Best VPX Tables?

[The loafer]

It will do the job but if you ever get errors (some tables require a lot of video memory), then you may need to lower the elements detail level (I think?).

Did you try the FPS limiter/vsync and Max prerendered frames? Gets really smooth with those settings, the 960 should be ok. for anti-aliasing, not sure if you can use higher than Fast FXAA, but give that a try at least.

 

[Jeff Strong]

I’ll test out some of those settings tonight, along with some new tables. I’ll let ya know how it goes. Thanks again for the help, man. You’ve eased more than a few headaches.

 

[The loafer]

It's my pleasure. As you know Pinball is a religion and VPX is a subset of that religion. Anytime I can draw people in with gospel text... LOL

 

[Jeff Strong]

Amen, brother! lol

 

[Jeff Strong]

FPS limiter/vsync and Max prerendered frames = 1 is awesome for T2 and Grand Lizard. Buttery smooth at a steady 60fps.

However, I downloaded Metallica and it appears to ignore the vsync setting. FPS is up around 150fps, and the ball doesn't seem to roll quite as smoothly. Even tried setting vsync to 60 as per the tooltip, but no luck.

Any idea why?

Table seems pretty great otherwise.

EDIT:

I forgot that each table has its own graphics options as well. Metallica has vsync set to 0 for some reason, while the others do not. So that's taken care of.

Yeah, vsync makes the ball roll WAY smoother. Thanks for the heads up on that.

BTW, also turned off Ball Trails/Motion Blur (just a personal preference, I usually turn off motion blur in every genre of games).

Added a video to the first post (of course it's smoother before the video capture/compression).

 

[wolfson]

Jeff , lol my little brain couldn`t handle this haha !!!

 

[Jeff Strong]

That's why we have smart guys like The Loafer to guide us through!

BTW Loafer, I've been downloading a bunch of tables and seeing your name pop up quite a bit. The version of Eight Ball Deluxe you playtested is fantastic. Also saw you provided some scans for Centaur?

Another quick question for you: how hard is it to change the ball texture on a table? Metallica for instance, I don't really dig the texture as you can't really see ball spin so the ball sort of appears to just be floating. Would love to swap it with the ball texture from another table if possible.

 

[The loafer]

Changing ball texture: it is USUALLY not hard, you just need to put in a different decal for ball scratches. I do the same thing so I’ll write up how to do so and post it tonight. Real easy and I do the same thing, need to see that ball roll

Tables: yeah the author Bord deserves FULL credit on those two, he really gets one major part of pinball that not all authors (commercial or freeware) don’t totally understand and that is that the tables are designed in such a way that a missed shot should not only result in a miss but it should punish you. Many of the awesome Williams and bally tables we love so dearly have strategic placement of posts, etc that in real life are supposed to lead to a ball loss. With Bord tables, if you deserve to get punished you get punished. That also means when you get on a roll it feels more earned

Yeah I’ve been around for a lonnggg time, started back in 2001-2002 with VP. I’m no author but anyway I can assist the community, I’ll do my best. It’s been quite a ride, was admin at the old VPForums.com for a couple of years, got out to preserve what little sanity I still had lol and also to focus on family due to health issues with my kids. All is great on that front now thankfully (both kids had pain disorders but full recovery!)

 

[Jeff Strong]

Right on. Great to hear all is well with the family now.

I have to say he really nailed EBD. Really has that "just one more" gameplay that pulls you in. So the rest of his stuff has a similar feel? If that's the case, I'll have to grab them all. I have Centaur, but haven't tried it yet. I see he also did Paragon. That should be a treat. Love that era.

Any other table authors that you feel really nail the physics like this? That's definitely more important to me than the eye candy, although I am a sucker for dark room lighting.

Looking forward to your write up on the ball textures. Thanks in advance, my man.

 

[The loafer]

For sure anything by Bord is great, playability is awesome. Paragon is some of his best work, the table in real life is a kick-me-in-the-ass table and the only way you will do well on the VPX version is if you play it EXACTLY like you would If you were playing the real deal. Same techniques used in real life will grant you eerily same results on the VPX version. On the Earlier in the thread I suggested tables by the author flupper. They look great and IMHO they play challenging (well Diner does, kicks me in the ass more often than not), he did Whitewater and The Getaway (so far, I would say I prefer his VPX Getaway to the FX3 version). I'd also recommend the Jurassic Park table, it may be more casual friendly (the real one is) but IMHO they did such a fantastic job I don't seem to get tired of it. A showstopper is what it is. Finally also suggested earlier but in real life I do fairly ok on AC/DC, I do pretty much the same on the VPX version found on monsterbashpincab.com. It plays VERY well.


Somethings to consider for VPX (you may know this Jeff, but assuming others are reading the thread and are curious:
in case you haven't discovered it, there is a way to get a dark room setting. You do so by simply adjusting the "night->day" slider, found under "options" button (top left under magnify), then selecting the night->day slider on the right side. if you don't see the slider it's probably because you also have backdrop selected (found under options button) so deselect that. Keep in mind, VPX is not a true 3D engine so lights are "faked" so not all tables will give you that bright LED look, but it's worth a try, helps that old "arcade" look we'd see on these tables

ok the infamous "how to switch a ball" or "how to add scratches so you notice the ball more", here you go in 12 easy steps, bit stretched for time so it's point form (all together now "THANK GOD you wordy bastard!". In this example, let's choose "Jurassic park" that I'm referring to by DARK found at vpinball.com. If these are not pleasing to you, find any table that you do like the ball and use the same technique

