B2S Editor Trick

[Scottacus]

I’m in the process of making B2S Backglass files for some older EM’s.  These machines have reel spacing that is greater than the max of 100 that B2S Editor allows you if you are working with high res artwork.  Here is a screen shot of the spacing that I was able to achieve in Grand Tour.

The trick is to export the B2S file and open it in a text editor.  I found that note pad won’t handle these files because they are too large.  I also had problems with word pad (max 25MB I think) so I ended up using my mac’s text edit to do the job.  These files are some sort of mark up language so look for the section on reels and change the Spacing to whatever you think will work, in this case it turned out to be 500.  Be careful about the use of “” marks from the mac.  I ended up needing to copy and paste “s that were already in the script or I would get errors in the B2S Editor saying that an unrecognized character was used.

One other trick that I should mention here as well is that if you set each reel to have sound1=”” sound2=”” … sound10=”” you can prevent the B2S from making reel clicks when it advances the reels.  This is useful if you want to control these sounds from the VP script so that either you get a custom sound or you can drive the score reels to reset to zero in the same manner as an EM using a score motor.

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[Scottacus]

I just went down the rabbit hole that is B2S in search of an answer to the question why the GT B2S with wide spaced reels works great on my machine and won’t even load on Bord’s.  After several hours of research and testing I came up with this.

When you first install B2S I think there is a cryptic message box that asks you about running BG’s in exe mode. If you select this, it will set the value of DefaultStartMode in the B2STableSettings XML file (found in your Tables Folder) to 2 which means start BGs as exe.  If you don’t choose this, like I did, your value for DefaultStartMode will be 1.

You can manually set any BG to start in either exe or normal mode by right clicking on the BG and selecting the run as exe (or something like that) button in the middle of the dialog box. This will create a new table entry into the B2STableSettings XML file for the table and set StartAsEXE to 1 (for exe) or 0 (if not).  I’ve found that running some tables with the BG’s set to exe mode will dramatically reduce ball stutter and improve play for those tables.

This morning I made a new BG for GT with smaller resources thinking maybe there is something about the huge file size that effected why it ran on my machine with a DefaultStartMode of 1 but not with that mode set to 2.  The new BG ran great with DefaultStartMode set to 1 or 2 and StartAsEXE to either 1 or 0, so far so good.

I then manually removed the reel sounds from the B2S by setting Sound1=”” … Sound10=”” in a text editor and everything still worked great with either DefaultStartMode.

I then changed the reel spacing for the B2S file in a text editor.  When I did this the table would not launch with the DefaultStartMode set to 2 but would with the mode set to 1.  Since I don’t want my inbox overflowing with “My table won’t run the BG!!!” messages and I don’t want to play tech support and walk through this XML work I’ll have to dump the cool looking reel spacing.

The moral of the story is this.  Just because you can change a setting manually doesn’t mean that there will not be unintended consequences.

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[bord]

Thanks @scottacus for the detailed info. Never would have thought to work in markup to work on B2S stuff.

Paging @herweh. Is there a chance B2SEditor could be amended to work in .EXE with reel spacing >100? It is a problem I’ve faced on numerous projects as well.

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[Herweh]

Well. Maybe it’s just time I got back into the code. I’ve been putting it off for the last couple of weeks.
Probably I would have to ask Wildman, are there any needed bugfixes, improvements, wishes, suggestions for the directB2S stuff? Something you guys can point me to?

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Scottacus

[Scottacus]

There is a work around…  It seems that you can make single reels of the correct size and assign all of them to a given player as a score reel in the B2S Designer with the first reel created as the largest digit (ie 100’s in this case) and the last as the smallest (ie 1’s).  B2S will then parse the score data to each reel as needed and will drive them correctly.  It’s magic!

@Herweh what does exe mode do to the B2S communication that makes it run so much better with some tables in terms of limiting ball stutter?

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[Wildman]

I noticed the bigger the file the more issues you run into ,the files are displayed the same on the bg monitor . I make all mine 2500 x whatever with out no issues and thats

at Hi Rez if they are any bigger it seems to slow things down.  you cant tell the difference from a file say 8000 x8000 to a file at 2500 x 2200 they will both look the same on your monitor. the smaller you can make they file the better it will run as far as snippits and pics… if i made some of the files the size of the BG scans i have they would never run lol…   just things i noticed while making them..

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[randr]

@wildman what the hell do you know about it anyways! LMAO kidding

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Messing with the VPinball app and push notifications.
So if you haven't downloaded app yet what are you waiting for!?
for IOS and Android

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