1002 replies to this topic

[DHogsett]

If there is any video you need that I could help with just let me know, my machine is an old 1970 EM but if I can help I will. I did just do a flipper rebuild with all new coils two weeks ago so it would give a good reference of exactly how the ball reacts when it does indeed open the EoS switch just for a second from a ball strike (the quick high-power flick) when using new equipment. I did just go and do some test by hand and the recoil of the current physics are not completely off, maybe a little exaggerated but nothing absurd, but this is of course my personal opinion. 

[RYSr]

 

mukuste:

 

The Coil Ramp Up thing seems to have some issues. I think others pointed out that when the ball hits the top of the flipper, it will bounce back more than you'd expect. I agree.
I see you can compensate for this effect by increasing strength and/or mass, but then you have an overpowered flipper that allows you to make shots that are not possible on the real table.

 

I'll link to a test table that I think shows the above effect pretty well: https://docs.google....LVZZOHF4cDFqdWM

Ramp up is at 2 on that table. I see no way to script a change in coil ramp up so you'll have to change it manually to see the different results. What I see is this:

 

Ramp up 0 = no effect (duh!)
Ramp up 1 = much more bounce than no Ramp Up
Ramp up 2 = slightly more bounce than Ramp up 1
Ramp up 3 = almost no change from Ramp up 2
Ramp up 4 and above = progressively less bounce

 

Things just don't seem natural there and it's a shame because the rest of the coil ramp up routine I like.

 

Thanks for the test table, as always those are very useful.

 

What happens here is that the ball pushes the flipper down a bit due to the weaker hold coil, then the higher-powered coil kicks in and pushes the ball back up. In general, I don't think this is completely unrealistic, although the effect seems exaggerated. This also doesn't seem to be specific to the Ramp Up setting, it also happens (though maybe a bit less pronounced) if you simply make the flipper weaker to begin with.

 

What I'll try as a first step for the next release is to increase the hold coil strength from 1/3 to 2/3; this reduces the effect a bit since the flipper doesn't get pushed down so far in the first place. Unfortunately I have no idea how much weaker the hold coil is in real life. But we'll see if this is enough or we need to tweak the flipper response in some other way.

 

 

 

mukuste:

 

I modded the Dr Who table with your default settings (Luckily no other ramp or wall mods were necessary) and never had any symptoms of the ball bounce back when hitting the flippers. People reporting the ball bounce back should specify the tables it was experienced on and the settings they modified so it can be recreated/studied as you have asked for. 

 

Above you talked about not knowing the strength between hold and full power. I would be glad to measure the ohms of the primary and secondary Williams coils if you like.( I just did the primary full power winding is 4.3 ohms and the hold winding is 133 ohms on the most commonly used FL11629 flipper coil)  The ratio of the windings should be proportional to the strength.

 

Bally/Williams up to the last made systems used dual windings that the end of stroke switch shorts out the hi power until a ball push back breaks the contacts and re-triggers the hi power..

 

Stern/ Data East ( except for a few early 90's models that copied dual windings and Williams sued DE to stop using it) use a single winding that is driven by a pulsed square wave, when the end of stroke is hit the software increase the duration of the pulse lowering the power, again until the end of stroke switch loses contact on a bounce back and re-triggers hi strength pulse

 

In either case the end of stroke contacts state/position determines the re trigger. Is it possible that you just need to adjust the software equivalent of the VP End of Stroke spacing for this issue.

 

Thanks again for the new physics initiative...

 

Rich

Edited by RYSr, 01 May 2014 - 11:17 PM.

[sliderpoint]

 

What happens here is that the ball pushes the flipper down a bit due to the weaker hold coil, then the higher-powered coil kicks in and pushes the ball back up. In general, I don't think this is completely unrealistic, although the effect seems exaggerated. This also doesn't seem to be specific to the Ramp Up setting, it also happens (though maybe a bit less pronounced) if you simply make the flipper weaker to begin with.

 

 

Is there any kind of "dead zone" that can be put in there?  I'm sure on a real flipper the arm on the flipper that activates the low power coil switch would need to move quite a bit to actually open (or close) the EOS leaf switch. That bit of distance is probably what keeps a real flipper from activating the high power coil if a ball pushes it down just a bit when hit.  Just thinking that maybe the 1/3 low power is actually right, but there is a mechanical part that is being missed.

 

-Mike

 

edit - or what Rich just said...

Edited by sliderpoint, 01 May 2014 - 11:26 PM.

[BigBoss]

 I tried the Bride of Pinbot and the 3rd skillshot hole eats the ball ... (100k)

 

Bleh. I see this now too. Thanks for spotting that one.
I'll try to fix this but gosh.. the ramp fixes that physmod3 has, leads to all sorts of problems. It exposes the flaws in the older physics that people used to base these tables on.
 
