106 replies to this topic

[toxie]

I beleive I understand what you mean about the 3ds. I don't personally have one but have seen them a couple of times.
I beleive this method should work from all vertical angles as you are blocking the view of a column (an actual row on the tv) of pixels. Having said that, it should not matter where you stand in that vertical column.

That's only partially true.. Parallax has the problem that it only works reasonably well within a certain angle of looking at it, so for the cabinet it would have to be a very very customized parallax 3D tv, i don't think that a standard approach/off the shelf tv would work there.. (at least not with the tvs out there so far)

PS. I don't mean to push this idea, I and many others simply don't have a 3d display to use
Correct me if Iam wrong, Im assuming that your idea would lay the images over top of one another, in theory you would only see one image in each eye (with rotation of the polarization of the film in your glasses). Something like this:

Of course not everybody has a 3D TV -yet-, but at least here in Europe it seems to become increasingly difficult to actually buy a new TV that doesn't have some 3D stuff in it, so.. .. It will also take some more time (if at all) to finish the prototype hack that produced the pictures above, as i said, for now my approach works and is reasonybly simple implemented in VP (i.e. it wouldn't break or complicate the 'standard 2D' pipeline), but also is pretty slow (like in 'even a highend pc/gfx board would stutter a bit during gameplay'), but i think i know the reasons and have different ideas to work around it (i.e. a lot of time to be spent on experiments/tweaks)..

As for displaying the picture: A finalized version would have different outputs, like side-by-side, etc. (there are like 3 or 4 standardized outputs currently around), which then again is converted by the TV to its own internal format that it 'likes'/can display..

[toxie]

small update: i optimized the heck out of it today, and i guess on a high-end machine it should now be usable (i.e. my rusty laptop doesn't do the trick so far, even with its NVIDIA chip in it), as the main bottleneck seems to be readback from gfx memory now (which is usually much much faster on a real desktop machine).. i also tested more tables, and so far it seems to work with much more tables than i would have hoped (at constant overhead time btw), and it just adds this tiny bit more of realism and depth..
so as soon as i can put together my cabinet pc (end of week), i hope i have more good news (i.e. playing VP without stutter in 3D! ) and will submit my changes to the dev svn..

[The Loafer]

That is fantastic news, looking forward to seeing videos of it in action (if release is far away). Your efforts are appreciated Toxie!

[toxie]

After even more optimizations, i'm pretty confident that it will work on a desktop machine now!
(maybe not in fullHD resolution but maybe 720p, but that's up for final testing (hopefully) end of the week)

[rockme]

Wow! You got me so excited I don´t know what to do!! Can´t wait!!

[toxie]

It's submitted to the svn now, but needs some more love (crashes on some tables ) and especially misses exposing the feature to the enduser (for now its nasty defines in the source code directly).. But then it should be ready for use..

[toxie]

Small update: No more crashes, but still misses exposure to the UI.. Also i implemented FXAA as a prototype, running fully on the CPU (as VP still uses DX7), but who knows if it will ever be really fast enough to be actually usable..

[bent98]

Small update: No more crashes, but still misses exposure to the UI.. Also i implemented FXAA as a prototype, running fully on the CPU (as VP still uses DX7), but who knows if it will ever be really fast enough to be actually usable..

Toxie

Can any of your amazing optimizatios work be applied to VP from a 2D perspective?

[unclewilly]

im curious also. will the optomizations help out with the standard vp or just for using a 3d monitor.

[toxie]

Nope, all the recent stuff i'm doing is all just a 'add-on' to the classic VP rendering, nothing of the other VP stuff really has to be touched for that, so its all 3D stereo optimizations only (as its pretty much glued onto the existing VP code).. So far i'm getting along pretty well, btw, my laptop now has ~60fps 3D stereo, the only problem is that my cab with stronger CPU and GPU only has ~30fps (at same resolution, of course, 20fps at 1080p) and i don't have a clue so far why.. :/

[BitPirate]

Nope, all the recent stuff i'm doing is all just a 'add-on' to the classic VP rendering, nothing of the other VP stuff really has to be touched for that, so its all 3D stereo optimizations only (as its pretty much glued onto the existing VP code).. So far i'm getting along pretty well, btw, my laptop now has ~60fps 3D stereo, the only problem is that my cab with stronger CPU and GPU only has ~30fps (at same resolution, of course, 20fps at 1080p) and i don't have a clue so far why.. :/

I'm curious and have to ask. Will the work your doing allow for an oldstyle R B image overlay (used with the old Red and Blue glasses)?

[toxie]

Nope, all the recent stuff i'm doing is all just a 'add-on' to the classic VP rendering, nothing of the other VP stuff really has to be touched for that, so its all 3D stereo optimizations only (as its pretty much glued onto the existing VP code).. So far i'm getting along pretty well, btw, my laptop now has ~60fps 3D stereo, the only problem is that my cab with stronger CPU and GPU only has ~30fps (at same resolution, of course, 20fps at 1080p) and i don't have a clue so far why.. :/

I'm curious and have to ask. Will the work your doing allow for an oldstyle R B image overlay (used with the old Red and Blue glasses)?

yup, would be possible in theory, although of course there you would have the usual ghosting problems, etc..

