868 replies to this topic

[toxie]

Test with Embryon - How were you capturing where the cpu spent time? 

 

if you press F11, you can see the amount (in msecs and %) spent in the physics code and scripts.

the physics currently include the script time though, but i'll change that for the next build.

[kiwi]

Do you mean with raised playfield the playfield height or another wall over the playfield?

Both, Playfield is made with walls high 50 VPXU, and 50 also the "Table Field Height".

 

Max

[fuzzel]

I can't reproduce the issue when you raise the table field height. If set to e.g. 50 and create a ball in "throw ball in player" mode the ball is created on the playfield. If you use a wall as playfield then this is a known problem. Therefore I added the drop ball functionality to the "throw" mode. Just press the middle mouse button and a ball will fall from the defined "top glass height" onto the playfield wall. It's not that convenient but better than nothing.

[BorgDog]

regarding top glass height, is that just always flat? or is a height above playfield and mirrors the slope? or any thought to making it like a ramp with a top height and a bottom height so you can have it mimic a real table?  Not sure why I would need this, or what glass height does for us, I use it so balls don't jump onto the apron for em tables where the glass basically parallels the playfield, but on modern tables wouldn't you want a different slope on the glass?

[BorgDog]

And to add to that, how about a Glass_Hit event so we can have that sound effect?

[kiwi]

I can't reproduce the issue when you raise the table field height. If set to e.g. 50 and create a ball in "throw ball in player" mode the ball is created on the playfield. If you use a wall as playfield then this is a known problem. Therefore I added the drop ball functionality to the "throw" mode. Just press the middle mouse button and a ball will fall from the defined "top glass height" onto the playfield wall. It's not that convenient but better than nothing.

Thanks, I did not remember the middle mouse button,

remember that in the old Vp there was a box to put the value of the height where to create the ball.

 

Max

[lodger]

Hi-

 

I had an interface suggestion that I'm thinking would be easy enough but would make a difference in my ease of use: increase the number of steps in the zoom in/out. Right now there are no problems with closer zoom, however trying to load the full playfield on my laptop to line up/design shots is a bit awkward...its either too far zoomed out or too far zoomed in to show the whole playfield at once. an intermittent step in the zoom would be much appreciated.

 

-Lodger

[fuzzel]

I changed that's but and will be available in the next build. Another issue in the current build is that zooming by using ctrl+ mouse wheel uses a wrong position for zooming and is not usable imo. That will be also fixed in the next build.

[Pin-Pete]

Good bye, bad stutter. You guys are magicians!

[fuzzel]

"Feel the power of magic"

[lodger]

"Feel the power of magic"

Yep. the devs are able to hit the trunk pretty consistently.

[kruge99]

Even though I play in desktop mode I have my pinDMD2 connected off to the side of my monitor but for the life of me, I can't seem to make the VPMColoredDMD appear on my desktop monitor at the same time.  Any suggestions? 

 

I've updated some tables that were still using the vpinmame renderer because I wanted to familiarize myself with the ColorDMD registry settings and VPX scripting but this is eluding me. 

 

Any help getting both DMDs to work simultaneously would be greatly appreciated.

 

Best Regards,

Kruge99.

[fuzzel]

rev2495 is up:

 

- workaround for new kicker physics behaviour. The kicker has still problems whenn it's attached to a wall (raised playfield)
- zooming in editor improved (also ctrl+ mouse wheel zooming)
- refine debug output
- text flickering removed in debug/camera mode
 

[atarian]

And to add to that, how about a Glass_Hit event so we can have that sound effect?

That is a great ideal. The glass tap sound would definitely add something.

[jpsalas]

rev2495 is up:

 

- workaround for new kicker physics behaviour. The kicker has still problems whenn it's attached to a wall (raised playfield)
- zooming in editor improved (also ctrl+ mouse wheel zooming)
- refine debug output
- text flickering removed in debug/camera mode
 

 

There is something wrong with the rendering. It looks like there is something on the right that pushes the table to the left. It is like for example you move a ramp to the right side and when you run the table the whole table is rendered to the left to fit the ramp. I attach a picture of the backdrop since it shows clearly the table is moved to the left.

 

 

 

Edit: I have found that this happens if the table has no ramps on its sides (side rails), like for example my latest WOW Monopoly. This has been working fine until this revision 2495.

http://www.vpforums....&showfile=11612

Edited by jpsalas, 07 February 2016 - 03:39 AM.

[freneticamnesic]

On the topic of stuttering:

 

I wasted a lot of time over the weekend (or actually not, depending on how you look at it ) looking into this. Apart from some physics stuff that is still suboptimal to put it mildly, i also discovered that some tables spent a looooooooot of time in the scripting. A prominent case that always confused me stuttering-wise (but its not just this table) is Kingpin.

 

There, up to 40% per frame are spent in the script sometimes!!

 

So one lesson here is that one should not overdo it with timers. Some of the Kingpin timers have a timer interval set of 0 or 1, which means that these will be triggered 1000 times a second, and there are a lot of timers and sometimes some costly routines in there!

(verifying this by setting them to f.e. an interval of 100, makes script time drop to <1% on my machine).

Another sideeffect of this is that even timers that are set to saner values like 10 or 20 will be affected, as these will have to catch up, too, in the case that a previous frame was rather costly.

-> e.g. micro-stutter

 

Kingpin uses less timers than some of my other tables. Significantly so, actually. There are a lot of useless timers on the table I've consolidated for the next update so if it really is just the amount of timers, that will be solved.

A key difference here is the Lamp shader used on this table. Change line 13 of the script to 0 (LampShader) and I suspect you'll see a marked increase in performance/stuttering... what's being done in that process is nothing to sneeze at. Check around line 1050 in the script to see what I mean.

[kiwi]

Good job! in what I'm doing I have noticed an improvement of about 10% of frames.

 

Thanks

 

Max

[fuzzel]

rev2495 is up:
 
- workaround for new kicker physics behaviour. The kicker has still problems whenn it's attached to a wall (raised playfield)
- zooming in editor improved (also ctrl+ mouse wheel zooming)
- refine debug output
- text flickering removed in debug/camera mode
 

 
There is something wrong with the rendering. It looks like there is something on the right that pushes the table to the left. It is like for example you move a ramp to the right side and when you run the table the whole table is rendered to the left to fit the ramp. I attach a picture of the backdrop since it shows clearly the table is moved to the left.
 
 
drawing_error_2495.png
 
Edit: I have found that this happens if the table has no ramps on its sides (side rails), like for example my latest WOW Monopoly. This has been working fine until this revision 2495.
http://www.vpforums....&showfile=11612

Oh I guess that's the result of the transformation optimization Toxie did lately.

[fripounet]

why isn't sam.vbs in scripts ?

Edited by fripounet, 07 February 2016 - 08:54 AM.

[BorgDog]

In video preferences there is a list of different video modes/resolutions you can use (below).  Not sure how others use them, but I do most of my table building on my laptop and when I want to have the db2s up along with the portrait oriented FS table I use one of the non-full screen resolutions.  I don't know if there is an easier way to do that, but in what I am doing it would be nice if there was an option for a vertical instead of horizontal orientation window.  For me at 1080 height screen a 607x1080 or even a 576x1024 would work nicely.

 

Thanks