9 replies to this topic

[rxd]

I installed the new Future Spa table for VPX in my cabinet and noticed that the play field wasn't the length of my monitor. So after fooling around with a bunch of stuff I got a menu to popup on my screen that allowed me to dynamically change a bunch of setting and I fooled around until I saw it was the X Offest and X Scale(?) I needed to change. So I exited out of the table without saving because I screwed around with a lot of things. But now I don't know what the heck I did to get that menu to show up.

 

Can someone tell this fool what he did to get into that menu? Thanks...

[jpsalas]

I guess you run the table by pressing F6 instead of F5

 

PS: About the Future Spa table: it is a wide body table, this mean that it is much wider than normal, and it will look too distorted if it should fill the whole screen.

Edited by jpsalas, 22 November 2017 - 06:31 PM.

[hauntfreaks]

@RXD.... i'm one of the biggest screen whores that were ever was.... I want all my tables to fill the screen.... BUT these tables have to be left to 1:1 scale to work and look there best, there is no way around it.... 

[ALpzepta]

@RXD.... i'm one of the biggest screen whores that were ever was.... I want all my tables to fill the screen.... BUT these tables have to be left to 1:1 scale to work and look there best, there is no way around it.... 

What do you mean 1:1? Does it mean X = 1 Y = 1 Z = 1?

[wiesshund]

 

@RXD.... i'm one of the biggest screen whores that were ever was.... I want all my tables to fill the screen.... BUT these tables have to be left to 1:1 scale to work and look there best, there is no way around it.... 

What do you mean 1:1? Does it mean X = 1 Y = 1 Z = 1?

 

NEVER change Z

 

your table will be all jacked up, physically.
Scaling Z does just that, you could mash the glass flat to the playfield and your ball wont move, or your slingshots etc become 120 units tall
and your ramps suddenly become very steep etc and the table will play terrible to not at all.

I didnt know that at 1st and had a table so jacked up i had to just reinstall it
Layback seems to screw it up also, so i leave that alone too

But yes it means X must equal Y

if X is scaled up say 2.5 then Y must also be 2.5

You may get away with cheating a tiny bit, but it does not take much before the table is noticeably all jacked up
and then you play hell trying to get your ball to look round again among other things 

 

Only things i mess with is the inclination, the combined X/Y scale
The Y offset, since you dont want to scale Y off a 1 to 1 with X, you can use the Y offset to slide the table to the top of bottom of the screen
And the Z offset is safe since it simply slides the table as a complete whole up or down, but you probably wont need it much.

You can not make every table a perfect top to bottom screen fit, and have the table still look right, because the tables themselves are not a 16.9 ratio of dimensions

Once your side rails hit the edge of your screen, basically you are done scaling the table up.

Nice thing is if you have a short table, you can always go do a little artistic editing of it and either extend the lockdown bar, or add something
visual to the top of the table to fill the gap on screen, or you could get fancy and add something like some flasher displays rotating static images, or a DMD even or what ever other creative thing you can think of 

[ZEB]

Even though this is an old thread, I'll answer rxd's original question for the benefit of other users: on the top left there is a button that says Back.... Use that button to switch between the Table menu and the Backglass/POV menu.

Since those x/y/z-scale parameters are under POV, they SHOULD not have any effect on physiscs and dimensions of the table. But unfortunately they do... or at least changing z-scale most definitely does.

I haven't experienced any problems (yet?) when changing x-scale and y-scale to fill the screen the way I like it (for instance, my cabinet already has a kind of apron by itself, so I don't want the apron of the table above that as well). Fortunately, changing x/y scale not only affects the table but also the ball, so that doesn't seem to cause any problems (like balls not fitting into holes anymore or balls dropping through rollovers or such). BUT, as wiesshund pointed out, x-scale and y-scale MUST be the same, or very close, and you MUST leave z-scale at 1, otherwise things go wrong.

This is SILLY: POV should only affect the rendering, not the actual dimensions of the objects that are used to calculate the ball movement and such. But that is not the case, which means there is something drastically wrong with the way those scales are implemented in VPX. I do hope this will be fixed in VPXI, whenever that might appear...

 

This also means that if you want to explore playing VP in 3D, you will end up with a "flattened" table if z-scale < x/y scale. So for proper realistic 3D rendering, x/y/z scale should all be set to 1 (in fact, changing x/y scales but not z-scale does affect the normal 2D rendering as well...). And then you can use inclination, field of view, layback and x/y/z-offsets to fill your screen optimally.

 

Although I haven't noticed it myself, all this DOES make me wonder if adjusting only the x/y-scales might affect the way tables play...

Edited by ZEB, 02 September 2020 - 05:56 PM.

[wiesshund]

 

Although I haven't noticed it myself, all this DOES make me wonder if adjusting only the x/y-scales might affect the way tables play...

