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Hey guys,
Posting this here as well for people not lurking at VPF anymore. We’ve been working on porting Visual Pinball to C#, which makes it feasible to integrate with existing game engines such as Unity or Godot.
The goal is to address two things: A better editor experience, and next-gen visuals. Jump to the thread here, but I’ll be reading and answering here at VPB as well.
Cheers!
-freezy.
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Really excited to see this. I have a dozen fully modeled games in Blender I’d love to bring over to this. When you get to the testing phase LMK. I’d be very interested in digging in.
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Sure thing!
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This comes as exciting news, I’ve always had a keen interest in 3D modeling and its effects so I’ve been a regular (and probably annoying) advocate of pushing forward to a fully realized 3D environment. One thing that has frustrated me is without dynamic lighting there hasn’t been a way to realistically light 3D models without using ‘tricks’ like texture swaps etc. Since I’m all about getting my 3D models to look as good as possible on VP tables I get very excited seeing the flasher test, I’d love to see another flasher test but with some complex 3D models in the environment with normal maps, I love to see the light actually land on 3D surfaces and act realistically.
Curious, is there a particular reason to go with unity over other engines? I don’t know much about them but I was always under the impression UE4 was a bit better….maybe more so for fps? In any case unity is more than capable of delivering what we need. Is unity free license? I forget the licensing for UE4, I think it’s free to a point but they require a % of any money earned off games created in their engine. I think both have commercial licensing available as well but it’s been so long since I looked at them.
Really appreciate you pushing this forward freezy, I look forward to porting Jurassic Park (among others) to this some day, I can’t wait to tweak everything in real time in the actual 3D environment (like I’m used to doing in other applications)!
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Hey dark, I’m looking forward to seeing your models dynamically illuminated in real-time as well! :)
I’ll try to record another flasher video, do you have any table preference? Thing is, there’s still a lot of potential for more realistic lighting by tweaking the materials. Right now, since VP doesn’t really have a PBR model, the materials are hard to convert, and you’ll get much better results by customizing Unity’s shaders.
About licensing, Unity has different plans. The free plan stays free until up to 100k/year revenue/funding. So given the free and open source nature of VPE, we will stay in that tier. The only reason to upgrade to the plus plan would be to get rid of the Unity logo on startup.
The most obvious reason for Unity was because it’s based on C#. UE4 is C++, and “porting” VP from C++ to C++ wouldn’t make any sense, it would be more a refactoring where you have to be a really competent C++ developer, which I’m not :)
Then Unity made a lot of progress the last years in terms of visual fidelity. It used to be focused on mobile for many years, with UE4 leading the high-end segment, but they have caught up a lot and many say there are little to no difference what you can achieve nowadays with both engines. And first tests are confirming that.
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@freezy, I’m not sure you need to be terribly concerned about backward compatibility with VP. I’d be just as happy in a new sandbox as a remodeled old one. All my stuff is done with rendered textures so I’m looking at starting over visually on most of my projects anyway.
Not that backward compatibility is a bad thing, just hope it doesn’t hamper the project. Like @dark I’ve been long restless for this type of forward momentum.
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Thanks bord, this is important feedback, and will be taken into consideration big time when deciding how to move forward.
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Yeah I’m with bord, don’t worry about backwards compatibility, I’d just concern yourself with making it user friendly for authors transitioning from VPX to ‘VPE”.
I’m fairly familiar with PBR work flow, I made a post a little while ago in the vpx beta thread asking for more PBR support, more map options like AO, displace maps, height maps, sub-scatter maps etc.
I think once people get used to it they will find PBR materials much more intuitive than VPX materials. Which makes me think, I guess I’ll have to write up some new wikis for a lot of this stuff when the time comes. :)
If a vpx author can jump to VPE with a minimal learning curve than it’s a huge success, if we can import table mesh’s and elements similarly to how to VP9 was ported to VPX then that’s all we really need I think.
If you check out my sketchfab account I have a lot of pinball toys showcased there, and pretty much all of the newer ones use PBR material effects, typically just a normal bump map and some post processing filters, but I would start to render out AO maps etc now that they are going to be useful for visual pinball. I’ve just started updating my Frankenstein model and while VPE may be a long ways off still, I will start to keep in mind all of the extra maps that can be utilized in Unity/PBR materials when making and updating future models (starting with Frank).
https://sketchfab.com/dark0verseer
If you need any testing or feedback, feel free to hit me up.
:excited:
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One thing that just came to mind is, on sketchfab they recently added PBR ‘refraction’ which simulates the refraction of glass/plastic bending light and imagery. In sketchfab it’s currently not the best for what I’m imagining for pinball plastic ramps as all it really does is offset the image and distort it slightly. A more realistic refraction would require more distortion, but this type of distortion is complicated and I’m not sure if it’s even possible currently to emulate that effect realistically.
