834 replies to this topic

[unclewilly]

Really looking forward to it.
I've been watching the commits on sourceforge.
Can't wait to see the changes in action

[toxie]

still a while to wait though, sorry.. :/

[Slydog43]

will stutter be a thing of the past with VP10?  (I don't really get stutter with VP 9.9, but every once a while it hickups a bit).  Really love all this talk about where VP is heading, thanks guys (clapping now)

[ronaldvg]

@Les73gTx: just to add something to the remarks about ballspin: I own a Star Trek LE and a WoZ 75th and I must agree with you on the fact that the Stern has got a lot more ballspin, BUT they are really different machines with very different playfields. Star Trek is much faster and allows for much more dynamic in the ball so you will automatically get more ballspin. I have observed a LOT of spin in WoZ also, but only when the ball travels very fast. As it happens I also have a Twilight Zone and STTNG and there the same is true. STTNG much more ballspin. So I think the amount of ballspin in VP is very good, only the author of the table must be aware of the enhanced physics. The fact that it can generate a good amount of ballspin is IMHO a very good thing and can be controlled more or less by the table author, just like in real life.

Edited by ronaldvg, 09 September 2014 - 03:15 PM.

[toxie]

will stutter be a thing of the past with VP10?  (I don't really get stutter with VP 9.9, but every once a while it hickups a bit).  Really love all this talk about where VP is heading, thanks guys (clapping now)

 

In theory, yes, as you can now enable vsync without the physics engine screwing up due to the 50/60/X fps limit then.

You can already test this with the beta physmod5 build/table mods.

So if your machine is up to delivering the full fps, then it should be perfectly smooth.

[toxie]

Just some minor spoilers/updates for those that do not follow on sourceforge, just to let you know that this project is not dead (yet):  

 

fuzzel has been working on the new material system and the UI part of it

i have been working on redoing the shading/lighting and having an internal DMD in VP

 

still a lot of work to do though, so no alpha/beta in the very near future.. :/

but there is a lot of progress i would say..

[gStAv]

great news dev team! 

[toxie]

i will hopefully also post some pics next week using the internal DMD and the new material/lighting on a simple test table..

[fuzzel]

A few words about the new material/lighting system from my side. Every VP element won't have this simple color selector anymore. Instead you have to define a material through a material manager and assign it to the element. Each material consists of three colors (diffuse, glossy and specular). You can define a factor for each property and activate/deactive them. Importing/Exporting of materials is also supported so we can create some kind of material libraries some day. With all this settings you're able to give an element a special look (e.g. metal, wood or plastic).

Another change is that you won't have this "Enable Lighting" option anymore. I know that a lot of you use this or disable it but that's because the current lighting system (VP9) is totally wrong. In VP10 every table has two global light sources. One in the upper half an the other in the lower half of the playfield. You can't change the location of the light sources just the height, range/falloff and the color. I hope that makes it much easier to create a proper illuminated table.

As Toxie said there is a lot of work to do until we can start an official beta phase, so stay tuned

[arngrim]

did you make some test with the internal dmd and b2s.server as example toxie?

[toxie]

One more word about the "enable lighting" (or more the fact that lighting will always be enabled): in case some of you fear that some things won't be possible anymore due to this, please bring up the specific issue so that we can either think of a new way of doing the same (using the new light/material system), or implement something early-on that allows for some similar effect in the end.

 

@arngrim: We're not there yet. So far there is only a simple quad drawn that shows the raw DMD data, on the same screen as VP is running on. 

Long-term though i wanna make the reels (or something similar to that) more flexible to either take the full DMD or partial LCD segments from VPM (custom-rendered of course, with a nice shader), and then you are pretty much free to do whatever you want with it, including putting them on other monitors. But this still requires quite some work.

Long-long term i'm thinking of optionally even getting rid of all add-ons like B2S and being able to steer and render everything from within VP. But that's maybe more for a VP11 or so.

Edited by toxie, 17 September 2014 - 11:11 AM.

[fuzzel]

ah yes nearly forgot to mention this. The flasher element won't be affected by the lighting system. So for doing some additive blending stuff with alpha maps the flasher is the element to use in the future.

[unclewilly]

Is it dynamic lighting?
Meaning will it cast shadows off of objects.
Or similar to fp just creating sized halos around a bulb object
Oh. Will it be possible for pinmame to access the internal dmd.
And will the dmd be movable to a second monitor.

[fuzzel]

It is dynamic lighting but only for dynamic elements. Don't mix that with bulbs or light inserts. The new lighting system is for global lighting. Such like an omni light you have in a room to illuminate the room. In the first step there won't be shadows but maybe in a next version. It depends a bit how far we can improve this approach.

[unclewilly]

Cool. Been watching sourceforge and getting excited about what I'm seeing.

One question on the room light.
Will it be something that we can script making day/night mods easily done

[fuzzel]

Yep that is exactly one use case

[toxie]

Light: As Fuzzel said, it's all about the illumination of the room (for now) and not about the table lights/bulbs/flashers (maybe we can add this at some later point though). And shadows or some ambient occlusion are on the todo-lists, but who knows when these will be implemented.

So if you make the harsh assumption that table lights don't influence the lighting/"look" of the table too much (like it is roughly the case if you play a table at daylight in real life), then VP will take care of making the materials cooperate with the lighting of the material "perfectly", so you don't need any manual tweaks there anymore. You just assign each table element a material from the then-hopefully-existing material library, optionally add a picture/texture (for plastics, playfield, toys), and that's it.

If you make the room lighting darker then (implicit night mod), of course the table lighting will become more significant, but hopefully just adding some flasher-elements to fake the table lighting (like its done now already) will do the trick there.

 

DMD: yes, it already works with VPM (needs the updated vpm dll from the alpha/beta thread and a custom core.vbs that i will release soon). and for the release i hope that we will have support for multiple monitors, but so far this is missing completely.

[LoadedWeapon]

That amazing news! Thanks guys.. so all the things that im doung now with flasher objects I will be able to do in the future? Im just learning all this scripting stuff I dont want it to all be wasted

[unclewilly]

You guys rock.
Maybe I missed this though. Will the ambient light/room light be script able or just adjustable in the editor

[dark]

In regard to the material options, could you please add opacity if possible?  A slider, or value box, 0-100%, the same could apply for images in image library if those are still two separate things with VP10.   This would make tweaking opacity levels much easier rather than reimporting images with different opacity again and again and again for optimal look.

 

Thanks for your time.