176 replies to this topic

[The Loafer]

Ask and Ye shall receive!

Pretty awesome eh?    I am very appreciative of this dark thanks

Attached Files

•  Loafenstein Pinball.jpg   239.74KB   10 downloads

Edited by The Loafer, 19 August 2014 - 04:47 AM.

[The Loafer]

I have no shame so here's the "model" pic that this was taken from (along with some side views that I don't need to post, you get the gist)

 

That is one nasty snarl!

 

 

 

 

Attached Files

•  Rob 1.jpg   75.33KB   7 downloads

[Shadowsclassic]

That's pretty cool Loafer.  The model needs the face thinned down a little more but it should make for a great conversation piece for your guests.

[The Loafer]

Well, 18 months ago I weighed 150 lbs more so they'll think "hey, it's the old loaf!"

[unclewilly]

I have to work a double today. So ill get the arm animation coded and back to lw tomorrow so he can upload if he wants to

[dark]

I have to work a double today. So ill get the arm animation coded and back to lw tomorrow so he can upload if he wants to

No hurries no worries pal.

[Shoopity]

Glad you like it Goesta, but you may need to re-import those textures one more time!

 

I got Uncle Willy to help with the 'creature 2 ball'.  I made some 3D mesh primitive balls to fit in Frank's hands so when the balls get loaded into his hands they actually should look like they are being held instead of just floating there.  The kicker will trigger a destroy ball > primitive ball visible > primitive ball invisible after launch animation > kicker launches new ball.  He said it shouldn't be too hard for him to get it working, but he's a busy guy as we all know, so I'd expect one more update on this one at some point.

Praise to UW! 

I'm going to fool around with it once the newest table downloads, but you might be able to get away with not having to destroy the ball at all.  Once a ball goes into a kicker, it becomes motion-less; gravity/physics don't affect it all (that's how the Magic Trunk works, or the Ferris Wheels on Hurricane (and I implemented it in Cyclone too, but I haven't released it)).  So you could, on a kicker_hit event just move the coordinates of the ball to be wherever you want and the ball will stay there until you kick.  And when you kick, it will kick from whatever position the ball is in.

[dark]

The problem is the kicker is too far behind frank physically and I think Frank's hands have a higher height value so I'm not sure how possible it is to make it appear as if the ball is actually in his hands instead of floating above them, or behind them.

[unclewilly]

That is what I noticed last night.
The ramps that drop the ball into his hands are about 100 units below his actual hands. And rather then plotting the individual coordinates for each step of the animation, y p u can just destroy the Bal and make the model visible, the model moves exactly with the hands, then make the model invisible when you kick the ball

[dark]

That is what I noticed last night.
The ramps that drop the ball into his hands are about 100 units below his actual hands. And rather then plotting the individual coordinates for each step of the animation, y p u can just destroy the Bal and make the model visible, the model moves exactly with the hands, then make the model invisible when you kick the ball

I moved the kickers a bit to get the ball as close as possible, and as you could see in the version of the table I gave you with the primitive ball the real ball lines up nicely with the primitives ones, so if you just kill the ball right before it hits the hand it should look almost perfect.

[Shoopity]

You can place the ball anywhere on the board you want and it will stay in the last position you place it.  The problem I have is that I'm not familiar enough with cvpmballstack and all of its ball ID handling to properly do it justice.  But you should be able to do it with something like:

Dim lhandball

Sub LKicker_Hit()
	Set lhandball = ActiveBall
	lhandball.x = 269
	lhandball.y = 306
	lhandball.z = 300
End Sub

Also, has any tried putting this in their code?

I just didn't think there was much "animation" to the balls.  The arms flick so fast and not very far that I wouldn't think it would be worth "animating" (i.e. multiple frames of movement).

[unclewilly]

I know how the ball movement works, that's how I'm doing the corkscrew ramp in pinball magic.

My thought on the animation was tha, from my experience with monster bash, where most people complained about the animations not having smooth movements, that a 50 degree jump in rotation for the arms without any steps in between would be considered jerky and not desirable.

So ill let you go ahead and handle this animation. I just offered to help with it from a request from dark.

SSince you've done all the rest of the animations, you might as well finish it up

[dark]

Well if anyone wants to make use of the primitive balls for the animation they are sized and positioned in this version here:

http://www.mediafire...balls_added.rar

 

The pivot points of the balls are also set to match the arms so they should follow the hands perfectly with animation.

