johnparker007

Planning to get some Vogues done alongside some bugfixes in the short term, but plan is to model some of the other popular cabs next (think I have resources for Electra, Genesis, Reflex, and some other bits) Also - does anyone know of a place where there's a large collection of old fruit machine flyer images please? Perhaps a google drive somewhere that someone might be awesome enough to share..? I had another look for side pics and found this flyer. These flyers are great, because it shows both the full machine side panel profile for me to model, plus it has the exact width/height/depth dimensions.

Bit more tinkering with the alpha display, dot very slightly more visible. Got Indy in the 2nd WIP Vogue cab, along with alpha display. Going to need some more work on the never-ending alpha display task (scaling, getting correct character set to auto-map, Indy has some wrong characters), plus some missing black metal bits around the edges of glass, and getting Vogue and arcade machine to correct scales (they're too large, plus I have the Vogue measurements now)... then I can start converting some more Vogue machines

Thanks for the thanks @Big J and thanks for the S6's @slasher ! Been a lot more work with these alpha displays than I thought... making progress though Everything has ended up a bit smaller again now I've got the accurate scale from matching a video, so need to beef them up a bit to work around the graphics issue. Fixed various corrupt character issues, sorted out the 3x fonts that they can be set to since I found my £ sign was coming out as the & character, and also got the 'dot' working which involved far too much work lol, close up screenshot below of a working dot, since it kinda gets lost at the moment as it's so small, scales down to nothing! Also got the nice fading in/out working... maybe another night on it and they'll be done enough... Brief vid, shows the fading and the new correct scale (though now the segment lines are a bit too thin again)

Happy birthday Chris, I hope they have fruit machines up there to tinker with You are very much missed around these forums, and I wish we could have worked on the new 3d stuff together - rest in peace dude.

Have to confess, no idea what went wrong with those at the end! I've not seen it do that before... looking at it for a bit over breakfast, then can get some proper work in tonight, hopefully get some of these bugs fixed

I was a bit worried it was going to be ballache yeah Think it's gonna be alright now - got it actually working in a very rough state, various bugs to sort out...

Ok sorry for the quick follow-on post, but turned out it was an easy fix after all, it was due to sub-pixel sampling stuff -looking much more legible now, had a big sigh of relief seeing them work, I thought they might be be doomed to look a bit glitchy Still got to get hooked up to mfme, but at least they can be clearly read now.

Working on the 16 segment alpha display for the oldies... looks ok when zoomed, like the bottom-right of this first editor screenshot, but face on/smaller; looks pretty glitchy Bottom-right ok: Glitchy when smaller on screen: Going to keep fettling and try figure something out. I'll probably have to redo this with a shader (which is a big chunk of time to learn how to write, then write), so may just be a case of getting it 'usable' for the short term...

Thanks for those I'll definitely keep them on, they'll probably get emulated at some point in the far off future...

This talk of cabinets has reminded me to finish up converting some old fruit machine database rows I got from a FMEDB data dump - if anyone wants edit access to add/update info on it, let me know - all can view it: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wOMCTOBThxv8AgPYb-suvmM6AuXpqAOsVCyJUlofjvA/edit?usp=sharing Got it up to 1311 rows now

Awesome that is brill mate! Thanks very much Pure side and front profile, plus the dimensions - that will make doing an accurate Genesis cab model a nicer task - sounds like it was used plenty of machines too, which is a bonus.

I've been looking into doing these alphanumeic displays for the oldies, as it's different to the dot matrix display the new ones use. Due to those differences (it has a fixed font, no custom segments to deal with) I'm thinking I can just use overlapping alpha textures, which allows me to add a 'glow' effect Probably gone a bit overboard with the glow here, but shows promise...

