FruitBar 2 - MFME Frontend.

[appstrader]

Been playing around with some idea's for maybe a new FruitBar 2, 

Well why not ?

I have thought over the months how to improve FruitBar, do I do a web version or an updated coded version.....

At this stage I have been playing around with creating a cabinet view, sure it would require a few different cabinets but would certainly give everything a different view.

Obviously I can zoom this to any size for portrait or landscape, etc hence why it spins and grows in size.

The important part was being about to animate the view, I might even see if I can add some flashing behind the cabinet view as such so it looks like the cabinet is turned on in attract mode sure it would not flash in the right places but it would give it an animated view and be a focus point.

At this point its an idea, feel free to add your own idea's if you wish.

 

Just writing this I have had an idea I need to try out......

 

So feel free to give your views, good or bad at this point its an idea so who knows what can happen !

But I generally work quite quick when I start to write things....

 

 

[bungle]

Looking Great Andrew,Big fan of Fruitbar,and look forward to whatever you have planned :@)

Good Luck mate...

[davep180]

I’m still a fan of the original! Could you use gifs of machines, ones like @woodsyused to do on his releases?

[geordie52]

many thanks andrew i gotta give this a test spin

[appstrader]

Just playing a little with a few different things, one being light on the cabinets and some display flashing an attract mode.  Cant really use GIF's or a video as this these are fully rendered cabinets hence the lighting and reflectiveness that you would not get with a video or animated gif.

As the cabinets spin they actually block some light on the middle cabinet hence why its colours change, 

Still just looking at things currently, how to get the best views, etc 

Quite a lot of work to get this working correctly, also remember I can pan and zoom the view to where I want it as this is not a static view and the cabinets will continue to spin, etc in any view I put it at.

 

So how many different cabinets am I looking at ?

Would I get away with 3 or 4 maybe....?

 

What's your thoughts ?

I want to drop down a back window of game play or something this will probably be a video with sounds etc, possibly behind the cabinets on the left side, Im thinking a large backdrop at a slight angle maybe so the video thumb will play if you stop on a cabinet for a period of time.

 

 

[woodsy]

On 16/04/2023 at 17:34, appstrader said:

Been playing around with some idea's for maybe a new FruitBar 2, 

Well why not ?

I have thought over the months how to improve FruitBar, do I do a web version or an updated coded version.....

At this stage I have been playing around with creating a cabinet view, sure it would require a few different cabinets but would certainly give everything a different view.

Obviously I can zoom this to any size for portrait or landscape, etc hence why it spins and grows in size.

The important part was being about to animate the view, I might even see if I can add some flashing behind the cabinet view as such so it looks like the cabinet is turned on in attract mode sure it would not flash in the right places but it would give it an animated view and be a focus point.

At this point its an idea, feel free to add your own idea's if you wish.

 

Just writing this I have had an idea I need to try out......

 

So feel free to give your views, good or bad at this point its an idea so who knows what can happen !

But I generally work quite quick when I start to write things....

 

 

bro, you're a level above barcrest in my mind of designers

[bungle]

Great to see you at it again.

It all sounds good Andrew,Whatever you are up too I,m sure it will be sweet...

[appstrader]

Just playing with the orientation of the machines, making the spacing correct for the animations as the cabinets rock from side to side while there are other effects going on etc, light, flashing panels, etc.

Playing a selected rom is the simple bit but sorting these animations is a bit of a nightmare but i'm getting there,

Not sure what view is a good one so the question is should I do 3 or 5 cabinets?

I think im leaning towards 3 cabinets on the screen at once simply because of the zoom level I would use it would be a waste to use 5 cabinets.

[bungle]

10 hours ago, appstrader said:

Just playing with the orientation of the machines, making the spacing correct for the animations as the cabinets rock from side to side while there are other effects going on etc, light, flashing panels, etc.

Playing a selected rom is the simple bit but sorting these animations is a bit of a nightmare but i'm getting there,

Not sure what view is a good one so the question is should I do 3 or 5 cabinets?

I think im leaning towards 3 cabinets on the screen at once simply because of the zoom level I would use it would be a waste to use 5 cabinets.

Looking good indeed Andrew.

10 hours ago, World of Vp said:

I personally think 3 is a good number, especially as i run my fruit screen in portrait mode

 

Yeah agree 3 is looking the best.

[appstrader]

Looks like 3 cabinets it will be although I might add the additional 2 at a later date, this build is going to be a little bit different from the old version...

Not sure you guys will like the next image or not, but it should help make things a little easier for people to configure and maybe explain how things will work

It's never been done before and it probably wont be done again but I'm doing it !

 

Hopefully post the image later today once I finish it a little more.

 

[appstrader]

I woke this morning with the ideal of why not make things easy, I have always had people that struggle a little with the configuration of fruitbar and because it's now animated in 3D it will get a little harder to manage.

If you didn't know there are lots of additional extra's within FruitBar that most people don't even know even exist what alone use the features but they all require additional configuration no one was really interested in these so I never really exposed the features so they generally sit there unused.

As you know you can use the button to show the jackpot and prices, etc but why not put everything into settings where everything can be configured in one place.

