johnparker007

Added the ability to drag with left mouse to draw a selection rectangle to very quickly select group(s) of machines. You can hold down ctrl or shift if you want to add further selections the same as when clicking on the machines to select them. It's been a bit of messing about trying to get this vaguely decent - I tried a straight '2d' rectangle and that is rubbish for selecting say a row of machines, without picking up neighbouring machines due to the perspective. So I've gone for this custom approach where the rectangle it draws is 'in the world'... so then it works for any camera rotation/perspective, and is much better at selecting a row of machines without picking up unwanted nearby ones. Also I originally had the rectangle drawing on top of everything, but it seems to 'make more sense' if the machines obscure it, conveys more that you're selecting an area of the ground... will probably keep tweaking this a bit, then start looking at the 'snap alignment' stuff. Probably makes more sense to see it in action, so here's a vid

I chose picker as I was thinking like picking a list like in a warehouse, selector is good though, have changed it to that The diagonals (well any angle really), are planned to be in the 'Expert Mode' panel, that can be accessed with the switch at the bottom. When Expert Mode is on, that left panel will have more buttons, for doing fancier stuff; curved walls, different carpets, machines at angles other than 90 degrees etc. Ta for the feedback!

More work on UI: now 'sidebar' has all placeholder icons done, changes to the machine picker window... a few bugfixes, and work on getting some form of the machine library working. So now from the machine picker menu, you can add multiple machines without closing the menu, and the menu is populated from code with different machines (just the 5 Barcrest High Top ones for the moment, as I have scaling to sort on the Vogues, and all the earlier ones I built in the Eclipse cabs). Currently the machines appear after being added on top of each other, later once I have at least some of the 'snap to nearest object' work done, they'll keep getting added to the right of the previous machine as a growing row of (aligned) machines, which will make it all all lot less fiddly!

All good suggestions thanks guys I like the idea of a bingo as a 'machine' of sorts so you can play it, and laboriously listen to the samples of (probably me) doing the bingo callouts and cross the numbers off - legs eleven, two little ducks, Maggie's den number ten... Added more functions to the editor (with the usual minor bugs, I'll have to have a night bugfixing soon), along with their toolbar icons. So the 'trashcan' icon deletes the selected object(s). The two arrows are Undo and Redo. It has an effectively unlimited Undo history, so you can Undo all the way back to the start, then Redo forward again to your latest action. Starting new actions at any point through the history then sets that to be the latest point. Just standard stuff for editors really to make everything painless if you make a mistake and need to go back A particularly dry video here for those that want to see some objects being deleted, moved, rotated then stepping through the Undo/Redo history to show it all working:

Done some bugfixes tonight, spent far too long making some rotate clockwise / anti-clockwise icons to represent rotating the selected machines Learnt a bit more about Unity UI layout stuff, experimenting with some sort of 'side overlay' for buttons to live on. Now the machines don't deselect after moving a group sometimes, and the big new feature is those rotate left/right buttons. They rotate the selected machine(s) by a fixed 90 degrees. More rotation options will come later, though back in Cleethorpes most of the grubby smaller arcades had everything square anyway to try and cram in as many machines as possible! So I think this will be fine for most basic arcades for now

Thanks man, I'm glad you're enjoying the project And I look forward to seeing what people create, the arcades will all be 'sharable' later so we can explore them all.

I'm trying to keep it nice and easy, nothing worse than a non-user friendly interface So for this editor, I'm thinking it will have a toggle to set it between the default of 'Simple Mode' and Advanced Mode'. In Simple Mode, there will be all the stuff you need to make a basic arcade, but not many menus or buttons cluttering up the interface, just the bare essentials. Then in Advanced Mode, that will have more buttons, menus etc, and allow for fancier stuff like curved walls, custom rotation of machines to do more elaborate floor plans with rings of machines etc. So hopefully everyone will have a go at making their own arcades to play in, rather than being put off by being hit with a million menus and buttons to navigate when they fire up the editor It will of course come with some pre-made arcades, and that flow will just be 'Play' > 'Choose Arcade'.

There will be one, though I've been thinking about how it'll work... I think horizontally it'll just be a configurable gap between the left-right sides of each machine. In terms of the front/back alignment... say we have a row of different cabinets models along a wall. Do we align the cabinets so all the backs are the same distance from the wall (so that the fronts are uneven?).... or do we have it align that row such that there are varying gaps behind, and the fronts of the cabinets are all roughly in a straight line, in terms of how far they stick out into the room? As different cabinet models have varying depths... Here's a pic of sort of what I mean: Here for instance, it looks like they have 'back-aligned' to the wall: the red cabinet and the one beyond further in the distance stick out more into the room. But for the true OCD arcade builder, would it be neater to have the less-deep cabinets in the foreground a bit further out with a gap behind them before they meet the wall, so that then the entire row has all their fronts in a straight line (since that's the bit you actually see when walking around in the arcade)? I think it'll initially have to be 'back-aligned', otherwise there will be problems - say if you put a stand-up streetfighter cabinet next to a sit-down outrun, and aligned them... the streetfighter would be like a meter away from the wall, so that its front could be even with the rear of the 'car' (which is generally seen as the front of the machine in terms of the outrun cabinet). Hopefully as I continue to work on move/rotate, and get more cabinets to their proper scale and in, it'll become clear with testing what is needed

Made some progress on implementing the move tool. There will be more to do on this after I add the rotate tool (as all the machines can't face the same way )... also, I've introduce a bug where the objects are deselecting when I release. You hover over either of the arrows to drag on just that axis (handy for keeping things aligned), or you hover over the square that joins the arrows to drag in any direction. You can see which mode you are in as the relevant arrows light up yellow... A lot more to do on this stuff, but happy to see the start of something a little more 'editor-like'

I'm guessing these ROMs don't run in MFME (spin the reels if switches manually triggered etc)? I don't think MAME has bothered with coin pushers yet afaik...

