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I've got hands. And I've got pinball.

Name:	Jesse (Midhir) Liles
Date Posted:	Jun 18, 2006
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I've been wanting for some time now to get a decent digital camera to get some good reference photos for my FPS game Shadows. Too much work (I make/deliver pizza) and I find myself drained and useless and I just haven't done it. I have a hard time finding any kind of work so I feel grateful to have my job but still, it's draining. I did make some progress at least with the visual appeal of the game. I purchased a pack from Max Thomas with a Glock and a Mac10, which both got added to the game. The cool thing is they both include hand models for first-person so I've used the hand models with the rest of the arsenal in my game as well
(many of them from the Modern Weapons Pack)

crossbones.us/images/unzoomed.png
crossbones.us/images/zoomed.png

Anyway, the announcement of the price change on TGB spurred me into actually buying it some weeks ago.
I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to work with. I've got a rough but playable pinball
game working:

crossbones.us/images/pinball.jpg

It was relatively simple to make a border, a ball, some flippers, and a bit on the bottom to move your ball back to the shooting thingy. No, I've never designed a pinball game. I've played quite a bit of pinball in my younger years and I've always had fun with it. While searching I found an excellent resource for
pinball collectors, or in my case, people interested in seeing real photos of LOTS of old and new pinball games
for reference.

www.ipdb.org/

Internet Pinball Database is awesome. Definitely gives me some material to look at for ideas =)

Recent Blog Posts

List:	07/28/06 - I like art 06/18/06 - I've got hands. And I've got pinball. 05/19/06 - Score! Back to work! 01/30/06 - Moving out. 01/19/06 - Project reaches alpha! 12/02/05 - Plan for Midhir 11/15/05 - Plan for Midhir 11/08/05 - Plan for Midhir

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Jeff Tunnell (Jun 18, 2006 at 16:35 GMT)

I have been the producer for several pinball titles that have been very successful. The one warning I can give you is that getting the pinball flippers to work properly is a big programming task. Another programmer that has worked on a pinball game gave us that warning before we started 3D Ultra Pinball, and we scoffed. I had one of the best Dynamix programmers on the task. We ended up having three or four programmers brainstorming on the problem before we shipped. We did solve the problem, but it was not trivial.

Good luck.

-Jeff Tunnell, GG

X-Tatic (Jun 18, 2006 at 18:15 GMT)

The same, we tried many approaches, including using ODE joints/hinges and impulses. Seemed that wasnt going to happen. The way I eventually saw it was that custom movemeent ( as simple as possible !) is the best way to go.

Jesse (Midhir) Liles (Jun 19, 2006 at 04:13 GMT)

I'm using stock TGB collision and movement code and I haven't yet run into any issue at all with the flippers, they work perfectly. The one issue I _do_ have is that the ball will occasionally, (and apparently randomly)
decide to pass right through solid objects that it normally collides with (flippers, bumpers, the edges of the table, etc). I dunno if it's TGB doing that or something I did, which is unlikely as I haven't touched anything involving the collision code.

edit: I've looked through the forums more and I think the margin might fix the problem, as soon as I can figure out what that is and how to set it =)
Edited on Jun 19, 2006 21:51 GMT

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