Elvis Pinball like you have never seen it before.. have a look

[shutyertrap]

I really like Rapid Vienna, and it happens to play a lot like something Zen would put out.

I can't remember who did it, but there's a pretty awesome Wallace and Grommet original table out there too.

 

[Dedpop]

Now you are just Mousin' Around with me hehe I have actually never seen that table before you posted this and I went to google it. It looks like an older styled table like from the 60's or 70's?

1989 !

 

[Ben Logan]

Wow. Absolutely amazing! Really hope this project succeeds. Beautiful work! Lighting is particularly impressive.

 

[shaderbytes]

Hi Everyone

A little progress report so you know Im still active on the build when I am not working on other client work :

So I bit the bullet and investigated ROM support , I tried emailing the unit3D guys via their website to ask about some info regarding this but did not get any response so I had to dig deep now by myself and sort it out. Good news is I have got my game launching and interacting with the ROM now I downloaded the manual for the elvis table so I can get the switch id's and stuff now so I need to get these numbers all synced and create the missing solenoids etc.. After that I need to see how their update data for each of the lamps , GI , Solenoids is sent back. I tested inserting balls , inserting coins and pressing the start button and the rom updated as expected so this is looking promising.

cheers for now

 

[karl]

Missed this thread, somehow. Very impressive work.

You should get yourself a cabinet for virtual pinball. It will motivate you further

 

[shaderbytes]

[MENTION=465]karl[/MENTION] , I wish I did have a cabinet , but the exchange rate from our currency Rands(zar) to dollars to buy the parts for me was always pretty steep and as of this month down right insane , our currency plummeted from 11:1 to 17:1 on Monday.. sigh

but I still want one I think I should start a saving plan and maybe after some time I can import the parts I need , I can obviously buy the pc locally and I have a friend who does woodwork for a living so he could help build the cabinet box's.

 

[lio]

shaderbytes, you are my personal new definition of "one-man army"
Absolutely incredible work!

 

[shaderbytes]

Thanks lio , it encouraging it get good feedback.

New updates :

I have the whole table emulated and playable!! All the lights and the table mechanics are working. The general illumination was not emulated by vpinmame so I just had to hook it into some other events. It plays very well and looks even better than before. I even improved the frame rate a whole bunch by not updating the reflection probe on every frame , I found it was overkill. I only update it now when you change the lighting slider.

I might be thinking of uploading this beta version 1 tomorrow - I still have lots to d,o I need to do some fine tuning on certain aspects and I need add table sounds for all the ball collisions (plus all the cabinet stuff I have to get a grips on at some point) but sharing a beta version now already for you all to have a game or 10 and give me some feedback would be helpful.

until tmrw then

 

[Snorzel]

I would love to give this some play, look forward to it

 

[shaderbytes]

HI again

I'm busy uploading the beta while I type

So obviously you need to have vpinmame installed and you need to have the latest elvis rom in roms directory. Here is the link to the rom on VP Forums :

http://www.vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=319

The dmd is purely vpimame standard , Im not doing anything with it yet. Unity has a game launcher screen where you can choose a resolution to use and if its windowed or not. If you choose your full screen resolution and no window then you cant have the dmd on the same screen as the game. I simply move it to my second monitor, but otherwise just choose "windowed" and then vpimame may be above the game screen. Its a pity the windowed mode is not borderless , I will investigate how to do that soon.

I dont have any special handling for if a ball manages to get of the table or emulation resetting or stuff like that, if something go's wrong just close the game and start it again. That been said I think I have only had it happen once in about 50 games which is really nice odds if you ask me

I have been using a Pappa video of elvis game play I grabbed from youtube all the time studying the tables physics , i still fine tuning everything but the ball play is nice and fast as I noticed it was in this video. My table slope is 6.3 deg

Unity has a bug with using two shift keys at the same time , a real bummer since this bug has been around for years now and they dont seem to fix it. So I had to map the flippers to the control keys instead. Table nudge is on the shift keys ( since you dont really nudge in two opposing directions at the same time )

Alpha 5 key for coins and alpha 1 for start .. same as VP

There is probably a whole lot more I could say but I see the file is uploaded already so here it is, you can comment on anything you like - positive or constructive negative and I will look into answering what I can about it. If you do try it out , let me know your average frame rate and specs of your machine , I did improve the frame rate a few days ago but somehow messed up the optimization while having a crisis sorting out the Unity IDE crashing all of a sudden when trying to bake all the lighting data

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5GQag5iS_vzLTFRR2h0VEVnekk/view?usp=sharing

chat soon

 

[shaderbytes]

HI All

I have updated the link and there was something dodgy happening with the slingshots which is now fixed and I also changed the flipper max rotation to be 48deg instead of 50deg

chat soon

 

[SilverBalls]

Hey shaderbytes,
First many thanks for all your work on this, and for sharing.
First impressions are it looks great and the physics feel pretty good it the 5 mins I had.

I rotated my cabs playfield launched your exe, selected my resolution from the drop down 1080 x 1920, chose 'Fantastic' for quality, and fullscreen. It works right out of the box and Pinmame is shown (plus my PinDMD is used).