1 - first pick a table that you really like the ball and that you see a few scratches that help give it a 3d look, then load the table in the editor (don't run it). As metioned, I'm picking JPARK here as an example
2 - from the menu at the top, click on "table", then "image manager"
3 - now you need to find the two ball and scratch images. Usually they are named logically. So in the case of JPark, the ball is called "ball_HDR" and "scratches". Select those two files and click "export" (you may need to do this one image at a time)
4 - from the pop up menu, save these files with the same name in your VPX tables folder

congrats you've exported the two needed files, time to take a sip from your fav adult beverage. Done? Ok back to work
5 - now exit the current table and load the next table that you want to add these two ball/scratches images
6 - from the menu at the top, click on "table", then "image manager"
7 - do not click any images, just click "import"
8 - select both files and click "open". These should now be added to the table file but not selected as of yet... You can now click ok to exit this menu
9 - as long as you have the options button selected, you should see a few menu choices on the right side (usually defaults to customizations, you may need to scroll down until you see "ball"). So... select the ball menu

notice the two drop down menu's?
10 - Select "ball image" and you should see the "ball_HDR" we imported in! So select it. You may ALSO see a bunch of other balls (some authors load many) so... go to town and experiment!
11 - Select "decal" and choose your imported "Scratches"


Are we done? HELL NO! You must now do the most important thing you've yet to do in this exercise!!!

12 - From the top menu, select "file", then "save"

personally, always a smart idea to back up your table in case you mess something up (or use "save as" and give it a temp name). Experiment, have fun and let me know what you think.

 

[Jeff Strong]

Fantastic guide! Thank you so much.

I kind of like a bit brighter of a ball to help my lousy eyes from losing track of it, so I'm trying to find the best. So far, I kind of like JPBall_Chrome_TimeShock.png (JPSalas).

If you know of a better ball that's sort of on the bright side, but not too bright, please let me know.

One interesting thing I noticed about Jurassic Park (which is an amazing piece of work, BTW) while trying to add a brighter ball is that no matter which ball images I import and select in the options, it never seems to change in-game. I haven't noticed this on any other table. Is there possibly some other table-specific setting that's overriding it?

All other tables have been smooth sailing.

Oh just one other thing I noticed with T2 is there are actually no ball images selected. Does it just load a default VP ball in that instance?

 

[Jeff Strong]

I found a ball image called pinball3.png that's a really nice, brighter one, but not overly so. I think it was actually one of the extras in Jurassic Park.

Also wanted to ask if you have a specific scratch texture that's your favorite. I'm liking JPSalas' JPBall-Scratches.png because it really adds more scratches than most, so the spin and roll is much more noticeable.

 

[The loafer]

I’ll have to review but I think those are the ones I use. Well maybe scratches is a different one now as playing on a 4K pincab, I notice the scratches more now so don’t need one with extra scratches anymore lol

There are a few tables that you can’t change the ball as easily, I forgot. There are also some tables that the scratches won’t show up on a ball. Not sure why I guess I didn’t care enough to check into it further eheh

 

[shutyertrap]

Oh my god, this thread is giving me PTSD!

I too play VP back in the early 2000's, and getting those ROM error messages took a long time to sort through. I can't remember if I caught the tale end of VP7 or not, but I know most of my downloads were for VP8 during PacDude's heyday. And yeah, once I had that program all dialed in it was a ton of fun. I stopped playing before VP9, and didn't try again until after TPA had been released. Installed on my computer and all those problems of getting the thing running came flooding back, and of course I'd forgotten the solutions. On top of that, most of the tables I had from VP8 wouldn't run, and I didn't care for a lot of the work being done by authors at that time. Jeff, you mention JPSalas, and I totally agree. On top of that, he'd put in these lens flares that bugged the crap out of me. I eventually got a few tables to work, but ultimately liked the ease and reliability (ha!) of TPA. I've thought of trying VPX just for the newer Sterns, but reading this and all the hoops you still have to jump through? Nope, I'm good!

 

[Jeff Strong]

Ha! The good news is The Loafer has already done the hard work for you by posting the fixes here!

Despite the hiccups, I will say the all-in-one installer has made it MUCH easier than it was in the past.

It’s definitely worth it for the Sterns, but also for everything else too. The VPX version of Eight Ball Deluxe is soooo much better than what’s in TPA for example, and who knows when we’d see that in FX3. To me, it’s worth it just for that one table. It’s really that good!

 

[shutyertrap]

Ha! The good news is The Loafer has already done the hard work for you by posting the fixes here!

Despite the hiccups, I will say the all-in-one installer has made it MUCH easier than it was in the past.

It’s definitely worth it for the Sterns, but also for everything else too. The VPX version of Eight Ball Deluxe is soooo much better than what’s in TPA for example, and who knows when we’d see that in FX3. To me, it’s worth it just for that one table. It’s really that good!

Fortunately I own the real thing, so not really a concern of mine

 

[Jeff Strong]

Heh, that’s just one example. There’s so many good tables and I’ve barely scratched the surface. Aside from the new FX3 tables, there’s really nothing else that compares, so I gotta have some good digital pins to play (can’t go back to TPA).

 

[Jeff Strong]

Since you’re going through the trouble of making a new controller, you should at least try out VPX. It’s really not that hard to set up compared to what it used to be.

 

[The loafer]

SYT: Jeff nailed it when he said the all-in-one does 99% of the work. The main reason why Jeff was having issues was because of trying to run exclusive full screen which is not required at all. Run the all in one, ensure you have the current time and even for two screen support you should be good to go. Definitely worth the try and. It just for 8bdlx . Take your pick from any of the tables I recommended and you will see

 

[Jeff Strong]

Yeah, that one setting (which is on by default btw) resulted in like 20 posts heh. Otherwise everything would’ve been fine out of the box.