98 replies to this topic

[BarryS]

Hi barry,

what tables did not work and what happened? Have you installed xna redist first? You also need .net 4.0 client profile. And this is an older version. You need to copy a table to c:\ and rename it bop.vpt... I have not written a file selection yet.

@all: anyone got less than 60 in the Window title? Thats something like the frame rate. What are your system specs?

Cupid

I got bop, pinbot, and Dr Dude (HR) to load. Dr Dude took a long time and used up almost 1.4 GB of memory.

It installed the .net 4.0 client profile, I don't think I have the xna redist installed (unless your installer did it for me... I will check).

My PC has the following spec:
Intel i7 (dont remember the speed)
4GB memory
xp 32bit
nvidia GTX 260, 1792MB video card

[Tomcat Leader]

Will this work only for VP9 or is it for both VP8 and 9? Inquiring minds want to know.

[rascal]

You graphic card is too old. Sorry.

Oh well, I guess I'll just pee myself for the fun of it then. Ahhhhh!

Still sounds awesome! I'm sure glad I didn't get started on my VP Overlay plugin now. This will be far better! cupid, you are the man!!!

Lets see what can I pawn for a new video card?

Edited by rascal, 08 January 2011 - 06:13 PM.

[FDSystems]

You graphic card is too old. Sorry.

Seems we are slowly getting outdated Rascal!

[kruge99]

Will this work only for VP9 or is it for both VP8 and 9? Inquiring minds want to know.

I tried with PacDude's Big Bang Bar and it did not render properly, not even worth the time to make a screenshot. It will be up to Cupid to decide how much effort to put into this "player" to make it compatible with both VP8 and VP9...

[BFG Brutal]

So with this new "3D" rendering, one would assume VP will be more GPU intensive and less CPU bound? Just curious....! Its awesome that VP will be getting a nice upgrade, thanks cupid!

[kruge99]

@ Cupid:

-some rendering errors in my high speed 1.0.1, ie bumper caps missing, apron missing etc
-speed drops below 60 once in a while to low 50 when I'm switching to another application or 20-30 if I load another application on my 3.0Ghz core2duo, 8gb ram, and nVidia GTS250 w/1Gb ram...

@Cupid, send me a PM if you want more info/details

Hope this development continues!




Best Regards,
Todd.

OK, thanks... Framerate below 60 when switched to other app is OK. I have not yet programmed bumpers. The green area is strage. i'll checkt that out.

Hi Cupid, another table with similar rendering issues with the VP player as my version of High Speed is Medieval Madness 2.01 by JPSalas if you need another example.


Best Regards,
Todd.

[J3SteR]

Looks great nice work Cupid! We need to find some people with experience coding 3d to help you out.

[grimwasere]

well done cupid this looks awesome vp is coming into the 21 century more and more guys are using high end gfx cards and pcs now with full size cabs and i think vp 9 on my cab is great but it still looks a bit flat what you are doing is stepping up to a whole new level when you look at the new pc games (eg cod2) and see the advancements in direct x vp is starting to get left behind as i say as it is its still brilliant but i see a lot of people pushing and wanting to push more and more out of their projects vp used to be a little program to tinker about on your 17 inch screen with your keyboard but ive noticed over the last few years the advancement with it all and its now like a drug where you try and get more realism into your cab, so well done m8 and keep up this fantastic work

ps does this mean real nice transparent ramps,and does it mean the editor has to be redesigned aswell?

[cupid]

Looks great nice work Cupid! We need to find some people with experience coding 3d to help you out.

Thanks. We have some people who can code 3D in the dev-Team. I'm somehow blocked by some other stuff at the moment (like finite state machine for Gamestates, menus, camera movement, Ressource Display and so on). I uploaded a todo list to the sources.

In such an early state of a software it's more trial and error to program (at least for me as a non professional). You think that the 3d Engine is OK like it is and after displaying another Element (like lights on screen, you notice that you have to completely redesign the engine and the interface to it. This may be not easy with several people in this state.

Also sometimes you don't think too much. I decided that some little helper classes for menus would be OK, since at this state you don't need the menus at all. Now i noticed: to debug a table with 5000 elements. i would have to cycle throught the elements and display the according data for it, öet it blink on the table or display it alone. Outputting all data for the bop to the debug console for example needs something around two minutes thats-Compile, wait 2 mins, look for 1 second, change something, compile again, wait 2 min... Also: If I notice that a wall is not ok. At this stage I have to find the wall in VP, let it display alone (with hard coding like if(surface.internalname=="Wall38")... Only noticing that it was the wrong wall - and this one looks good - so at this stage i have to recompile ...

So i decided that i need a stack Menu that can display all things that i need.

Not only i wrote new menu's, but i changed the whole System, how input work. The Menu now has an own connection to the input-manager. In the main loop you can't see anything of the menu-system. The Table class does not even know that there is a menu (and which) on screen. And so on...

