rothbauerw

Like manna from heaven.

Thank you.

Amazing stuff Bill! Very much appreciated.

I’m sure that this is going to become yet another leap for VP in the right direction and I’m happy to see you posting this after a small hiatus. Downloading Big Shot now, planning to play it tomorrow with beers.

I have tested this in a couple games and it is bananas. Seeing more than one target drop when you hit directly between two targets is a revelation. Please tell me you’re privately sharing this with the devs. Impossible to see how the rubber dampening script and now this shouldn’t be built into VP. Once you play one game with it you don’t want to play another game without it.

In an alternate universe VPX 10.7 beta lasted two weeks and consisted of 10.6 plus the following being written into the program:

-roth’s rubber dampening script
-roth’s saucer/kicker script
-roth’s drop target script
-roth’s flipper trajectory script

Fuzzel did ask for help to build in the drop target stuff. I just haven’t been able to get to it. Now that I’ve written this part, hopefully I can bring it back to fuzzel and get it built into 10.7.

That said, I do think this will need a little refinement though. Just watching some videos of Flash Gordon and the targets behave a little differently there. I think this can still be a good and better approximation, but some enhancements may also be in order. Would love others thoughts.

Have you built in the classic Bally drop target reject? 😁

No, but I’d love some video of it if you have it. I think that’s related to the differing behavior I’m seeing on the Flash Gordon videos. I assume you’re referring to a hard strike where the target doesn’t drop?

Took me a few games, but got a nice 4 drop sweep on Big Shot. Excellent work.

would love to see this and all your other stuff built into vp7 as @bord says.

Yup, the hard strike no drop issue. classic Sterns have that issue a lot too, especially with replacement targets (I think they are less stiff or something). If I can track down some video of it I’ll link it.

The thinner, non-hooded classic Stern drops fall if you talk too loud. They were phased out halfway through Meteor production and there aren’t any replacements for sale, so you see lots of the harder to drop ones Borg is referring to.

Does this work for stand up targets also? hmmmmm

I mean they should work the same (hitting multiple….) they just don’t drop

the first could be a drop, to trigger the bending and getting out of the way? then a stand up to actually trigger the hit

Just a quick note for anyone trying to implement this. I think you need to make the targets uncollidable when they drop and collidable again when they raise for this to work or the ball will bounce off the target despite this code. I’ll add to the tutorial above when I have time.

Another note of caution. The second target will drop when hit. This can be prevented by setting a very high Hit Threshold on the second target (1000?) or by using a wall instead.