[WIP] pinball

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.