Some good ones in there - I really like the look of that Magic 7 coin pusher!

I also saw Star Rider briefly - the one I saw was in the first arcade past the train station, ran by a red-headed guy at the time. He'd temporarily converted his sit-down Hang On machine to run it - I was pretty young and also very blown away, young me didn't know about panning/chroma-keying with pre-rendered video like I do now, so I saw it and also thought actual magic was happening! Here's some footage of Star Rider, that came out in 1983 - so impressive for back then:

I also love coin pushers They are planned to be fully playable machines in the simulator I was just going to just hand recode any ROM-type behaviour initially, since no emulation exists. If the project gets traction we may be able to get some dumps going in MAME and have it drive the machine in the simulator to get proper sounds etc. I've just pulled up one of my ideas docs for other non-standard machines I was thinking about implementing: - that spooky Morgana fortune-telling machine (can map video from youtube onto face mesh). I used to go alone to the arcades from a startlingly young age, and it used to genuinely scare me! - those multi-player horse racing games with the horses on tracks where you bet on the color to win - like the horse racing games, but they were a roulette wheel under a dome. Again I think you had 5 colors to bet on for increasing odds - pool/snooker (with turn-based play in online mode) - moving hydraulics cabs like Outrun, Afterburner etc - plan to implement the hydraulics in MAME so the model moves in response to the live gameplay while you are sat in it - penny vertical bagatelle units Lots of possibilities really, though it's all much further down the line Edit: at 12:10 in this video you see some footage of the Morgana machine in action. Still pretty scary to be fair! https://youtu.be/JXHwZBngCuY?t=730

Made a start on object selection. Vid first shows left mouse clicking on objects one at a time to select (or clicking no object to deselect all). Then shows holding down shift (you can use shift or ctrl) to perform multi-selection

More very early WIP on the arcade editor: slightly improved camera control (I have a new idea that should make it better), some test buttons/menus, adding a sample machine, testing a colored 'highlight' (just applying random highlights). This highlight will be for stuff like if you are moving a machine around, it'll be green if it's in a valid place, or red in it's in an invalid place, like right in front of another machine/halfway through a wall etc...

Extremely early look at the frontend so far in action, along with some of unfinished camera control code in action (using the mouse) in what will be the arcade editor

All sounds like simpler times for the budding fruit machine fraudster! I've started looking into the Frontend / Editor now (gonna be a big old job, but it's time I think), so I'm hoping one day there will be a recreation of 'Dirty Verns' in Rhyl for us all to enjoy...

I remember everyone used to always just gamble for jackpot on these

I thought it'd never stop!

Ah wow @Tommy c thanks very much mate, some good side profiles in there! Even if I get better at modelling, I'm certain the side profiles are crucial to modelling the cabinets fairly accurately, so this is all gold You may recognise your excellent BWB Rat Race layout among some previously shown ones (with now working alphas) as a new addition in this latest vid...

Aye you can't beat a bit of digital archaeology I remember a couple of years back getting into an in-depth discussion with a couple of guys about the arcade game 'Star Force', I think we were talking about a graphical quirk. As I'm an emulator guy, I fired up MAME and got into the tiles - and found some unfinished sprites not used in the game, which showed the original pixel artist's process (drawing white outline, then filling in the shaded art from there). I've fired it up again and dug 'em out - we think these are started but not finished/included gfx (the white outline sprites) - a snapshot of the artist's WIP - geeky stuff, but interesting And thanks for the positive feedback on the arcade sim project

Finding some very handy info scanning through this collection of flyers @A:E has kindly sent So I now realise that PCP only manufactured 'kits' to apply to other manufacturers cabinets (which explains how I was seeing PCP games in what appeared to be Smash n Grab type cabinets... I thought they might be sister companies, or share the same cabinet builder - but this all makes much more sense! So - the 'Smash n Grab' cabinet, as I have been calling it, is apparently called the 'Barcrest High Top' cabinet (though Jaye mentioned 'Barcrest Roll Top' so maybe they're the MPU4s with the grey metal like S&G...), and the nearly identical cabinet (that just seems to have the metal overlaid bars removed on the top glass) is called the 'Barcrest Caberet' cabinet, at least according to PCP: Also - they give the 'families' of machines that use the cabinet (at least as the family stood at the time they printed their advertising) - again super useful to know It'll be great for the big spreadsheet this, so I can 'deploy' new cab models to the various machines that used them

Done more work on Vogue machines, have 3 more converted - with various issues: - cab scale is wrong (too large) but I have the measurements, so just a couple of hours to get that sorted and everything approximately remapped again - alpha displays are showing reversed text (as well as a few wrong characters). Indy's is only not reversed as I manually fixed it, will be implementing reversed alphas in the converter - alpha scales are wrong, a few things involved with that, will keep working on it - can't insert coins to play as not scraping out the coin mech as a 'panel'. Probably will just put a temp panel in to get them all going, ultimately all coin mechs/bill validators will be 3d models with rom lighting (and clickable input) - some black metal trim missing allowing to 'see inside' the machine ...so generally a good few nights work still on all that lot to get them vaguely good enough to move onto some new cabs

That sounds absolutely rocking @A:E, nice one! Will pm ya shortly. That's perfect thanks @Spidy21982- side profile and dimensions, exactly what I'm after

Thanks, I've added those usernames and a note to my todo list for cabinet modelling tasks I used to play the oldies really, back in the late 80s->mid-late 90s - they're all pretty cool though