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

[SilverBalls]

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

Thanks for the info on HDR - I see what you mean so probably not possible and by no means straightforward. I just finished another solid hour playing it . The ball is so much better than before so that change you did was well worthwhile. I do indeed have the ROM on Max so will reduce that. Another sound I didn't hear in multiball but maybe you have already is a ball colliding sound. Sound sliders are a really good idea. A lot of people do like to control the mech sounds separately.

 

[shaderbytes]

Great you had a good session of playing

I fixed a bug in the menu now for showing hiding vpinmame dmd and my own ones in fact , but im first going to add more sounds now and make volume controllers for them and then I will update the files and let you know

 

[freezy]

Fantastic work! It's even playable on my old laptop here. The "other" Unity Pinball lags even with my GTX970.

I have a question about your workflow. So basically you model the whole thing in Blender and import it as-is into Unity? Then attach the lights and triggers and code the animations in Unity? I suppose sometimes you need to go back and fix stuff in Blender, how does that work? Do you export/import parts of the table then? Or can you do basic modeling in Unity3D as well?

 

[shaderbytes]

Hey [MENTION=591]freezy[/MENTION] , yeah I go back and forth between blender and unity all the time making adjustments. I'm sure this would happen less and less if I build more tables. The more you do something the better you become at it hehe. I export fbx files from blender and import them into unity.

Some aspects are more complicated then you are assuming though, like when you mention "attach lights". The light models I have imported have an emissive material (which could be included into Unity Global illumination pipeline, but are not ) then there is a actual Unity PointLight object for this bulb ( this is because im not making use the bulbs actual emission in the global illumination pipeline mentioned ) , way too many lights changing all the time. For some even a third aspect is involved, a table plastic. This is because I dont want to write a shader that actually calculates translucent light, again way to expensive and the same thing is faked very well but having baked emission plastics and fading them in and out with the bulb.

So when the emulation sends an event for any given light , there are different code objects that handle doing multiple animations in sync. Do you have any coding experience? I could show some of the code to you if you like?

 

[shaderbytes]

Hi Again

New files are uploaded.

• Big change in the physics. Im not sure how this will work on all other computers but it works great on mine. In the end for best results I really had to push the amount of calculations spent on physics super high!

I had the odd occasion of the ball missing colliders , Im hoping this is no longer an issue, so far so good but also I did not like some aspects of the old physics in general.

The ball has much more weight now , the table plays alot faster. I really noticed the problem with the older physics on the right orbit shot, before no matter how hard and correct you made that shot the ball never traveled all the way to the top saucer. This is just one observation but obviously it means everything was not quite as correct as it could be. The new physics solves all of this. Of coarse now that I changed some core physics values I had to change settings on everything again. This actually brought me to realize the top control gate had no purpose with the previous physics, the ball was never fast enough to even need it.. and it was not really working anyway. I got this working now but its not perfect yet. Some times the emulation misses the magnet activation. I may need to adjust the bounce on the flippers back up a bit but I left it as is to get other stuff done. With the new speed of play increased I noticed my left ramps exit didnt narrow down enough like on the real table which reduces the ball speed to make the hotel shots easier. I just added in some invisible colliders to get it a bit reduced but Will look into it at some point for a next release.

• Lighting is improved , small bit of extra overhead but much better. This has to do with updating the environment and reflecton probes with the tables general GI changes.

For weaker machines I will add a toggle to switch off dynamic shadows in the next release , if you currently decrease the directional light to zero you will notice you can get double the frame rate. I could use some baked lighting but had some concerns with it .. maybe if I upgrade to a newer version of unity this might become usable, so If real time shadows are disabled I will fall back to baked lighting ( on static objects only obviously )

• Extra sounds on table and code redone on the backend to support exposing them to the menu system

• Menu system enhanced, additional slider and preset buttons. Audio controls coming soon

• Ao map on the playfield

• Objects added to hotel roof

(remember m key is for menu)

feedback welcome as always

 

[freezy]

[MENTION=2638]shaderbytes[/MENTION]: Yes I do. It's funny because just recently I came across a pinball showcase by some devs from Epic Games Japan, written for UE4. They added some nice features to the editor as well so it's easier to create flippers, ramps, bumpers etc. I've created a GitHub repo here hoping some UE4 pro would fork it and start tweaking it, adding VPinMAME support etc.

I have never worked with neither UE4 nor Unity, so mark me a noob. Some code would be always interesting though

Looking forward to testing your new build when I get back home, did you upload it to the same Google drive?

 

[shaderbytes]

Yes the link remains the same , I just update the files, although as some others have suggested I should probably be incrementing the beta build number on each upload.

