear - I heard you the first time when you said you didn't want to use reels. I already ran some tests, I wasn't being stubborn or trying to make you change your mind or pushing for anything. It's really not my way so please, forget I mentioned reels, I didn't mean to.

This is what I meant:

I assume you are using a graphic program to convert the movie frames into an animated gif. What I am suggesting is that you use the graphic program to blend the part of the table that is BEHIND the movie with the GIFS. What you would do is take a snapshot of the rendered table with no movie, and then blend that part over the frames. if you do this with every frame, it will make it appear as though you can see the table underneath it. Probably the best effect to use for this would be a linear burn, as you can see from this attached image, it looks a lot like the real thing. All you have to do is get your image positioned correctly so the image of the table you have in your frames lines up with the one on the table, and it will look like the screen is semi-transparent. It's not ideal, but it would look nice.

But don't worry about it, it's not a big deal, just a little idea, and nothing to do with reels As I said in my previous post, I mentioned them by mistake, it wasn't what I was suggesting. I was just trying to be helpful.

HR

p.s I still think impossible is an imposter though

Attached Files

•  swep1.jpg   142.56KB   259 downloads

[Rawd]

That looks cool Highrise. Nice effect.

I suppose they would all need to be done for 4:3 AND FS, which would be a bitch I assume. (If he is planning an FS version)

[highrise]

I guess if you hard wired the image of the table into the frames it would make it a lot less adaptable for when the impossible becomes possible though, this much is true.

[destruk]

Looks cool.


That's what it should look like. Between 90% opacity and opaque isn't all that much difference IMO. Maybe I'll just ask TAB to make all the graphic darker and then you won't notice the difference in the window itself as much.

[epthegeek]

What's the plan for dealing with dynamic elements? Like the gun that moves back and forth that you have to hit with a ball in one mode (Where amidala is constantly saying "Get to your shi*"). You'd have to do every frame of the hit animation for every single position of the moving gun so that it could blow up anywhere.

It makes for an extremely cool demo, no doubt. But the dynamic scenes would just be far, far too much to actually do.

/"I'm high on Gin"

Looks cool.


That's what it should look like. Between 90% opacity and opaque isn't all that much difference IMO. Maybe I'll just ask TAB to make all the graphic darker and then you won't notice the difference in the window itself as much.

Nucore proves that you can emulate the hardware. Not that the developers of that would be willing to help free emulation since they're trying to make money. But maybe they'd consider adding hooks for Vp (like pinmame has) into the commercial product.

[destruk]

What's the plan for dealing with dynamic elements? Like the gun that moves back and forth that you have to hit with a ball in one mode (Where amidala is constantly saying "Get to your shi*"). You'd have to do every frame of the hit animation for every single position of the moving gun so that it could blow up anywhere.

It makes for an extremely cool demo, no doubt. But the dynamic scenes would just be far, far too much to actually do.

Um, no. You have a single image of the gun and then vpdisco can move or display it wherever you want in realtime. With an EMReel that would be a hassle. You'll just have to wait - I've almost done attract mode and will be ready to move on to other sections soon. I wouldn't even be posting demos or discussing it if I saw any real problems that can't be handled as far as the game goes - and these pinball 2000 games without a working display would suck.

[highrise]

well I think you might risk going a little crazy but hey, its got to be worth a shot, like I said, anything is possible

[diskoboy]

*absolutely speechless*



What are the specs on your rig? We've gotta know how much horsepower it's gonna take to run this! This table looks like it could be the Crysis of VP!

Edited by diskoboy, 26 June 2010 - 01:31 AM.

[destruk]

TAB and Noah can run it on their systems. Mine is kinda fast, but anything just using VP without roms should run fine as long as VP9 works for you you'll be ok. Right now I'll be branching in the second 'alternate' attract mode section - the "Thanks to Hasbro" one is done and working. The game design credits is the other one that sometimes isn't displayed - sometimes it is - on the real machine too. But when one is displayed, the other is always displayed - so they are linked somehow. And then you should be able to quick step through the display sections with the flipper buttons.

[epthegeek]

What's the plan for dealing with dynamic elements? Like the gun that moves back and forth that you have to hit with a ball in one mode (Where amidala is constantly saying "Get to your shi*"). You'd have to do every frame of the hit animation for every single position of the moving gun so that it could blow up anywhere.

It makes for an extremely cool demo, no doubt. But the dynamic scenes would just be far, far too much to actually do.

Um, no. You have a single image of the gun and then vpdisco can move or display it wherever you want in realtime. With an EMReel that would be a hassle. You'll just have to wait - I've almost done attract mode and will be ready to move on to other sections soon. I wouldn't even be posting demos or discussing it if I saw any real problems that can't be handled as far as the game goes - and these pinball 2000 games without a working display would suck.

Oh, I didn't realize you could do sprites with vpdisco. That makes a big difference.

FWIW, I emailed Chuck Hess, the nucore guy, and ask if he'd consider including hooks in the retail nucore to interact with VP and he said he's got other things to work on for the software now, but would consider it in the future.

E

[destruk]

Oh, I didn't realize you could do sprites with vpdisco. That makes a big difference.

FWIW, I emailed Chuck Hess, the nucore guy, and ask if he'd consider including hooks in the retail nucore to interact with VP and he said he's got other things to work on for the software now, but would consider it in the future.

E

Good luck with that - since VP doesn't work on Linux, and Windows runs 8 times too slow to interface with NuCore.

[The Trout]

That's what it should look like. Between 90% opacity and opaque isn't all that much difference IMO. Maybe I'll just ask TAB to make all the graphic darker and then you won't notice the difference in the window itself as much.

Indeed. Speaking from experience, the video portion of the playfield, though semi-transparent, is almost so opaque that seeing anything behind the screen is nearly impossible. Same thing on the Revenge. Whenever the ball goes behind the screen, it just vanishes for a bit. While semi-transparency would be nifty, it's far from necessary.

[epthegeek]

Good luck with that - since VP doesn't work on Linux, and Windows runs 8 times too slow to interface with NuCore.

Oh, Ha. I hadn't thought about that fact. My bad.

[destruk]

Well, he might port VP to Linux, which would be the most practical solution.

[destruk]

Anyway, today I got the flipper keys in for advancing/reversing the attract mode pieces like the real machine does. You can flip ahead to what you want to see, and it works to back up too.
http://vpforums.org/...attractdone.avi
This is just a video of the display to save bandwidth. In reality it looks a bit clearer than this even.

All attract modes are done, including the full table playfield effects for the lamps. So I think I can start on the actual game now. Media size for vpdisco for this is 7.5mb so I can estimate the rest of the game's media should be about 4 times more than that.

[razors78]

Looks awesome, Destruk!. I bet this table will be a hell of alot of fun to play once it's done!. Keep the great work up!. Also, it will be very intersting to see how you come about with the sound and music for the game later on. And speaking of in-game music & effects, are they of high quality? Just curious!