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As opposed to derailing UW’s Pinball Magic WIP thread. I thought I’d post here about the raised playfields in VPX.
Here is a link to the suggestion I made in the bug tracker regarding reflections on raised playfields: HERE.
Here is my last post as to why I like the raised playfield and some samples:
Just piggybacking the pinball magic thread. I think of holes as being able to have different shapes and where it is not grabbing the ball and dropping it straight down, but the ball falls through naturally. As well as being able to seen through and see the ball in.
I did a couple test tables, one with a raised playfield(wall) and one just using the kicker object to move the ball below the playfield. One hole is the AFM scoop shot and the second is a TAF Swamp type area. As you can see the ball behavior going into those are very different. The one with raise playfield has more natural ball movement.
Raised wall test (I don’t know why the PF image is cut off on this wall, but it works for demonstration)
Thanks for your efforts.
These might help make the what I described make more sense. I would use the normal playfield for the image with alpha but it would be non-collidable. The wall would have the holes and a side image, but the top would be not be set to visible. So the reflections should work just as they do right now on the PF and the wall would handle the physics interactions with the ball.
Another thing with the wall vs playfield had to do with lights. On TAF with the raised playfield and “some” alpha applied to the playfield image and actually put the lights under the wall and they would “shine” through the image. I have not been able to do that with the same image on the actual playfield.
Maybe I’m doing it wrong…
-Mike
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Yeah as I said in the other thread I also had to scrap using the raised pf. There was no way to get the ball to fall in a custom sized pf hole realistically.. I’ve slowly been working on a from scratch version of MM and there is a pretty big hole in the moat area.. If we could get custom shaped kickers I guess that would work. Or what would be even better would be letting us actually cut parts out of the pf we want a hole, like we can now using a wall… Another idea would also be if we make areas like holes on a pf transparent why cant the ball just fall though that area?.. So with all that said, right now the MM build is using a wall as the pf b/c the raised pf was pretty much pointless and didn’t work the way I though it would unfortunately.. It’s a shame too b/c it would of saved me a bunch of time and effort..
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Awesome! MM is a perfect use case for needing the trough.
I guess I don’t really even understand what the raised value even does. If you put a number in there, say 75, all other objects still base their heights where the playfield is. So 0 is still level with the playfield, not -75 below it. If you want something below it you still have to put in a negative number. And you can still use the kicker to have a ball go below the playfield even if the playfield height is still zero. So I’m not really sure what it’s even doing, maybe something with rendering…?
-Mike
On a complete side note, I really wanted to post in Dozers thread that he wouldn’t be able to release his MM wip over there because the game is currently in production!
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The raised playfield value is actually a height offset to everything. If you add a value say 50 everything will be raised by 50 units because the playfield is the relative origin for every other element on the table. Therefore you have to enter a negative height for walls for example if you want to go under the playfield because the playfield height 50 is your new 0 ;)
Regarding the alpha value to punch holes in the playfield: this is a just a visual feature and doesn’t have any impact on the physics. Therefore you need a kicker hole to simulate the fall through situation. The physics engine normally expects a flat playfield without any holes, just the kicker supports that by adding a special event to the engine that the ball can “fall” through something. So because the physics engine doesn’t support flying/falling balls you always need an extra event to destroy a ball on the playfield and create one under the playfield if a normal kicker can’t be used.
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The raised playfield value is actually a height offset to everything. If you add a value say 50 everything will be raised by 50 units because the playfield is the relative origin for every other element on the table. Therefore you have to enter a negative height for walls for example if you want to go under the playfield because the playfield height 50 is your new 0
So why have it at all? It seems it could just stay 0 and everything still works exactly the same. I’m not understanding where the value add is.
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Not much I must admit. The main idea was to add a way to build subway systems. In VP9 there were some limitations and adding the table height was a very early feature in VPX. I think rebuilding a subway system isn’t a good idea anyway because it needs extra performance without any benefit, but that’s just my option ;)
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So I guess we all agree then it doesn’t work unless we can get
– Custom shaped kickers (in my opinion the fall though on kickers aren’t very realistic)
– Or let us cut holes out of the pf like we can with a wall object
– Or let the ball fall though transparent areas on the pf
– last but not least witch I think is the best option in my opinion enable reflections on the wall object if used as the pf.I’m not really sure why you say a ball can’t fall. This isn’t true, right now I’m using a wall as the pf on the MM build and it’s much more realistic falling into a hole cut out of a wall than using the kicker fall though.. Also, in my experiments the pf hight doesn’t even work. I have my pf ‘wall object’ set to hight 70, if I set the ‘pf hight’ to 70.1 a ball thrown on the table still goes under the pf wall in debug mode. So it seems the pf hight doesn’t really do anything.
Also, this won’t come out right so I apologize for that but it seems features us authors have been asking for have either been ignored or fall by the waiste side and overlooked. i.e. fixed guide walls, built in guide wires, sloping walls similar to ramps etc. etc. those are just a few examples brought up not just by me but other authors as well..
Please don’t take that statement the wrong way as we all appreciate what you dev’s do for VP. We all love you guys and we would love to see features incorporated into VP that will make all of our lives easier and tables to be built faster.
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I think the kickers are pretty damn nice, finding the sweet spot with your pf friction is a little difficult but I like the way the ball interacts with kickers. If we could get a shapeable kicker that would solve a lot of things, I think you’d get a better effect here than you would at the edge of a wall but I can’t be sure.
Punch it!
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The idea of the raised playfield setting was a great idea. When we had posts that consisted of many walls and ramps it was a pain having to bump in the height on all of the items. The raised playfield option took care of that.
I agree if we had ways to make actual shapeable holes/fall through kickers in the raised PF it would be more useful.
Also we need to be able to see objects below the raised PF. I think when I tried it by using creating a transparent section in the PF, I also could not see any wall or objects I put below the PF all I saw was the default background color
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Awesome! MM is a perfect use case for needing the trough.
I guess I don’t really even understand what the raised value even does. If you put a number in there, say 75, all other objects still base their heights where the playfield is. So 0 is still level with the playfield, not -75 below it. If you want something below it you still have to put in a negative number. And you can still use the kicker to have a ball go below the playfield even if the playfield height is still zero. So I’m not really sure what it’s even doing, maybe something with rendering…?
-Mike
On a complete side note, I really wanted to post in Dozers thread that he wouldn’t be able to release his MM wip over there because the game is currently in production!
but that’s not very constructive.You should have posted it, I would have enjoyed reading the justifications by the site ops as to why certain tables are O.K to release over there as opposed to others.
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@gtxjoe: so far, only dynamic objects will show up under/through the playfield (stupid restriction by our engine, sorry, but that keeps it low on memory/fast).
as for the free shapes/holes: i’ll look into that. maybe there is a simple implementation for that.
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