I will send some code details in my next post , just taking a bit of a break today

 

[lio]

Wow, thanks a lot for the release of this beauty! It's really incredible what you have pulled off here on your own!
FPS seem really good on my system with everything maxed at 1920x1200 (120fps+ usually, 160+fps without the room and 200+fps at "night" - GTX 670 2GB, Core-i5 3570K @ 4x4Ghz, 16GB RAM, Win 8.1). FPS drop with a ball in play somewhat to 160-220 at night with the room off.
I'm a bit surprised to see anything above 60fps because I force adaptive sync via driver for everything so it does not seem to work here - also DSR does not seem to work: I can select 3840x2400 as resolution from the launcher but it doesn't actually use that resolution in-game - even when I run Windows at that resolution the table does not seem to like running at that resolution.
The emulated sounds are too low in volume compared to the mechanical sounds even if I crank it up all the way in the menu.
I can't quite put a finger to it but the ball movement does not look as smooth as I'd expect it to with such high fps - at times it looks like the ball might only be updating at say 30fps and not together with the rest of the world.
Maybe you have played the original "Bioshock" game where it was really obvious that the ragdoll corpses and other physics objects were only moving at 15fps (or 30fps I forgot) no matter your frame rate - it somehow looks like that just not as pronounced.

 

[SilverBalls]

The new lighting looks awesome and physics are superb too - massive improvements! What a great table . Unfortunately I only managed about 15 mins as we have some people staying with us atm, but can't wait to try out more options once they leave .

A few things I noticed:

[Edit: removed incorrect comment on shift keys]

* I also have very quiet mechanical sounds even when I set the mech volume to maximum and the Emulation volume very low.
* After pressing M to get the menu, if I use the sliders with the mouse the table position also rotates left and rotate. I guess when the menu is launched, the mouse control of the table view needs to be disabled?
* The table has some jaggies in just a few places - is there a way to enable AA? Apologies if it is one of the new options - I didn't explore them properly yet.
* The top of the slingshots don't seem to have any bounce. The ball almost stopped on there. It may have been a one-off but it seemed it lacked elasticisity.

Many thanks again for this

 

[shaderbytes]

Hey lio and sb

• I will check to see if I can push the emulated sound slider up some more , I think I read in a VP table script some where the range was 0 to -32 ( strange its a negative ) and I used that , but perhaps it in the -32 to 32 range .. will let you know if it works

• The night mode increases frame rate because the directional light slider is on zero which disables dynamic shadows as a by product. I did include a toggle to disable the shadows even when the directional light is above zero to help boost performance if needed.

• I added a pro grade SSAO effects filter in as well. It rally adds a great look to the table but also obviously has a rendering cost , so if you need to squeeze more performance out of the game disable this in the menu as well.

• I dont know if unity supports DSR but I can check if the standalone resolution is perhaps capped in the publish settings which might be why you didnt see a change when choosing it from the game launch window.

• I found the game does not like vsync being on so adaptive sync would also be an issue for this. For some strange reason it affects the physics dramatically. There must be something strange going on inside Unity with the fixed timestep and max timestep for physics dropping calculations when vsync is on. Try turning off sync and let me know if the ball still seems to be lagging.

• Yes the menu mode should not permit table rotation .. It is normally something I always do but didnt do it yet , dont worry it has started annoying me as well Will be fixed in the next upload. That being said Im going to include a button to reset the camera to the default camera view , and another button to save a custom view. So you can adjust the camera to your liking and then save it.

• I do have another AA solution to try , I will expose some controls for this, the problem is im using deferred rendering which doesnt support hardware accelerated AA solutions, so all AA solutions for this rendering mode are software only which makes them expensive. Many games that use deferred rendering use a combination of software AA as well as super sampling ( like DSR ) Games like trine 1 and 2 for example use this technique. Any game that wants to use a massive amount of dynamic lighting needs to use Deferred rendering like Im doing.

• I might have changed the physics materials on the top of the sling shots by mistake , I notice what you say and it was not like that before .. it definitely needs to be bouncing from there again.

• I will look into adding key mapping , internally but unity does have a bug for using multiple shift keys , so even if I do expose key mapping .. you should not map the flippers to the shift keys. This really sucks I know and I really need to send another bug report to the Unity guys again to see if they can sort it out .. as every pin sim uses shift for flippers ( some have shift and cntrl both mapped as flippers )

• (I think I left some test code in the latest upload that needs to be removed , I mapped all the flippers onto the left shift key to test something , sorry about that )

Oh by the way I have upgraded to the latest version of Unity and have made the game work in oculus as well I didnt publish it with this yet because Im trying to get some help on the unity forums in regard to some usability issues with launching an oculus enabled app as a normal app by default. But as soon as that is sorted I will include the functionality and map it to the "v" key and add a menu button as well.

chat soon.