[toxie]

some more update: yesterday i almost finished 16bit rendering support, too, now its finally fast enough to not be annoying on my cab setup, too! yay!
(interesting that the readback/lock is so slow on my main machine (thats why 16bit helps there: basically only half the memory traffic), but not on my laptop.. maybe also some weird driver issues, meh)
just one tiny bug (hopefully) to fix!

EDIT: you people better get some 3D TVs ready, this is really changing the experience A LOT, especially on a cab setup!

Edited by toxie, 04 July 2012 - 11:39 AM.

[am1001]

Hi Toxie

I am the original poster for this thread. I could not be more pleased.

I tried the preview images in 3d - and it looked really great.

Hope this becomes a reality as it will give a lovely 3d depth when playing pinball.

I have two 3d setups - one uses Nvidia 3d vision (output to a lg 3d vision monitor, or to a 720p 3d projector which is compatible with 3d vision), and also a 27" LG 3d tv.

Would the visual pinball 3d work with 3d vision setups?

Also what sort of pc specs do you need? I have a 3ghz dual core, with 8gb ram with a nvidia 260gtx graphics - good enough for 1920x1080?

When you talk about adjusting the glasses - do you mean rotating the glasses - how would you do this?

Finally do I assume that this works for tables which are desktop created tables as well as full screen cabinet tables?

Huge thanks to you!

am1001

Edited by am1001, 04 July 2012 - 08:49 PM.

[toxie]

Hi Toxie
I am the original poster for this thread. I could not be more pleased.
I tried the preview images in 3d - and it looked really great.

thanx! being into rendering/gfx and being addicted to 3D TV lately i had to try that out..
the pics even look better by now as there was a slight bug in the prototype pics i posted..

Hope this becomes a reality as it will give a lovely 3d depth when playing pinball.

it already is a reality, it just needs more work to be end-user ready..

I have two 3d setups - one uses Nvidia 3d vision (output to a lg 3d vision monitor, or to a 720p 3d projector which is compatible with 3d vision), and also a 27" LG 3d tv.

Would the visual pinball 3d work with 3d vision setups?

i don't know.. actually the only thing you would need is a TV/monitor/driver that can "convert" a top/down 3D stereo picture to the needed format.. i don't know if nv3dvision can also do that for you?!
(the lg should work out of the box, i use a big brother of this one for my cab)

Also what sort of pc specs do you need? I have a 3ghz dual core, with 8gb ram with a nvidia 260gtx graphics - good enough for 1920x1080?

after all the insane low-level optimizations i did recently the only thing you need is a SSE2 capable CPU (so basically everything that is not stone-old), and now the main thing:
a super-fast down/upload of stuff from the gfxboard to sysmem and back again.. so basically a fast PCI-E connected gfxcard.. what the exact specs are and how much of it actually depends on the driver
(cause as i said earlier, actually my poor old laptop is much faster (using its builtin intel gfx OR the additional nvidia chip) than my standalone cab setup), is something i dunno exactly and only more (user-)tests will show..

When you talk about adjusting the glasses - do you mean rotating the glasses - how would you do this?

so far i simply cut one of my passive 3D glasses (extract polarization foil), rotate them (matching the rotation of your TV in the cab) and tape them back onto the plastic..
a more professional solution would of course be to buy some polarized foil and have it match the original glasses size.. (which i will do later-on)

Finally do I assume that this works for tables which are desktop created tables as well as full screen cabinet tables?

yup.. indeed.. and to my own surprise, most tables i tried really just work out of the box!
there are some tables that simulate "glow"/blooming of flashers via bright/huge overlays though, and these might look a bit stupid as it distorts the 3D effect around objects, but for everything else it just works fine in 99% of the cases..

[am1001]

Hi

Do we know when the 3d version of visual pinball will be released. Can't wait to try out my favourite tables in 3d!!

thanks

[toxie]

recently i didn't continue with finishing it up (too busy tweaking my cab setup/build, so sorry), but hopefully i'll continue soon.. only exposing the feature itself and saving custom specific parameters for each table is still missing, the main core code is mostly done though..

[sleepy]

Which 3D engine does it use? Is it the Direct3D 11.1 Stereo API or other?
Is it a custom engine?
Can the VP/rendering be split to two CPU cores?

The Direct3D 11.1 stereo app has something M$ calls "Render Direct2D content on the stereo 3-D swap chain.", using the back buffer, though I suspect that would only be the backdrop?

Edited by sleepy, 25 July 2012 - 05:51 AM.

[CaptainNeo]

I wouldn't want to wear the glasses tho. Think i'll wait till I can get a 42" monitor that doesn't need glasses. But for cab, your looking at it from an extreme side angle, usually for 3D that results in most of the 3D effect to be flattened and minimized. It's awesome in theory, and would rock of the pops and everything would seem to over over the monitor, but right now the technology isn't there on the monitors sides of things. not for cab users anyway.

[sleepy]

Are your glasses linear polarized 3d glasses, hence the need to rotate the polar films?

I wonder if the circular polarized glasses 3D monitors work in either horizontal or vertical monitor alignment since the polarization in this version is circular clockwise for one eye and circular counterclockwise for the other? I wouldn't think rotating the monitor with the circular polar system would fail the 3D view.