[WIP] pinball

uh, that gravity equation is meant to increase the force of gravity as the ball is further up the table? That would imply the table is curved, which it isn't. Gravity is fine as a single constant, but it would be cool to be able to define that constant per layer in the editor so that you can better simulate ramps.

if you drop the ball at the top of the table wouldn't it fall faster than if you dropped it at the bottom because the angle is greater. Or does it just seem this way because the ball travels for longer at the top?

damn, I really do need a table to get reference from, so many situations I need to re-create

No, tables are flat. I've never seen a curved one at least. Of course a ball falling from the top will be moving faster by the time it reaches the bottom, but that's just cause it has had longer to accelerate.

You should really take a look at Future Pinball, it's the next best thing to a real one in your garage and would be a fantastic reference for you. There are tons of user made tables, people make faithful reproductions of real pinballs with scanned artwork etc. as well as their own designs. There's a table called 'Dead Hunters' that is truly epic.

Unfortunately because the guy who made FP uses a pre-fab physics engine, the physics on the flippers aren't quite what they could be, aiming shots is harder than in real life, but the rest is really spot on.
here's a screenshot

www.futurepinball.com

I have renamed the videos. Sorry for the confusion (had my ant videos in there labelled as pinball).

Gravity and table slope are the same thing. It's one value that represents the amount of acceleration of the ball towards the bottom. A table that has been angled steeper will accelerate the ball faster. A perfectly flat table will not accelerate the ball at all. (Sorry if my babbling was misleading... I'm not much an improvised speaker).

ok, update time

here's the editor and new swfs, sorry slight but the xml has significantly changed, so you'll have to re-edit your map, from this point on if I make any xml changes I'll create a xml converter swf for you or anyone.

http://soap.com.au/chris/pinball/pinball_offline.zip

editor might still have some bugs, ones I'm aware of:

- when scrolling with spacebar, if cursor released outside of main window scrolling still continues.
- draw options don't update when a entity has been created
- scrolling at small speeds is buggy

things to add:

-scroll bars
-collapsible panels
-fixed object flipping (groups dont flip properly atm)

new features:

-groups
-zoom in/out
-mouse wheel, spacebar + drag, hand icon + drag all, scrolls window
-control + drag to move control points
-more object data (most data is redundant atm, mass, bounce and friction, this will change in the future)
-table background image (use tableImage.jpg as name in root directory, this will change in future)
-table gravity

I think thats it, have fun :D

hey would be nice if you could quickly implement a load background image functionality ,- like a attribute in the first _root node of the XML.
I´d might try rendering some things cuz I have little freetime now :)

Freaking awesome! And if render makes a background, I'm set for a weekend of pinball! I like how it feels now

Looking great!

I was stumped for a while by the lack of a load table button in the editor, but then looked at the swf instead of the old editor/index.html ;)

Don't make an xml convertor for my sake, I can fix that old file in 2 minutes with a text editor macro, no problems.

Couple of thoughts on the new editor, the smoothed out zooming and scrolling while zoomed makes it feel more like a toy than a tool and would get annoying after a while.

Really like the chaining together of lines & beziers with single clicks, then dragging the last one to finish, brilliant!

Some things that would be nice:
mouse wheel zoom.
ctrl toggles arrow tool.
maybe later on a 'double bezier' tool for making long, winding fixed-width channels and rails?

Haha, Slight, if you keep up the feature requests, you'll end up being their lead level developer :D And with Render doing BG's I almost see an FK collab :D

yeah, thanks for the feedback on the editor, really good suggestions, i'll try and add those in. How were the groups? no bugs? those were quite frustrating to implement.

smooth zooming was a product of debugging, I'll make it fell more "IDE'ish"

its starting to look real nice. nice work. well done mate. Me want me want!!!

The groups work well, didn't see any real bugs other than the mirroring you already mentioned. There's no grouping of groups which you mentioned before, but I don't see where that would be useful anyway.

The ungroup button is active sometimes when it shouldn't be, but again that's not really an issue. At first the way the control point visibility is segregated seemed like an oversight, but after playing around a bit, it is probably best the way you have it.

