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Comment by phreezie | Hacker News Reader

We're working on something like that using Unity[1]. It's nice, because contrarily to the commercial platforms, we don't need to support low-end devices like the switch. And yes, the DXR features will make a difference[2] (sorry, I don't have a more recent video).

Concerning physics, we're using VPX's engine, which is very well tuned to pinball. Not sure if the breaking the glass is going to be a thing, but PR welcome if you think so. ;)

[1] https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CfZImFl1ME

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If you're taking requests for future pinball machines, I'd love to see the 1975 Gottlieb Soccer machine. My parents had one in our basement for most of my childhood. It was broken half the time, and was hard to find a pinball mechanic to fix it, but lots of great memories.

A long shot, I'm sure, I just never really see this one get any love anymore. Volley seems pretty similar though, and looks like they're only a year apart from each other.

Gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COiudbUYN1k

There's actually a pretty active part of the virtual pinball community that recreates old EM machines (Electro-Mechanical). Check out www.VPForums.com and maybe post a request there.

When authoring a virtual version of these older tables one of the challenges is getting a decent scan of the bare playfield. Fortunately, there are a lot of EM collectors who acquire and restore physical machines and they tend to be quite supportive of virtual preservation efforts - so they can be a great source for playfield scans (since they take it all apart when restoring anyway). Finding a hi-res scan or a potentially willing source for a scan will put you a good ways toward getting your virtual table made.

Also keep in mind that a virtual version is usually close but sometimes the tables have particular quirks. For example I had a stars machine. I could back the ball up into the side chute with a flipper flick for some easy points. But virtually that does not work as it relies on the elasticity of the rubber band and the weight of the ball distorting it a bit on the flipper.

Saw one guy who made VR version of these and made a physical stand which was just the plunger and buttons for him to hold onto. In VR it looked like he was playing a full thing. Tactically it felt that way too. Almost dumped 3k into that mess when I saw that before I came to my senses.

There are also large collections of them out there you can get. Most of the popular tables are recreated in some way. But in varying conditions of 'done'.

Already implemented in Visual Pinball. It has VR support as well.

https://virtual-pinball-spreadsheet.web.app/game/x6-6z6GA/

BTW, folks like phreezie that work on the engine and the like are often not the folks that develop the tables. A lot of work goes into each side of it and they are doing it in their free time.

Yes, Volley was a nice project because one of the dev team has one at home, so we got ultra detailed assets. It was also a great use case to test Visual Scripting.

But before we dive into more table builds, we'll be focusing on the engine work.

For sure! Looking forward to you getting back to VPE now that the whole DMD thing is sorted thanks to your efforts. Do you have a rough idea of what things you'll be focusing on next? I know there was mention of a dedicated player a while back...

I'll post an update to VPU in a few weeks!

Oh great! Thanks, I'll check it out.

So would this be extended to physical cabinets with flipper buttons?

Absolutely, that's the main goal. I've built my cabinet over 10 years ago, so testing is assured. ;)

For a physical build, just curious if you've thought about integrating something like OpenTrack to track head/ eye position of the player and modify the camera position - to make the table look even more real when it's in a physical cabinet?

Support for something like this already exists for Visual Pinball thanks to BAM. Use a Kinect V2 for best results.

https://www.ravarcade.pl/

People have done this with an old Kinect. It works okay, but most people say it's not good enough to use regularly.

Yeah, I used to work on the Kinect which is why my mind went there - but the v1 certainly wouldn’t be up for this.

Fun fact, originally, the resolution of the depth sensor was 640x480 but was nerfed in firmware to 320x240. Why?

The makers of Rock Band wanted to make a Kinect version. But, with a Rock Band mic, bass, two guitars, and keyboard plus Kinect, the Xbox 360’s USB bus couldn’t handle it. So the Kinect got nerfed.

The company behind Rock Band either shut down or went bankrupt before the Kinect went on sale. At that point, way too much of the tooling (not to mention pose estimation modeling) around the Kinect had been built with the 320x240 resolution constraint so it wasn’t feasible to “unlock” the full res.

It's so sad that microsoft fucked over kinect at every conceivable opportunity. I used it a lot for 'creative coding' open frameworks and processing projects (many in that community did). Thank god they bought the original from primesense and didn't have the ability, or didn't exercise the ability, to break their multi-platform sdk.

When the Kinect 2 sdk was windows only it was a huge turd in the punchbowl and a clear sign that microsoft was not serious about making it a real tool to do real work with. I did do one project with the kinect 2 and learned just enough of the sdk to write a shim in c# to run the camera and pipe the data out over the network to a box that was actually doing the rendering.

The kinect 2 also was excessively picky about it's usb3 port, I remember going through about half a dozen usb3 cards until I found one that worked.

Yes, I also have a Tilt Five kit, which is awesome.

We're still doing lots of work on the core parts though, so these things will come later.

This is amazing work - the lighting effects in the video are stunning. Kudos!

Have the recent Unity shenanigans made you consider an alternative engine?

Yes.

But at the end of the day, this is a hobby, and Unity is an awesome engine to work with. I'm following Godot more closely than ever, but too much effort to still be able to call it fun would be necessary to port this over.

Wow, that looks really good!

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