I get a FPS of about 160-180, but if I lower the quality only get about 50 oddly.
The ball is almost fluid although doesn't feel completely smooth, has a very slight stuttery feel. Nothing severe just not liquid smooth. Interestingly I get the same in Unity3D pinball when I have any text overlay, even the FPS counter so I am wondering if your permanent FPS counter is causing this. Can I switch it off in any way to see? I experimented with lower quality, locking the VSync in nVidia but it didn't change things. Also I notice the FPS doesn't seem to take any notice of the VSync setting from nVidia. I also tried with Aero, fullscreen, windowed, Win7 and Win10.

One other suggestion the table looks superb quality, but the lighting slider doesn't go dark enough to really appreciate the lighting. Could the slider support a lot darker range?

Just to say again it is impressive how I was just able to unzip the exe and data folder and run it with no issues. I also like how I was able to drag with the mouse to change the table view

Cheers

Edit: my PC is a Core i7, nVidia GTX 970 4gb. Tried with Win7 32-bit (3.5 GB ram) and Win10 64-bit (4 GB ram).

 

[shaderbytes]

Thanks SB

Wonderful to hear you played it on a cabinet, if possible, could you take a photo or video and show it to me

I dont think that fps counter is even accurate to tell the truth , it is someone else's script I found and just used for now , I will hide all overlays in the next upload and assign their display toggle to a key press.

I will have to add a second slider to go even darker. The current slider controls the one and only directional overhead light. When you slide it all the way down it is in fact at zero, but this is not the only thing lighting the table. Unity 5 uses IBL ( image based lighting ) , so I have an HDR ( think cubemap) of the inside of someones garage. This HDR is providing the left over lighting you see which is global illumination. So I will need to display a second slider to control the exposure of this HDR. I will add it in the next upload as well.

I still need to add several things , like edge case stuff like if a ball gets lost of the table etc.

Thanks for the feedback.

 

[SilverBalls]

Thanks ShaderBytes - that sounds good. Sorry I can't do a video, but here are some photos. Some better angles are possible (2 are shown in the 3 photos) - excuse the poor photography

 

[shaderbytes]

Thanks for that SB it looks great on a cab

I have made changes to the files on the same link as always :

1. Menu is toggled with the M key now , I added in another slider and also a few other toggles for the cabinet and room and dmd etc.. have a look.

1b ( I never mentioned it before but you can press the p key to render a super hi-res snapshot to the game's folder )

2. I made a working dmd on the table itself and an additional UI dmd , both running in the context of unity now. These can be toggled on and off as well.

3. Most importantly , I revised the flipper angle a small bit again , but this time I also adjusted the force value and the rubber. Along with several other tweaks to other physics materials. I was studying the Pappa Elvis video again while doing this and I think the results are very good now. The table plays much better now - The flippers being the most important change, before I was not happy with the shot angles and now I think its just about the same as in the pappa video, its much more spread on the length of the flipper now.

I made an awesome game play video , its over a gig again so its gonna take some time to upload. I will post it as soon as it is ready.

 

[shaderbytes]

The video is finally uploaded ..

Watch it in HD full screen to appreciate it at best .. or even better grab the game and try it yourself

 

[SilverBalls]

Many thanks for the changes. I will try tonight. The timezone difference mean long delays

The video gameplay looks great - love the sliders!

 

[Tann]

Watch it in HD full screen to appreciate it at best .. or even better grab the game and try it yourself

Wow, impressive.

IMO, the playfield glass definitely adds visual realism (light reflection like IRL). I miss this in TPA, knowing it was available as an option in the previous FS pinball game (Gottlieb & Williams PHoF).

As always, take note FS!

 

[SilverBalls]

Well the ball is silky smooth now and it makes a world of difference . I turn off room and I guess that the FPS counter was doing something before. Plays really nice - physics are really impressive.

Some small suggestions (which you can ignore of course!):

* My cab is mapped to use left and right arrow keys (for multiple sims) for the flippers plus has nudge buttons. Could the keys be configurable maybe in an INI file?

* Visual Pinball 10 (VPX) also allows HDR images for the environments. As you know these can drastisically change the look and ambience of the room. Would it be easy to offer a selection of HDR that can be used selectable - maybe dark room, arcade, bar, garage, etc? There is a website that the VP people use here:
http://www.smartibl.com/sibl/archive.html
Again I don't pretend to understand this stuff, so maybe talking rubbish .

* Some ball rolling sounds and ball drops sounds would add to the realism.

* I would love to add this to the cab via PinballX so if there could be an optional command-line param in the future to bypass the initial popup that would be great.

By the way, the look of the ball is particularly realistic - one of the best I have seen in a sim.

Thanks again for this. If anyone here hasn't tried it, then you should! Easy to setup.

 

[shaderbytes]

Thanks Tann, have you played the beta yet? If not please give it a whirl and let me know your thoughts.

Thanks SB, I actually added interpolation onto the ball rigedbodies now .. this is what has made it be smoother.

I dont think you can swap out the used HDR because Unity has a clever system of partially pre-computing information about this. So its not fully baked , its still real time full 3d supported HDR IBL but some of the calculations are reduced because of this compile time information pre-compute. I dont know how much of a difference this makes on frame rate , its just one of those things they built into their engine which Im using. It was a case of if they put it in there .. it must be for a good reason. I will let you know more about non pre-computed support and frame rate and if HDR images ares interchangeable under these conditions soon.

I definitely need to add more sounds .. but there is ball rolling sounds and steel sliding sounds for the ramps and trails. Not sure what your rom volume is? Check the video I posted again you can here them. But this leads me to a thought about what to add in now .. some controls for volumes of sounds because I think individual preference would vary on this from person to person .. better to make it configurable