If I were to suggest anything as far as the groups it's maybe to lose the bounding box and just use a different colour for unselected groups to reduce clutter on screen a bit. And really, if that's my only suggestion, must be pretty good already. ;)

Yeah phreax, I've thought about designing a virtual pinball for a while. The FP editor is great, but terribly time intensive to make anything worthwhile. It would probably take upwards of 4 months to build a single table of any quality in that editor, and then there is only the limited audience who have the game installed and are looking for fresh tables for it. So if Mr Malee's engine and editor work out as well as it looks like they will, and I can knock out a complete table in under a week then I'll be over the moon, hence my interest in this project. :)

http://soap.com.au/chris/pinball/pinball_offline.zip

updated, scrolling and zooming fixed. Also fixed bugs with loosing focus on the main window, but be careful, if you drag an object outside of the stage and release there's no way to select and delete it again. I'm thinking of resizing the bounds so no object can be lost, I think I'll need to add a re-center button though so you don't loose the actual table.

two new objects, holder and move event. Pretty self explanatory.

render, the xml now has an image path, relative to the root, so when entering a path in the editor, enter it as if you were dealing with the root directory. No more ../

Cool! Movers open up all kinds of possibilities. Here I go again with feature requests though: how about giving movers a target layer?

I found that if you can release something off stage you can reselect it under the button panel if you know where it is. On the sides where it's completely off stage you can't release it anyway. As for resizing bounds, wouldn't you be better off constraining objects from being dragged off stage in the first place rather than allowing users to position stuff in no-man's land and then allowing them to hunt it down again.

In the older version I was using arrow keys to accurately position stuff, it's not so hot now that the table pans around with arrow keys at 1:1 zoom.

One last addition to my little editor wishlist: adjustable grid size.

damn, I forgot to put that function within the object modifier one, so it will scroll the window if no object is selected. I'll fix that tommorrow, thanks for spotting :)

i'll add a target layer to movers too

I guess I was being lazy with the window focus thing. I'll try and create a good system which doesn't allow objects to get lost.

been thinking about the grid size thing too, i'll add that as well, shouldn't be to hard.

http://littlemofo.soap.com.au/fox/me...eta/index.html

updated with some gfx :D

slight flipper bug still in, I beleive there's another integration problem, going from -180 to 180. But there's a quick fix to stop the game freezing up. Let me know if you see any weirdness *delays when you flip the ball.

slight, I can't release the updated editor yet, there's no pinball swf anymore, I'll release it along with the API at the end of the project.

more to come, please post any feedback about the gameplay

splendid job dude. nice work

darn, that's awesome. The visual richness is just great.

nGFX

No worries about the editor, nice to see the one way wall in there tho.
It's looking fantastic, bit of art makes all the difference.
Gameplay as far as the table itself goes is a little brutal for my liking, seems about 1/2 the shots either go down the left side drain or straight down the guts from the top bumpers without going near a flipper. Or maybe I'm just unlucky... Lowering the gravity a fraction would help though, I reckon.

thanks everyone

I think separating graphics + sounds from the editor / pinball API was the best thing I could have done, its so much simpler handling it separately with events form the collision data, I have been able to do so much more than if I had given objects graphics and sound propertys.

one question for all you math pro's, is there a nice easy way to find the intersection point on a bezier line from another point? See the plunger ramp, how the arrows light up as the ball overlaps them. Atm i'm just finding the percentage the ball position is on a straight line and using that * number of animation frames to show lights. It works ok, but to be accurate I need to find the percentage the ball is on a bezier line, in order to do this I need to know the bezier length + the intersection point on the bezier. Anyone tackled this before? (I can't really use my bezier collision class because that is just made up of tiny lines)

Looks great! Plays great! I like it!

The ball does drain to easily on the sides. You might fix this by making the drain lanes a bit smaller, most pinball games have drains only about 1.5 times the width of the ball. Also, the drain walls on either side usually wouldn't be much higher than the triangular bumpers. You probably raised them to prevent the constant ball draining, but I think a better solution is to make the drains thinner.

I did a quick google search "bezier line intersection" and the second link was to a JS SVG intersection class that might be helpful:

http://www.kevlindev.com/gui/math/intersection/

well, I couldnt say about the bezier percentage, but if you use that method, what will happen when the plunger wasnt pulled all the way back and the ball is not against the rail?

A physical pinball would use a trigger per light, maybe just add trigger areas for the last three lights?

the ball doesn't have to be against the rail, or even anywhere near the invisible bezier line, the idea is that I find the intersection point on the bezier from wherever the ball may be and use that along the beziers length.

but yeah, I could always go the event trigger way, it works ok now so I wont go out of my way to change it.