I also have to say that I am nowhere near as talented (and patient) as those authors are when it comes to tweaking a table and make it feel just right. I simply want to have some tables out there that use the new physics so that those that do not like to mess around with settings can get a feel for it.

That skill shot problem happened on physmod2 as well. I fixed it but I can't remember how.

[unclewilly]

Just looked at some tables.
Not sure if this is true or not.

But as I remember when I first started building tables when the ultra pin version of vp was merged with vp 8 to get vp9.
That is when the global difficulty setting was added.
Correct me if I am wrong on this, but if the global difficulty is set to 0. I don't think some of the table settings such as scatter angle and global friction have any effect on the physics.

If I remember right those numbers are applied to the table as a percentage from the global difficulty.

So to have the global scatter angle actually at 5. Global difficulty would need to be set at 1.

I think this may be causing

[BigBoss]

Mukuste: please don't feel discouraged. Your recent changes with physmod are monumental. VP has gone from a "hey that's kinda cool. Too bad its too unrealistic to play" to a fun and playable platform. Seriously. Don't be discouraged. You're a hero

[mukuste]

Just looked at some tables.
Not sure if this is true or not.

But as I remember when I first started building tables when the ultra pin version of vp was merged with vp 8 to get vp9.
That is when the global difficulty setting was added.
Correct me if I am wrong on this, but if the global difficulty is set to 0. I don't think some of the table settings such as scatter angle and global friction have any effect on the physics.

If I remember right those numbers are applied to the table as a percentage from the global difficulty.

So to have the global scatter angle actually at 5. Global difficulty would need to be set at 1.

I think this may be causing

 

Sorry, I forgot to mention this... scatter is disabled on most elements right now. Also the friction is hardcoded for most elements, so you can't change it from the GUI.

Edited by mukuste, 02 May 2014 - 06:57 AM.

[boiydiego]

Mukuste: please don't feel discouraged. Your recent changes with physmod are monumental. VP has gone from a "hey that's kinda cool. Too bad its too unrealistic to play" to a fun and playable platform. Seriously. Don't be discouraged. You're a hero

so you find the pshysics bad ? realy the only thing i have to say THE PHSYSICS ARE MORE THEN GREAT the feeling is sooo much better ,

i checked with vp9.9.0 and you are right muskuste the ball is more splipery on old phsysics,  the one thing i hope is that you do the nudge engine as good as the physics

and i can make tippasses work finaly

Edited by boiydiego, 02 May 2014 - 10:58 AM.

[unclewilly]

The flipper physics and accuracy alone makes your work here far superior to the old engine.

A question about scatter angle.

I was always under the impression as an author, that this setting is what gave a table object more randomness in the angle the ball had when rebounding off a table object.
Is that correct?

You are doing a fantastic job with this, please try to ignore the off comments. I understand where you are coming from, as an author I get this all the time

[Horrible]

To all those developing the new physics, VP10 etc.  

 

Just a big thank you and keep up the good work.  I've been playing some of my favourite tables using VP 9.9.0 and REALLY enjoying it.

 

Have tried a few of the Physmod tables also and appreciate the work so far.

 

Once VP10 really gets going a spreadsheet or something that records the best settings for each table (as I assume not all tables will start been updated by authors immediatly) would be helpful, although I realise it is not that simple especially as VP10 develops there will need to be fundamental changes made.

 

Please do not be wavered by any negative comments that may come up, this really is good work that is happening here and many of us are really appreciative of your efforts.

 

H

[unclewilly]

Hey I have another table that has been modified and I got permission to release in the thread. If I send it to you. Can you attach it to the first post with the bop table.

I just have a little more tuning to do to get it playing more closely to my friends real table.

It is melons cftbl. I'm not sure but I believe it was initially modified by bigboss, and I've modified it further and am trying to get it tuned to match my friends real machine.

I've fixed the lower right vertical up kicker issue. Just need to adjust a few more things and I think it will be as close as I can get it with the current available options.

This has been an interesting mod. And I think when I'm finished I'll have some better observations to contribute to your development.

I think if more table authors were involved with this testing you would get a lot more constructive posts as we are more used to tinkering with settings and fine tuning a table.

I'm not discounting anyone's work on these tables, but I know I've spent many hours in the editor trying to get a table to play just right with the old physics and adjusting flipper setting is a whole other can of worms. With the old physics.