If i would program with other people, it would drive me nuts if other people would release such "changes" that radically change the whole design of a program.

I think that the base should be ready, to work with several people on one project.

Cupid

[luvthatapex]

Wow, talk about an absolute breakthough! I can imagine our cabinets looking real!

Well done, this will be great to see your progress every step of the way. Brilliant!
My only hope is the incredibly real physics of VP won't suffer from the 3d changes.
LTA

Cupid,
I am looking forward to seeing the development of this. Please keep us posted on your progress!

Programmed lights today. ;-)

Hey, the aliens say they have 4 arms, just before you destroy the mars... They were wrong: They have 8 in this screenshot :-)


Now you can really feel like a woman... But please... DON'T SING!!!

Holy crap! That's awesome and looks great Cupid!

[sza]

Looks great! There is hope for VP just yet.

[BK3K]

Holy rusted metal Batman, The Force is Strong in This One, Kick Butt.
If You Build it, They Will Come!

Edited by BK3K, 11 January 2011 - 03:17 AM.

[chriz]

simply AWESOME!

[toxie]

go, cupid, go!!! insane what you achieved in few weeks!!!

So with this new "3D" rendering, one would assume VP will be more GPU intensive and less CPU bound? Just curious....!

not necessarily.. actually the 2D-style rendering in VP is so oldskool that todays GPU don't really "like" it anymore, especially when ppl like JP or highrise max out all kinds of stuff..
so maybe it will even be faster in the end (as long as one doesn't target FP rendering quality, of course)..

[sza]

(as long as one doesn't target FP rendering quality, of course)..

I hope it will eventually do! Or even exceed it at some point. With PCs last years high specs, becoming todays budget system, there no reason to limit anything to make it work on slow machines.

If this would render 3d up to modern games standard, backward compatibility would be completely irrelevant. I keep my fingers crossed.

Edited by sza, 11 January 2011 - 02:02 PM.

[cupid]

go, cupid, go!!! insane what you achieved in few weeks!!!

Thanks, but holidays are now over. So don't expect such a pace in the future.

If this would render 3d up to modern games standard, backward compatibility would be completely irrelevant. I keep my fingers crossed.

I disagree with that. If i program something in VP it will always be backward compatible. If i come to the conclusion that a 3d renderer could not be done with backward compatibility i will finish the project.

After long absence of VP i just came back when VP 9 was very new... I could not understand why all my tables did not work in the new version, which has much better physics than the old version. Every table i loved to play could not be played anymore with the new Version.

With high respect to the Authors who have created many tables again and did not finish creating tables at all, this 3d version will be backward compatible, even if it comes to light, that modern games standard could not be reached with this.

As we are talking about: Don't expect modern games standard out of two reasons:
First: This is not a prerendered scene like in most games. As i described earlier, it's hard to program something in 3d that you don't know before.
Second: I have barely programmed 3d. I think that i can program some High Level Shader Language (HLSL) effects into the engine, but i'm not a pro... I have never programmed HLSL before. In fact everything i do here is new to me, and i had to rewrite almost everything of the engine i have programmed before, because i learned from mistakes. (i also explained this before)

I would be glad to put out a 3d Table viewer within some months, maybe more.

so maybe it will even be faster in the end (as long as one doesn't target FP rendering quality, of course)..

With lights displaying and blinking, i get 240 fps with the bop (because of 3500 ramps) and 350 fps with most other tables. But almost no depth sorting is done yet. So the frame rate will for sure drop lower.

The next thing i will do (after cleaning the code a little bit) is a file chooser and a run-time property editor. This will cost some time, that i could use programming bumpers and gates, but i think this is very important for debugging strange errors (like the error with MM (wich is rendered good unter the two black triangles)).

Cupid

[wtiger]

Cupid,
My hats off to you for working on this.

[Joe]

Hi barry,

what tables did not work and what happened? Have you installed xna redist first? You also need .net 4.0 client profile. And this is an older version. You need to copy a table to c:\ and rename it bop.vpt... I have not written a file selection yet.

@all: anyone got less than 60 in the Window title? Thats something like the frame rate. What are your system specs?

Cupid

I got bop, pinbot, and Dr Dude (HR) to load. Dr Dude took a long time and used up almost 1.4 GB of memory.

It installed the .net 4.0 client profile, I don't think I have the xna redist installed (unless your installer did it for me... I will check).

My PC has the following spec:
Intel i7 (dont remember the speed)
4GB memory
xp 32bit
nvidia GTX 260, 1792MB video card

You need a 64 bit os 4gb system + 1.8G video + system pci ram space over head = only about 2-3.5 ram that can be used.

[BarryS]

You need a 64 bit os 4gb system + 1.8G video + system pci ram space over head = only about 2-3.5 ram that can be used.

Say wha?