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Comment by phreezie | Hacker News Reader

Shameless plug, we're working on a next-gen pinball simulator called Visual Pinball Engine[1]. It's free and open source, using Unity, and will eventually support importing FP's table format.

It's still WIP, but we've put a lot of focus on tooling, so anyone can easily create tables.

Quick video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CfZImFl1ME

[1] https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine

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This is awesome! Do you know if any of these simulators emulate wear and tear on the table? I feel like the lack of variability in the table is why they've all felt like playing in the uncanny valley to me.

Thanks! :) What we're doing is adding adjustable randomness to the collision resolvers, which results in more or less control over where the ball goes. You can also adjust many parameters of the flipper bats, e.g. you could make the coil less strong, which would be the case for many worn machines. Finally, as you can see in the Volley video, texturing is a big part of adding visual wear, and it makes the whole thing a lot less uncanny.

So cool! Don't forget the inconsistent launch out of the scoop! :)

Any chance you will support VR? Having tried a flat screen virtual pinball table, the VR experience just blows it away.

Or PS5 DualSense force feedfack for haptics and feeling the ball?

Yes, definitely. I did some tests with my headset, and while a few usability and performance issues need to be resolved, it looks incredible, specially the reflections.

Do you guys plan on out of the box support Linux with VPE?

Yes! Our CI builds for Windows, Linux and MacOS.

>It's free and open source, using Unity

Useless for OpenBSD, sadly.

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