Done some testing of AI upscaling in the simulator itself. This feature can't go live until I've done the texture streaming work which will be linked to the lighting, so quite a bit later on, but it certainly sharpens up these lower resolution layouts. Here's an example on Smash & Grab, running as normal with the scaling magic in place - normal on the left, AI upscaled on the right: May need to zoom in/view at 100% scale to properly see the effect And here's a bonus shot of the AI upscaled top glass looking at it close up in the editor:

I used to rub my trainers on the floor with a 2p of a conductive year in hand to rinse free games out of the 'Carnival' video game - nothing wrong with a good and honest self-generated static click I will have a bash at implementing 'plugging' at some point (along with emptier ROMs), it's on the low priority list for the mo though, a lot more core stuff to get going first

^^ Do you mean plug it, so reset the machine? I know there were those exploits later on for a bit (Monopoly while win was counting up could be successfully clicked on early roms I think)

Thanks mate I will change it to that in my internal stuff as it's a far better name than 'Smash & Grab' cabinet! Thanks very much, it's truly appreciated. In terms of oldies, there are plenty planned, but I also have to keep general momentum towards an alpha release, so most of those oldie cabinet models (along with all their machines) will come a bit later. I'm thinking probably some JPM Vogue/Rat Race cab/JPM System 80 machines will make it in before the alpha push. And yes, I do love the Smash & Grab machine, with all the gambling/nudge saving strategy it's a ton of fun to play

I've been on a bit of a detour with these new lower resolution layouts - led to bugfixes, then having to make changes in the data layout generation, which led to changing how the keyboard input is received (which will add support for US/other keyboards etc), which led to work on reducing the data layout filesize that I'd been putting off! Anyway, here we have three new Barcrest MPU4 machines that also use the 'Smash & Grab' cabinet - more oldies (If anyone knows if there was an official name for this cabinet like the later ones, e.g: 'Vogue', 'Eclipse' etc - please let me know - cheers)

Well it's hard to know what to say to that video. I can say that I definitely won't be implementing that functionality!

Haha yes there will be customisable avatars for the online version, but as the focus is now to get the 'standalone' experience working first and some alpha builds out there, they'll be a good while yet (Since the simulator is designed to be played purely in first person 'VR' perspective, the standalone version has no need of the avatar system, since you'd never see it. For the online version I am planning to have some 'mirrors' on walls in the arcade so you can check out how you're looking Plus also of course everyone else can see your avatar, as you can theirs).

Those arcade machines will be playable It's just super low priority for now, as I need to spend time to do it properly so that there is zero input lag, and the fruit machines are the main initial focus - I do also like having them around though even just doing attract mode In terms of ciggie machines, ashtrays, chairs etc - for the local arcade builder, there will be 'props' such as these that you'll be able to drag to where you want them in your floorplan editor. Or have the arcade 'generator' (that will generate arcades based on a list of settings) scatter them around in appropriate locations. Of course now I've typed this, I've realised we're going to have to have a 'kitchen sink' object in the prop list to keep @slasherhappy!

Have been doing more on converter/model, as a result Smash n Grab looking a bit better now (Edit: just realised, I forgot to enable turbo start stuff, so this starts up at normal speed in this recording)

I did actually find this photo when I was scrounging around for side profiles (attached at bottom, can't embed image for some reason) - it's hopefully enough of a side profile for me to 'make up' the bottom/proportions for doing a 3d model... so I'd expect to be doing some Jokers Wild / 777 Heaven type machines that fit this cabinet And yes more oldies planned - I think PCP cabinet is pretty similar to this one, plus there's a few good JPM System 80 layouts. Plus there's a nice Rat Race layout, whoever that was (BWB?). Part of the process is finding usable side profile pics, I may start begging side photo-taking favours (along with length/width/height measurements) on the Mecca for future models More classic machines definitely planned It's just all really time-consuming work this, and with my day job (video game developer) I'm basically doing 80 hour weeks! I'll be converting some more into this cabinet that fit it, so we'll have a few of these Barcrest MPU4s in the Arcade Sim library in the next few days

You can see the effect kind of replicated just by watching some Indiana Jones flashes - I noticed recently that most of them (hold buttons flashing etc) have a ramp up/down coded into the ROM. I guess because it was an expensive license they took their time... but anyway, on a modern monitor it gives the same effect. So all machines would look similar to that, with a single frame of ramp/decay each side of the 100% lit frame(s). Right - sorry for taking this off-topic, back to the Autoplaying - gotta hit that 10K @Reg!

There are unfortunately some Donds to be converted in the last lot of downloaded 'modern' layouts ...but I'm planning to work on older machines (80s/90s) for the coming weeks, so we will see a decent selection of oldies building up

Been working on getting Smash 'n' Grab into the 3d model - everything looking fairly ropey for the moment! (more work needed to fix all the issues)