We’ve tried to simulate this effect with a number of ramps by pre-baking them, the first one was the Gilligan’s ramp, though it’s refraction was minimal this inspired flupper to create refracted ramps for Diner and then later for TOTAN. I did this technique for JPark, DE Batman and Taxi. To me these refractions are what make plastic ramps convincing.
Do you know if it would be possible to add simulated/fake real time refraction?
Simulating something like this:
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I’m sure the timeframe for this is distant-ish future but am I the only one who feels like putting all current projects on hold effective immediately? Suddenly my interest in pre-rendering an entire table has completely vanished.
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Refraction is definitely possible, there’s even a ray traced implementation of it. But the whole rendering terminology is pretty new to me, and I’m still learning, so I’m not sure if it’s possible to get that exact effect. Best guess yes, but I assume you’d have more skills than I have to find out :)
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Yes, it’s no secret that one of the things I LOVEÂ about Future Pinball-BAM is it’s per-pixel hardware lighting and shading that could give stunning results when used correctly.
With all the fantastic work done on VPX tables recently… no matter what, I still wished they had a lighting engine along the lines of FP…because for me… even on the most stunning VPX tables, I could still see the lack of it…especially in VR!
So seeing that first flasher video and the raytracing demo has certainly got me very excited… and I may dust off my very old Lightwave 3D experience and be able to apply that to making something in VPE… as much of the terminology and tech is similar… only in real-time!
@Bord I kind of felt the same as you in some ways in respect to my FP table updates and conversions to modern BAM standards and PinEvent… but in that respect, I’m dealing with tables you can’t get on VPX at all (and probably never will)… so my efforts are unique and not wasted in my eyes.Speaking of which… would FP tables somehow be able to be imported in some respect? It’s certainly not the first time it would have been done…
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Suddenly my interest in pre-rendering an entire table has completely vanished.
Noooooooooooooooooooooooo…..
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I’m very happy, not just for vpx but also for the fp community and even my personal interests. Terry, there is no change with FP, it is the same, and maybe just became far more important to more people. People will still need our resources, will still want to convert our originals, nothing really changes other than maybe some of our authors will be appreciated a bit more. We even have our own “JPSalas”
The expectation to the existing vpx devs is the amount of extra things they need to learn, and a lot of them just don’t know anything about models, the new languages or Unity, which they are still going to have a least a basic understanding of no matter how much work load the new editor takes off them. They don’t have to really worry about the models, just find the fp version, use the plug-in built into blender, and then use those models in whateveritscalled. Just like a lot of them already do. We have people who know that as well.
So, great news for everyone. It’s just about a better Pinball.
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Latest Project: fpxEngine Table BuilderYou need to login in order to like this post: click here
If I’m not mistaken, if you have a table built entirely in 3D, finished with all it’s texture maps and materials you can export then import as fbx and it will load your entire table in ready to go. The only thing that will require tweaking is PBR maps since not all of them translate directly, then do lighting, load some physics settings and your done. I think you may be able to import lights as well with fbx but I’m not sure.
So I’d like to confirm, .fbx support?
.fbx supports a lot of info, can even import animation sequences.
p.s Flasher test on a table with some models with normals maps please, flupper’s white water(mountains), Jpark (Trex), or gilligans (Kona). :)
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Suddenly my interest in pre-rendering an entire table has completely vanished.
Noooooooooooooooooooooooo…..
No Farm Time No Peace!
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I’m sure the timeframe for this is distant-ish future but am I the only one who feels like putting all current projects on hold effective immediately? Suddenly my interest in pre-rendering an entire table has completely vanished.
Unlike!
Seriously, you’ve been running pretty hard. A little down time might do you wonders. I took a break for 4-5 months early last year and I’m glad I did. Still super excited about this hobby with VR and now this on the horizon.
Current Project: Perpetual updates of VPX physics.
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And speaking of VR, unity has VR support built in so that should help right?
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Just a thought but although a clean cut no-backwards compatibility might be good to enable this to move forward, the lack of backward compatibility might create a bit of a fork in the road, where some choose to continue with VPX (assuming vpx dev continues) and this new dev platform
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Just a thought but although a clean cut no-backwards compatibility might be good to enable this to move forward, the lack of backward compatibility might create a bit of a fork in the road, where some choose to continue with VPX (assuming vpx dev continues) and this new dev platform
A good point, I’m afraid there will be a fork regardless, if this goes forward and there comes a point where it’s easier to just make tables in ‘VPE’ its basically just going to render vpx obsolete. It will kind of be like when physmod5 tables were still being made in the early beta days of vpx, they were more common than vpx tables but over time they stopped being developed all together. I know fuzzel did say he wanted to integrate dynamic lighting in the next iteration of VP after polishing up some stuff with the current vpx. I mean I don’t know what everyone’s intentions are but I would hope that everyone would want to work together to push forward in the name of better pinball.
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