 In a way, yes

 

Take a table and purposely crush the Y scale
While the ball fits were it should fit, your play field is suddenly very short and the physics seem kind of weird and the angles off.
If you keep them on a 1 to 1 ratio, it does not seem to have an effect

 

Layback also seemed, at least to me, to jack things up if more than a small amount was used, so i have been leaving it alone.
It was like pulling the top and bottom of the table 2 different directions, if that makes sense?

 

[ZEB]

 

 

Although I haven't noticed it myself, all this DOES make me wonder if adjusting only the x/y-scales might affect the way tables play...

 In a way, yes

 

Take a table and purposely crush the Y scale
While the ball fits were it should fit, your play field is suddenly very short and the physics seem kind of weird and the angles off.
If you keep them on a 1 to 1 ratio, it does not seem to have an effect

 

Layback also seemed, at least to me, to jack things up if more than a small amount was used, so i have been leaving it alone.
It was like pulling the top and bottom of the table 2 different directions, if that makes sense?

 

 

Yes wiesshund I understand what you mean, thanks for your reply. If that layback, like z-scale, also has an effect on the scales/dimensions/ratios of the table BEFORE the physics calculate the next location for the ball, there is really something terribly wrong with the way VP works.

 

And about those ramps: I have most of my tables scaled up a bit, usually something between 1,1 and 1,25 (and of course x and y-scales MUST be the same), but z-scale is always 1. That MIGHT mean that now ALL my ramps are less steep than they would be with x, y, and z-scales at 1. Pretty hard to check if that is the case... Is there any way to get this info from the guys who made VPX ?

 

Hang on... I'll do some tests with x/y-scale = 0,5 and z-scale is 1. If x/y-scales also influence the physics like z-scale does, that would make my ramps more than twice as steep. It will be a tiny table to play at less than half size, but it should be very noticable whether the ramps are then impossibly steep or not. I'll try it tomorrow.

[ZEB]

That layback is to compensate for the fact that we are not looking at our screens straight (like you would with a normal pc or laptop monitor) but under quite a shallow angle. Without any layback the ball looks sort of OK when it is near the flippers, but when it is in the top part of the table the ball looks squashed because of perspective. Layback compensates for this by stretching the ball (and everything else) in the vertical direction. Just a tiny bit of stretching at the bottom of the table, and a whole lot more near the top of the table. And the larger your playfield monitor is, the more layback you need (because the bigger the screen, the higher the difference in viewing angles between bottom and top of the table).

 

I REALLY hope that layback doesn't f**k up the physics, because I prefer to play with pretty high layback values (usually 60-65). If only for the fact that it looks silly when you are standing behind your flippers while seeing the "playing side" of the flippers much better than the side that is facing towards you... that's like playing while leaning forward with your head hanging over the pinball. Which is fine if that's how you play. But that's not how I play.

 

 

In fact, come to think of it, there should be FOUR parameters to properly compensate for perspective distortion:

 

1. height (z) of player's eyes minus height of front of playfield monitor

2. angle (slope) of playfield monitor

3. horizontal distance (y) between player's eyes and front of playfield monitor

4. size of screen in y direction (i.e. "width" of playfield monitor, which in our case translates to "length" due to 90 degree rotation)

 

It appears that all of these four parameters are now crammed into that single layback parameter... room for improvement there.

 

 

And DEFINITELY NONE of these scaling and layback parameters should have ANY effect on the physics, nor any other POV settings for that matter. These are all RENDERING parameters, or they SHOULD be. Because if they are not... who the hell is interested in physically stretching or squashing his pinball machine ???????????????????????

 

And even if you DO want to have that option, that should be settings in the Table menu, not the POV (Point Of View = perspective) menu.

Edited by ZEB, 03 September 2020 - 02:29 AM.

[Wylte]

Found this while googling, so I did some testing.  Might as well post it here, with updated information from 2021 on VPX7.  Ball was set to not stretch, so I could see it clipping through the visually changed details while physics stayed the same.

 

Z Scale:  NOT a PoV adjustment

Physically squishes the ball at low values as wiesshund said, and makes ramps impossible at high values.  Don't mess with it.

 

Inclination:  PoV only

You can flip that sucker upside down and the ball doesn't notice.  Textures, images, etc. aren't distorted either.

 

Field of View:  PoV only

Images on flippers, targets, and such get weird when you get too close, but physics are unaffected.  Kind of cool putting the camera against the table and watching these huge flippers defend me from a gigantic ball!

 

Layback:  PoV only

Even at the max/min of 179 / -179, where the playfield was reduced to a line, I could still launch a ball and hear it doing all the same stuff.

 

XY Rotation: PoV only

 

X and Y Scale:  PoV only

Even extreme values didn't change the way the ball interacted physically, even when I couldn't tell what was happening visually.

High or low but reasonable values felt weird but could still hit all the same shots, reliable areas away from the flippers had no change in movement or timing.

 

X, Y, Z Offset:  You can change these however you want.  The table will still play as a tiny dot offscreen.