That is the part I am most impressed with is how you've greatly improved the flippers. And made the
Oblique correction a thing of the past

[BigBoss]

Hey I have another table that has been modified and I got permission to release in the thread. If I send it to you. Can you attach it to the first post with the bop table.
I just have a little more tuning to do to get it playing more closely to my friends real table.
It is melons cftbl. I'm not sure but I believe it was initially modified by bigboss, and I've modified it further and am trying to get it tuned to match my friends real machine.
I've fixed the lower right vertical up kicker issue. Just need to adjust a few more things and I think it will be as close as I can get it with the current available options.
This has been an interesting mod. And I think when I'm finished I'll have some better observations to contribute to your development.
I think if more table authors were involved with this testing you would get a lot more constructive posts as we are more used to tinkering with settings and fine tuning a table.
I'm not discounting anyone's work on these tables, but I know I've spent many hours in the editor trying to get a table to play just right with the old physics and adjusting flipper setting is a whole other can of worms. With the old physics.
That is the part I am most impressed with is how you've greatly improved the flippers. And made the
Oblique correction a thing of the past

Hi. Someone else had a right vuk problem but I couldn't reproduce it. Did you remove the spinner script that runs the bowl at a velocity of 1.7x? That causes the ball to stay in the bowl forever and you won't discover it unless you get the ramp during multiball

[unclewilly]

Haven't gotten that far yet. I'm a crappy player so I have to block all out lanes and between flippers to get all the modes going. But thank you for the tip.

If you remove that script does the ball still spin around the bowl or does it just drop straight down the hole?

[BuckoBundy]

So I finally found what was causing the bug in the version of BOP I modded for physmod3. I send an updated version to mukuste.

For those that want to fix this themselves:

set Wall349 and Wall350's Top Height to 100

 

The upside is that I used the skillshot so often during testing, I can now hit the 100k 8 out of 10 times.. LOL

[boiydiego]

whats causing the plunger not strong anough on indianapolis500 ? i have it on more table what to change ?

[unclewilly]

Select the plunger object increase either mech strength or stroke length.

If it's a kicker you need to go in the script To the table in it sub routine.
Look for either impulseplunger or auto kicker if it is a push button table like mb. Change the kicker strength to something higher

[randr]

Just looked at some tables.
Not sure if this is true or not.

But as I remember when I first started building tables when the ultra pin version of vp was merged with vp 8 to get vp9.
That is when the global difficulty setting was added.
Correct me if I am wrong on this, but if the global difficulty is set to 0. I don't think some of the table settings such as scatter angle and global friction have any effect on the physics.

If I remember right those numbers are applied to the table as a percentage from the global difficulty.

So to have the global scatter angle actually at 5. Global difficulty would need to be set at 1.

I think this may be causing

 
Sorry, I forgot to mention this... scatter is disabled on most elements right now. Also the friction is hardcoded for most elements, so you can't change it from the GUI.

That is very good to know! As I was trying to adjust these settings. Ha! Feeling much better about these new physics and really looking forward to new tests! Thanks for taking on such a huge task yet again.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[ckovanda]

Has anyone tried modding Melon's Getaway table?  on mine, the supercharger diverter keeps diverting to the right ramp, even when "supercharger ready" is flashing.  you can see the diverter opening up but then it closes again after a couple seconds.  did I screw something up somehow? would deleting the NVRAM fix this?  or could it be a physics issue somehow?

[BuckoBundy]

Has anyone tried modding Melon's Getaway table?  on mine, the supercharger diverter keeps diverting to the right ramp, even when "supercharger ready" is flashing.  you can see the diverter opening up but then it closes again after a couple seconds.  did I screw something up somehow? would deleting the NVRAM fix this?  or could it be a physics issue somehow?

Diverting to the right ramp seems to me like normal when "supercharger ready" is flashing. Maybe I misunderstand. But to fix the diverter I set Mass to 1 and Strength to 2500.

[mukuste]

If there is any video you need that I could help with just let me know, my machine is an old 1970 EM but if I can help I will. I did just do a flipper rebuild with all new coils two weeks ago so it would give a good reference of exactly how the ball reacts when it does indeed open the EoS switch just for a second from a ball strike (the quick high-power flick) when using new equipment. I did just go and do some test by hand and the recoil of the current physics are not completely off, maybe a little exaggerated but nothing absurd, but this is of course my personal opinion. 

 

If you could capture the effect we were talking about on video so we can see how strong it can be in reality, that would be great.

 

 

 

 

mukuste:

 

I modded the Dr Who table with your default settings (Luckily no other ramp or wall mods were necessary) and never had any symptoms of the ball bounce back when hitting the flippers. People reporting the ball bounce back should specify the tables it was experienced on and the settings they modified so it can be recreated/studied as you have asked for. 