Thanks for the link Jerry, i'll check that out. As for the drains, I didn't have anything to do with that, I've just basically mapped out collision from a designers graphic (the graphics aren't mine, I only animated) but that being said, I can just get him to tweak the design a little, only been on the graphics side for 2-3 days now, still haven't had much time to test out the table as a whole.

So people are happy with the gravity, I noticed you thought that the table was too frantic slight? I do like the weight of the ball as it is, maybe just some simple table design tweaks could make it play easier?

Not frantic, but brutal. I suggested lowering gravity because it's the simplest way to take the edge off the difficulty and it does feel a little heavy, but if your graphics guy is OK with tweaking the table a little, then yeah, narrowing the drains a little as Jerry suggested would be good. the right side bumper above the drain could jut out a little so it is angled up and blocks the drain a little more, but really the problem is the area around the left side drain is very open.
Most pinballs have some method of saving balls from that lane, either a kicker or older machines often had a gate that would rotate across the lane to feed the ball into the flipper lane, once the gate saves the ball it flips into the open position. Re-activating the gate is done with a target, which adds a bit of gameplay. see attached 1000 words. :)

for the bezier stuff Ive used the singularity classes a lot... you can find them at the algorithmist.com

his spline routines have paramiterisation abilities which will probably help you get a hand on it.

Looks sweet the game, but I dies to easily in it... I agree with lowering the gravity a touch

I agree with previous guy who said maybe the gravity is a touch too strong.

99% done :D

http://littlemofo.soap.com.au/fox/me.../pinball_beta/

just a tilt to go

I hope to god it runs ok on your machines and that its fun, this is probably the hardest thing I've ever had to build. Have fun

awesome job,- well done

Awesome Malee, a lot more playable now! All my crits seem to be graphical.
The "flippers" are pixelated as in low quality, while the rest is not (because it's bitmaps I assume). The numbers with score and lifes need to be a bit bolder and the whole gamescreen is a bit confusing at first. There's a lot going on everywhere instead of a red line. Of course that's not gonna change but the numbers being bolder would help a lot and is a small tweak and the flippers really need to fit the rest of the gfx!

Gameplay wise, it has gotten a lot better, and it's really playable now! I haven't seen many Flash pinball games, so I can easily say, that this is the best Flash pinball game I've seen ;)

*edit* The graphics are great though! As usual I wouldn't comment on them unless I felt they were really worth it :)

The good news is, it's done as well as it could be done, good graphics and gameplay.

The bad news is, it's pinball.

The good news about the bad news is, it's irrelevant as you didn't do it for guys like me.

Wow malee great work, I didn't have any problems with it at all. Graphics and game play are great.

Wow amazing work, really impressed. Smooth, fun. I think flipper is the one of the most difficult thing to do and you made it so well. And with your editor, you can release thousands of flipper games now :) .

Sweet, sweet work mate.

Squize.

Only just had a chance to look at this....

Great work. Really smooth and at least as good as any other pinball I've played.

ah cool, glad you guys like it :D

phreax, I'm too much of a performance whore, I'll try to create some bitmap numbers so low quality can't be detected :)

some day i'll get to both design and make my games... someday

really nice work there mate, without any doubt the best flash pinball game out there (and it´ll probably stay that for a good while :) )
the only thing i don´t like is as phreax said the flippers have no anti aliasing on em and due to that get jerky when rotated. Besides that all around very well done :)

Wow, just fantastic, the best flash pinball by far.

Think there may be a bug in the highscores, I played a few games and on about the 3rd game, noticed the highscore got "stuck" in that it kept showing an old score from a previous game over and over.

Absolutely beautiful!

Two small issues, nothing really important. The entire game doesn't fit in my browser window at 1024x768 with only two toolbars, about 1/7th is offscreen. The other issue is even less important, that is that circular bumpers in pinball don't move side to side when hit. They move down to force the ball away, but honestly who cares, just a pinball junkies technical eye. :)

Awesome game!

Cool. Somehow I got #2 highest score...great job!

thanks for playing everyone, there is a highscores bug that I'm fixing right now, so unfortunately the list will probably reset.

Jerry, the final game will open in its own window, so you shouldn't have any problems.