[Shoopity]

No no, I wasn't arguing or trying to be pushy.  I was just thinking it's not worth doing the animation for since it's so fast.  Please go ahead and do what you think will look best.  All I do is offer my work and it doesn't matter to me if 0 to 100 people like/hate it.

 

Dark has already done the work on the primitive ball(s), so there's not much "work" to save on.  Like I said, I currently don't have a good enough grasp of the stack to properly implement my idea (I could do the Ferris Wheel myself in Cyclone because it's a 1 ball machine; once you thrown in multi-ball and all the ID handling, I get lost).

[unclewilly]

No fuss shoopity. I much respect the things you do around here. You did successfully fix the drac in mb.

Which ids are you talking about?

Do you mean for the ball collision and rolling sounds?

I may be able to help with that as I've just had a pita time getting that to function right after doing the corkscrew ball manipulation in pinball magic

[Shoopity]

I understand the concept of virtualizing the ball stack; instead of having a bunch of balls physically sitting in a trough somewhere (or multiple troughs if there's some sort of subway), a ball gets destroyed and created when needed.  And I saw Eala's post about working on having a "real" trough system; and your comment in that thread indicates you might be forgoing the cvpmballstack.  But this table definitely uses it.

 

Anytime a ball is destroyed/created, IDs/uservalues are removed/added (that's a lot of slashes in that sentence).  And I've looked through the methods and I just can't follow; I need someone to explain it to me in Laymen's terms for me to totally grasp this.  Although... now I'm going through this table and it doesn't look like it does much with IDs/uservalues.  But I still having trouble.  What exactly is ActiveBall, especially if there are multiple balls in play?  Is there a way to reference in the code the ball that hit an object (e.g. saying me.enabled inside a kicker_hit sub would enable/disable the kicker; what if I want to do something that hit the object).

 

Take a look at, say, the most recent Hurricane if you don't already know what I'm talking about.

[unclewilly]

Ok so you mean for like ball collision.
Here is the issue with the vpm ball stack and the ids. Each time a ball is destroyed say entering the trough. The ball Id is killed also, then on the create ball a new id is made. That is why a real physical trough is nice as the ball ids aren't lost. Although aside from the ball rolling and ball collision engine I don't think the ids are really that necessary.
If you are trying keep track of which balls are in which stacks like say for tz. I think there are easier ways to do it. Just through variables.

I didn't know you could set a ball as an object and manipulate it without first destroying and creating a new ball. But if this is the case, then you won't loose the I'd when manipulating the ball.
I'll have to redo the corkscrew code for pinball magic and adjust it a bit.

The only issue with a physical trough that I've found is unless you want to use kickers for the trough, it requires an elevated playfield.

I wanted pinball magic to function exactly as the real table does, mostly just for my own cur is it and amusement so I'm building it on an elevated playfield with a working real 4 ball trough.

[Shoopity]

The problem I have is, if a table uses ID for whatever reason, then you have to properly create and kill a ball; you can't just say "Kicker1.createball" or "Kicker1.destroyball", you have to run the proper routines otherwise it'll throw errors.

 

I'm at a loss here... If I do this, the ball doesn't move at all, but there IS a knocker sound:

Sub Kicker1_Hit()
	setball
End Sub

Sub SetBall
	testball.x = 360
	testball.y = 1160
	playsound "knocker"
End Sub

If I do this, there is a knocker and the ball DOES move, and there's still a knocker sound:

Sub Kicker1_Hit()
	testmover.enabled = 1
End Sub

Sub testmover_timer()
	testball.x = 360
	testball.y = 1160
	playsound "knocker"
	me.enabled = 0
End Sub

Best as I can tell, I have to move the ball with a timer??

[unclewilly]

Is there a part of the statement where you set the ball to the variable testball.

I would think if you did a set testball = activeball be for the coordinates in the set ball sub it would move.
Actually you'd probably have to do that in the kicker hit event.

I'm not at home to check any of this though.

I wish I had vp here to look at for this

Edited by unclewilly, 19 August 2014 - 10:47 PM.

[Shoopity]

Yeah, elsewhere in the script I have Set testball = Activeball.  I even modified my script that that happens in the kicker_hit event just to keep things in one place.  I've got it working now, I'm just fine tuning where it moves the ball when it hits lkicker or rkicker.  But I'm at a loss why it is I have to do it in a _timer event; I even tried it in the kicker_hit event and it didn't work there.  I wonder if this is a bug no one's really noticed since most of the ball manipulation is for ramp helpers and what-not, but since they're small amounts of velocity adjustment it's hard to tell if they're working?