 

[MRZ999]

This is so Amazing. Cant belive you made this yourself. Will you continue it? I hope you get a team that can create the best pinball sim ever from this. Some partnership with Future Pinball makers so they can convert tables into this one.

LOVE IT!

 

[shaderbytes]

This is so Amazing. Cant belive you made this yourself. Will you continue it? I hope you get a team that can create the best pinball sim ever from this. Some partnership with Future Pinball makers so they can convert tables into this one.

LOVE IT!

Thanks , I am still working on it , I have already added more sliders for additional lighting controls , I enforced Vsync now since it's overkill to have the GPU render anything above the screen refresh rate. Tweaked physics again and some other things , I will post and let you know as soon as the download link has been updated with the new changes. I am starting work on doing the dataeast tommy table now but I will start another thread for that when its ready

 

[MRZ999]

Thanks , I am still working on it , I have already added more sliders for additional lighting controls , I enforced Vsync now since it's overkill to have the GPU render anything above the screen refresh rate. Tweaked physics again and some other things , I will post and let you know as soon as the download link has been updated with the new changes. I am starting work on doing the dataeast tommy table now but I will start another thread for that when its ready

Ty for reply. Im happy to hear you contiunue it. I Think its good enough if you like to ask for donation. I donated the United Pinball Project some Money and will be happy to donate you a beer. Im not that much into pinball sims as i was 2 years ago. But im still exited to see new versions of pinball emulators.

 

[Snorzel]

Im going to try to install this. It will be my first experience with VP any advice is welcome (or is it easy?)

 

[shaderbytes]

Im going to try to install this. It will be my first experience with VP any advice is welcome (or is it easy?)

Hi Snorzel

Technically this is not VP , VP is a front end that uses VPinMame emulation. My Game is a totally different front end but I use VPinMame emulation as well. I need to look into creating an installer that can unpack and register VPinMame myself going forward but for now I just suggest using the VPX (Visual Pinball 10 ) all in one installer. This does install the VP frontend but it also installs the VPinMame as well. I dont like that they unpack it into the front ends directory though , it kind of ties VPinMame to VP, but for now its the easy route to get up an running.

(A BIG TAKE NOTE : The VPX all in one installer has one of those automatically checked options to install bing bar .F**King idiots .. so dont just click next , next next without looking. When the modal prompt page gets to this point , uncheck the option for bing bar before clicking next. )

Once that is installed you need to get the ROM for Elvis pinball , This you place inside the roms directory of the VPinMame directory.

Then you have all you need , just download my game and play it. I have changed a few things in the game again , I need to upload a new version soon. If you have not downloaded my game yet give me a day or so and I will update and come back here and let you know the newest version is ready

 

[Snorzel]

Hi Snorzel

Technically this is not VP , VP is a front end that uses VPinMame emulation. My Game is a totally different front end but I use VPinMame emulation as well. I need to look into creating an installer that can unpack and register VPinMame myself going forward but for now I just suggest using the VPX (Visual Pinball 10 ) all in one installer. This does install the VP frontend but it also installs the VPinMame as well. I dont like that they unpack it into the front ends directory though , it kind of ties VPinMame to VP, but for now its the easy route to get up an running.

(A BIG TAKE NOTE : The VPX all in one installer has one of those automatically checked options to install bing bar .F**King idiots .. so dont just click next , next next without looking. When the modal prompt page gets to this point , uncheck the option for bing bar before clicking next. )

Once that is installed you need to get the ROM for Elvis pinball , This you place inside the roms directory of the VPinMame directory.

Then you have all you need , just download my game and play it. I have changed a few things in the game again , I need to upload a new version soon. If you have not downloaded my game yet give me a day or so and I will update and come back here and let you know the newest version is ready

Awesome! Thank you very much shaderbytes, I will try it when I get home from work and give some feedback.

 

[shaderbytes]

Awesome! Thank you very much shaderbytes, I will try it when I get home from work and give some feedback.

Hey there , if you have not tried it out yet .. good! .. since im going to be updating tomorrow with a custom installer i built which will handle all the vpinmame stuff for you without any of the vpx and directx bingbar installation nonsense A one click solution.

I will post a link tomorrow

chat soon

 

[Snorzel]

Hey there , if you have not tried it out yet .. good! .. since im going to be updating tomorrow with a custom installer i built which will handle all the vpinmame stuff for you without any of the vpx and directx bingbar installation nonsense A one click solution.

I will post a link tomorrow

chat soon

Thank you! I was just too tired last night, will hold off one more, cant wait

 

[Snorzel]

Shaderbytes I am ready when ever you are, really looking forward to it. Much appreciated

 

[shaderbytes]

Hey Snorzel let me upload it quickly , sorry had a paying job come in I had to get out the door