 

Above you talked about not knowing the strength between hold and full power. I would be glad to measure the ohms of the primary and secondary Williams coils if you like.( I just did the primary full power winding is 4.3 ohms and the hold winding is 133 ohms on the most commonly used FL11629 flipper coil)  The ratio of the windings should be proportional to the strength.

 

Bally/Williams up to the last made systems used dual windings that the end of stroke switch shorts out the hi power until a ball push back breaks the contacts and re-triggers the hi power..

 

Stern/ Data East ( except for a few early 90's models that copied dual windings and Williams sued DE to stop using it) use a single winding that is driven by a pulsed square wave, when the end of stroke is hit the software increase the duration of the pulse lowering the power, again until the end of stroke switch loses contact on a bounce back and re-triggers hi strength pulse

 

In either case the end of stroke contacts state/position determines the re trigger. Is it possible that you just need to adjust the software equivalent of the VP End of Stroke spacing for this issue.

 

Thanks again for the new physics initiative...

 

Rich

 

 

Thanks for the detailed information. I think the Ohm values alone are not sufficient to compute the relative force of the two coils, unfortunately. What I'm interested in, though, is how large the end of stroke spacing is on a real flipper. Do you know?

 

 

 

 

What happens here is that the ball pushes the flipper down a bit due to the weaker hold coil, then the higher-powered coil kicks in and pushes the ball back up. In general, I don't think this is completely unrealistic, although the effect seems exaggerated. This also doesn't seem to be specific to the Ramp Up setting, it also happens (though maybe a bit less pronounced) if you simply make the flipper weaker to begin with.

 

 

Is there any kind of "dead zone" that can be put in there?  I'm sure on a real flipper the arm on the flipper that activates the low power coil switch would need to move quite a bit to actually open (or close) the EOS leaf switch. That bit of distance is probably what keeps a real flipper from activating the high power coil if a ball pushes it down just a bit when hit.  Just thinking that maybe the 1/3 low power is actually right, but there is a mechanical part that is being missed.

 

-Mike

 

edit - or what Rich just said...

 

 

It's quite possible that the dead zone needs to be larger. I'm curious how large it is on real flippers (though I understand this will probably vary between eras and manufacturers).

 

 

The flipper physics and accuracy alone makes your work here far superior to the old engine.

A question about scatter angle.

I was always under the impression as an author, that this setting is what gave a table object more randomness in the angle the ball had when rebounding off a table object.
Is that correct?

You are doing a fantastic job with this, please try to ignore the off comments. I understand where you are coming from, as an author I get this all the time

 

Yes, this is what scatter did. I disabled it during the early phases of the physics mod to make test cases more reproducible, but I will put it back in at some point.

 

Personally I think randomness should be limited to elements which have quite strongly varying behavior also in real life, for instance kickouts or plungers, but not apply to every single collision. But the tool will be there for those that want it.

 

 

Hey I have another table that has been modified and I got permission to release in the thread. If I send it to you. Can you attach it to the first post with the bop table.

I just have a little more tuning to do to get it playing more closely to my friends real table.

It is melons cftbl. I'm not sure but I believe it was initially modified by bigboss, and I've modified it further and am trying to get it tuned to match my friends real machine.

I've fixed the lower right vertical up kicker issue. Just need to adjust a few more things and I think it will be as close as I can get it with the current available options.

This has been an interesting mod. And I think when I'm finished I'll have some better observations to contribute to your development.

I think if more table authors were involved with this testing you would get a lot more constructive posts as we are more used to tinkering with settings and fine tuning a table.

I'm not discounting anyone's work on these tables, but I know I've spent many hours in the editor trying to get a table to play just right with the old physics and adjusting flipper setting is a whole other can of worms. With the old physics.

That is the part I am most impressed with is how you've greatly improved the flippers. And made the
Oblique correction a thing of the past

 

This is great news. I have no doubts at all that a table tuned by someone with years of table making experience will showcase the new physics even better than mods by people with less experience in that regard (not to discredit the valuable efforts in modding and testing that others have made). Also looking forward to your observations.

 

Also I can't wait to get a well-playing CFTBL with the new physics Any chance there will be a desktop version?

 

 

So I finally found what was causing the bug in the version of BOP I modded for physmod3. I send an updated version to mukuste.

For those that want to fix this themselves:

set Wall349 and Wall350's Top Height to 100

 

The upside is that I used the skillshot so often during testing, I can now hit the 100k 8 out of 10 times.. LOL

 

Thanks! I'll get to updating that as soon as I can but, er, I'm in a train.

 

I've been pretty busy with moving and all that, but I hope to return to working on this more soon.