This is off topic but just wanted to wish a happy holidays to everyone in the community and a very Happy New Year. I am very much looking forwards to things on the horizon.
With the help of some great friends I'm gearing up to get back into the groove. Have a lot of awesome plans and innovative ideas soon to come.
New render engines, modeling tools and techniques that will allow me to do incredible things and do them much much faster.
You guys haven't seen noth'n yet, I'm just getting warmed up;)
https://www.youtube....sMN-BUfTAcxOOhg
https://vimeo.com/227201133
Nice! Although it feels like cheating compared to old fashioned box modeling that I used to do some so, feeling a bit bitter 
. Oh well, CAD programs have had these for long.
Happy holidays to you too!
A bit OT too but with VR the sound vibration feedback becomes more important now that there's no speakers (usually) in the cabinet to give ball rolling vibrations etc. Someone said that one of those el cheapo chinese boombox units does it well but tried one 9€ device and it was just crap. I then tried to turn some Creative computer speaker kit from my old pincab into a diy bass shaker. Works a lot better but needs some fine tuning and probably need to turn those mid/high speakers into shakers as well (or replace the original amp with something else to feed all freqs to the same driver). I just ripped the cone off and glued a bolt to the coil and attached it to the frame with some polycarbonate.
If anyone has a really well working solution for ball rolling & bouncing vibration feedback, please share.
Yea I've done my share of box modeling over the years and glad I've learned the technique but it just takes so long.
The current tools available are so powerful and for hard-edge modeling they're so much faster.
As far as feedback have you considered using audio exciters? They will transfer the sound information much more efficiently then a standard cone driver.
A single AuraSound AST-2B-4 will take care of the bottom end
https://www.amazon.c...ENF8G6526QZ6NY1
And a couple Dayton Audio TT25-8's will do the rest and give you a good left and right bias.
https://www.amazon.c...2SMKQAZ7ZC237BK
Have considered but doubt those cheap ones are much better than the diy. They have the same principle of coil + magnet + suspended mass. The main gripe I have is getting the ball vibrations transferred loud enough. I think it's mostly about the rolling sound not having deep enough freqs so should try to edit the soundtrack. I was kinda fishing for some other types of gizmos someone had maybe built, like some sort of a rotary speaker or using a small vibrator from a phone or such. Would be neat if DOF would have a dedicated ball effect support and if VP would have sort of a standard interface for that. (I know dof has custom outputs that I could use for this. Maybe I'll give it a go at some point).
lol that's pretty cool dyi. What you are lacking on that is enough mass and freedom of movement. The ones you buy have a heavy weight on the coil sleeve to increase its effectiveness and they move freely on a suspension. Swap the Plexiglas with a piece of rubber and stack some washers on that bolt;) That will dramatically increase it's amplitude.
Like mentioned previously, you can use a butt kicker Gamer 2 to reproduce almost any sound https://thebuttkicke...tkicker-gamer2/ . If you want you can make it so you feel the ball in the ramps. I've tried other transducers and exciters but find that one buttkicker can really reproduce any sound. Even slight things like when you are playing Flintstones for example and the ball is in "The Machine" you can feel it hit the walls of the machine while in there ever so slightly. Other things like slingshots bumpers and solenoids feel extremely realistic with a little tuning. I usually end up modifying most of the sounds on each table to get it just right however. I just use the below site as it is super easy to reduce or add more bass to any of the sound effects on the tables quickly and free here. The key to that buttkcker is the long arm that holds that transducer. For example, if you were to mount that transducer in the butkicker to your cabinet directly or even with some small rubber washers it would suck (Large Rubber stands work ok though). With the arm it is completely different. When a table sounds are tuned in, I'm wiling to bet most people could not tell if the feedback is a real table or a virtual table.
https://audioalter.com/
Once other thing, I found for me at least, it was way too easy to make the mechanical feedback / ball rolling sounds too strong. In fact, in the beginning my flippers bumpers and slingshots were set too high which was not really realistic. Even the drain sound when the ball drains had too much feedback. On real pinball tables you can indeed feel all of these things but it is not that strong, I ended up going to the arcade and playing most of the pinball games for an hour or so and coming home and readjusting my sound effects to get them just right. The good thing is you can adjust the volume of the sounds in the scripts or in VPX sound manager as well. In many cases I didn't need to adjust the audio levels of the wav file, instead I could just lower or raise the volume slightly to get it right.
I used to own some tables but sadly they were all sold. Makes tuning the feedback for the sounds harder that is for sure. lol.
One more thing, The Rift S and the Valve Index both have sound that is built into the headset though the Index audio is wayyyyyyyy better. Anyway, I find that it works well to have the ROM audio come out of the headset and all of the mechanical table sounds and the force feedback come from the table. Since the Rift S and the Index do not cover your ears with their audio solutions this works pretty well.
One thing that may actually be better though is to just not use the audio at all in your VR headset. Just have speakers in your backbox for the ROM sounds and speakers, transducers, exciters, shakers etc on the table for the the mechanical sounds. Four of these mounted so they are facing the player https://www.amazon.c...1?ie=UTF8&psc=1 and a buttkicker gamer 2 and VPX in four channel surround sound can work wonders especially if you configure it so that you have separate amps driving the rear speakers, front speakers and butt kicker so that you can adjust the volume level of each individually.
If you really want to feel the ball in the ramps, (i'd personally find that you would want this to be VERY SMALL amount of feedback if any as well as ball rolling) You may be able to do that with your current set up just by adding bass to the ball rolling sounds. Try the Extreme bass booster on some of your ball rolling sounds here: https://audioalter.com/bass-booster/ If you find it is too much just start over with the original sound file and apply less bass. Alternativly you can use their EQ option as well but the bass booster on max should let you know if it is possible to get what you are looking for. Just make sure to try it on ball rolling sounds from a few different tables. Once you get sounds you like, you can just save those and apply them to all of your tables.
Edited by gear323, 26 December 2019 - 07:16 PM.
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. Only one thing is bothering me and thats a flickering on the edges of objects (wire ramps f.e.) for example on Indiana Jones (BW). I also have it on the Cirqus Voltair table on the edges of the plastic ramps. Is there a parameter to get rid of this? Thanks.
. I changed the Supersampling Factor to 1.5 in the preferences\ VRSettings. I'm playing with a HP Reverb and now it looks pretty good.
. I've gotta get myself a pinsim these days! Thanks for sharing pinsim designs and tips!
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