Suggestions for cabinets

[Zeiram]

Come on ZEN. Just lay a TV flat on the table and adjust a view for it in your engine. Should be two hours work. Making a patch maybe another two.

That part works just fine for cab owners. It's quite playable on a cabinet with XPadder and AHK scripting. The consensus view seems to be that moving the DMD to a second monitor (or a PinDMD) is the only missing feature for cabinet nirvana.

[priested]

That part works just fine for cab owners. It's quite playable on a cabinet with XPadder and AHK scripting. The consensus view seems to be that moving the DMD to a second monitor (or a PinDMD) is the only missing feature for cabinet nirvana.

That part does NOT work just fine. Granted, they do have portrait views but none of them replicate the view you would have standing in front of a table. The views are as if you were hovering about 6 feet directly over the table. Everything is small and flat looking. Check out TPA for how a proper portrait view should be. No, theirs isn't perfect either but it is a lot better than Zen's. The tables themselves are great and play great in landscape on a console but the portrait views for Steam suck.

[mpad]

That's what I meant. Views are very bad. And in my eyes the most easiest thing to fix. These are real time rendered graphics, so one could even put in a slider to adjust angle and perspective on the fly.

[Zeiram]

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. It's not as awesome as Future Pinball running with BAM and head tracking, but I don't consider it any worse than Visual Pinball. Everyone who's played FX2 tables on my cab has been wowed by them.

[priested]

Zeiram, Do you have or play The Pinball Arcade? To me, pinball is all about whether it "feels right", which is really hard to describe. With me, it is a combination of graphics, physics, and viewpoint. TPA comes the closest to hitting all three. Zen would be right up there with them if their view was adjusted to be more up front rather than overhead. In fact, I think it would rate rate as my favorite if not for the subpar viewpoint because I really like the themes and deep missions.

It has been a while but I just did not enjoy VP or FP. FP, while it had very good graphics, the poor physics just killed the experience. It is furthest from "feeling right". VP is better with the physics but also just never felt like real pinball to me. Zen and TPA have different physics but they both feel more like pinball to me. Graphics for both are great and, as I said earlier, if Zen would just adjust the portrait view to more front and centered (like the landscape view), it would be a near perfect pinball experience.

I think the best option would be for Zen to offer views for both of our tastes and get rid of some of those weird views where the table tilts back and forth or zooms in and out. who wants a view like that? No pinball table in existence does that!

[Zeiram]

Yes, I've played TPA a lot, and have bought many tables on multiple platforms. I was as excited as many cab owners when Farsight bought a Virtuapin for development last fall, and dutifully installed the steam version on my cab when it came out. Honestly I didn't think it was appreciably better than the VP or FP tables I'd already installed that have functioning dynamic back glasses, DMDs, and analog controls. I tend to cherry pick which engine's treatment of a table I like best in my PBX setup, and like you I weigh physics, visuals, and cab hardware support when making the decision. I tend to prefer FP with BAM unless the physics are bad. That's been changing a lot with Zed physics. Centaur is a good example of a Table where I've hopped between engines as improvements have been made. The FP version was sluggish and floaty until recently. VP has also seen a lot of improvements in both physics, transparency, and lighting. Uncle Willy's Monster Bash is awesome if you have the hardware to push it. If you haven't tried them in a while you might take another look. The Unity3d engine is also worth keeping an eye on. If TPA ever supports other features on my cab, I'll buy yet more versions, but for the time being it doesn't cut it for me.

I tend to give FX2 a fair bit of slack with respect to physics since they aren't recreations, and the shenanigans that happen on many of the Zen tables cater to video gamers - which I'm completely fine with. They're creative and fun, and a welcome addition to the 250 or so tables on my cab.

[Roo5676]

I think the best option would be for Zen to offer views for both of our tastes and get rid of some of those weird views where the table tilts back and forth or zooms in and out. who wants a view like that? No pinball table in existence does that!

Try view 1 or 1w if you haven't. It's not perfect (sides are maybe cutoff just a tad), but short of a truly tweaked cabinet camera it feels like a pretty natural position to me on a cabinet. It's slightly lower than view 2, which seems to be the best "fit" for the screen. I suppose it could depend on your height and stance as to what feels "right" to you.

Keep in mind that I'm guessing that all the camera settings are heavily based on the way they are in landscape mode. You don't have to use one of the ones that zooms or pans -- those are really only needed for landscape where that's used as a compromise to see more detail and also see the whole table.

[BarbieBobomb]

We updated the game today to include:

-Movable DMD (can be placed onto a separate screen and positioned/scaled as needed via config files)
-Touch screen controls

Enjoy!

[moewe]

We updated the game today to include:

-Movable DMD (can be placed onto a separate screen and positioned/scaled as needed via config files)
-Touch screen controls

Enjoy!

That sounds great!!!
Barbie,
i love you. ;-))

[sliderpoint]

The movable DMD is great!

I posted in another thread, but this one seems more appropriate. A backglass image that functions like the DMD would be great. The ability to turn off event cameras would be nice.

Also the ability to add a command line parameter to launch into a specific table would be nice. The folks that work with the frontends that people use on cabinets have been creative with the macro's but they always have to be adjusted after Zen adds tables/rearranges menus.

But happy with the DMD for sure!

-Mike

[markmon]

The movable DMD is great!

I posted in another thread, but this one seems more appropriate. A backglass image that functions like the DMD would be great. The ability to turn off event cameras would be nice.

Also the ability to add a command line parameter to launch into a specific table would be nice. The folks that work with the frontends that people use on cabinets have been creative with the macro's but they always have to be adjusted after Zen adds tables/rearranges menus.

But happy with the DMD for sure!

-Mike

As one of those creative folks that addressed the back glass issue, all we need is a very simple change. That's to add the game title to the DMD window. This would solve the backglass issue entirely as I could write something to handle the rest. I do not think we need direct table launch via command line. I'm not even sure of steam apps can do that. The idea of launching from within hyperpin should be ditched.

[Sir Cheddar]

As one of those creative folks that addressed the back glass issue, all we need is a very simple change. That's to add the game title to the DMD window. This would solve the backglass issue entirely as I could write something to handle the rest. I do not think we need direct table launch via command line. I'm not even sure of steam apps can do that. The idea of launching from within hyperpin should be ditched.

Keep in mind that the DMD window isn't active unless a table has been started so you won't have BG support while selecting a table like there is in your solution now.
Also, steam does pass command line parameters to games and applications, so that wouldn't be a problem. I would consider command line options very useful.

[sliderpoint]

As one of those creative folks that addressed the back glass issue, all we need is a very simple change. That's to add the game title to the DMD window. This would solve the backglass issue entirely as I could write something to handle the rest. I do not think we need direct table launch via command line. I'm not even sure of steam apps can do that. The idea of launching from within hyperpin should be ditched.

I'm not sure about hyperpin, I use PinballX. It seems to work really well and is very versatile. I like having the FX2 tables listed there and launching from it. Steam has always supported passing command line parameters to apps. That's how you enabled the console to cheat...er "enhance the game play" for HL2.

-Mike

[markmon]

Keep in mind that the DMD window isn't active unless a table has been started so you won't have BG support while selecting a table like there is in your solution now.
Also, steam does pass command line parameters to games and applications, so that wouldn't be a problem. I would consider command line options very useful.

But we could show a really cool generic pinball fx backglass when the dmd isn't visible. This feels like a proper solution to me.

[insx]

I would like to see a generic Pinball FX2 backglass on a monitor of my choice just to have something other than a blank screen. I guess I could do this pretty easily with a workaround but I'm lazy