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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.
IŽd 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)