So the new options page will allow all those things and I will be adding sounds in there so maybe the software will have announcement so it will speak the name of the game type of thing or even an intro sound or even both who knows, feel free to give your view.

As you can see I have added an animated cabinet in the settings page its currently rocking from side to side,  the images you load update the cabinet images directly so you will see the cabinet update in real time this will allow the themes to be instantly checked that they load ok and you will be able to view the images live on a cabinet without a reload.

There is a logo in the bottom part of the cabinet as well as a top image, middle and door image as this is a casino type of cabinet so it has more sections, I will add another generic type of cabinet where you can load the images into this cabinet also.

I will also add a cabinet logo that was used in the original fruitbar the logo that used to sit at the top above the cabinets, hope that makes sense, 

I believe this will type of configuration will make things easy for people to setup the system where previously they may have struggled.

It's a fairly empty settings page currently but give it time it will be loaded.

 

If you think I missed anything or think I should add something feel free to post it below or drop me a message.

Hope this all makes some sense !

Andrew

[MPU_FIVE]

Looks very good... I am following this with interest.

Will I be able to use it on a machine that's not connected to the internet? - (reason i say that is because my Windows 10 PC is for MFME only and i got fed up with Microsoft update keep making my PC lose it's ability to have sound so the internet is 100% out of bounds to it and has been for 2 years -  I won't let Microsoft touch my PC again! lol)

Cheers,

Gary.

[appstrader]

Hey Gary, 

The original does not require internet other than to check for updates, this one I am tempted to add a download ability so all the images for the cabinets will auto populate.

But not sure on how this will be funded generally its funded by myself but that is way off.

 

The original fruitbar is online following the link my signature.

 

9 minutes ago, MPU_FIVE said:

Looks very good... I am following this with interest.

Will I be able to use it on a machine that's not connected to the internet? - (reason i say that is because my Windows 10 PC is for MFME only and i got fed up with Microsoft update keep making my PC lose it's ability to have sound so the internet is 100% out of bounds to it and has been for 2 years -  I won't let Microsoft touch my PC again! lol)

Cheers,

Gary.

 

[appstrader]

Anything missing ? 

 

I have sounds, marquee, videos and lots of images for each cabinet view.... not forgetting the floating top image. 

This is the new settings page, its not finished yet but its certainly the backbone of the whole program so this has to be right for everything else to work correctly.

Animating the cabinets as you scroll through them is actually the easy bit in comparison to getting all these details correct !

I'm sure I will be adding more tabs as and when needed, so if you think I'm missing anything drop a post below.

 

 

[bungle]

Thanks for all the hard work you put into FruitBar.

All your suggestions sound great,Look forward to trying it all out. :~@)

[johnparker007]

@appstrader nice work on the 3d cabinet renderer!   

If you'd like the fruit machine models (and Electrocoin Goliath video game cab) in ArcadeSim I could provide the .fbx's for you - we'll have to check if @Spidy21982 is cool with that first..?   ...as most of the new versions of cabinets are his great work.

Looking forward to seeing FruitBar continue to evolve  

[appstrader]

Hey @johnparker007 hope you are well, 

I'm going with an easy cabinet design as most of the cabinet will be covered by the images if that makes sense, although its a 3D cabinet I don't think the rear will ever be shown even though its fully rendered just maybe on the attract mode when I generally spin the cabinet before popping up a new selection of cabinets.

In theory I should be able to just change the front bottom section, ie the door and pay tray along with the other images so the parts that are shown will become the new cabinet its not a 3D walk around like ArcadeSim so the sides wont be shown in any detail even though they are rendered.

It's all subject to change of course but you got to start somewhere.

[johnparker007]

15 minutes ago, appstrader said:

Hey @johnparker007 hope you are well, 

I'm going with an easy cabinet design as most of the cabinet will be covered by the images if that makes sense, although its a 3D cabinet I don't think the rear will ever be shown even though its fully rendered just maybe on the attract mode when I generally spin the cabinet before popping up a new selection of cabinets.

In theory I should be able to just change the front bottom section, ie the door and pay tray along with the other images so the parts that are shown will become the new cabinet its not a 3D walk around like ArcadeSim so the sides wont be shown in any detail even though they are rendered.

It's all subject to change of course but you got to start somewhere.

Doing ok ta, and hope you are good too man  

Keep up the good work, the 3d cab system looks like a really promising feature!

Edited April 23, 2023 by johnparker007

[appstrader]

3 minutes ago, johnparker007 said:

Doing ok ta, and hope you are good too man  

Keep up the good work, the 3d cab system looks like a really promising feature!

It's a complete rewrite, it's always nice to start with a blank page !!

Once I get things in place working which shouldn't take too long I will then have a play around on making this a little better the flashing displays will be an interesting one to overcome and also how to show the popup attract play video so it blends nicely.

It's all in my head to some degree just have to put into code with the limited time I have available.

[johnparker007]

"the flashing displays will be an interesting one to overcome"
@appstrader Indeed   I guess there's two main approaches with the flashing lights/segment displays etc on fruit machines:

(a) record video of each machine running its attract mode flashing lamps etc in MFME, and then map the polygonal areas of the video to the rectangular textures for the quads representing the rectangular glass panels on your models

or

(b) go the ArcadeSim route, and fully reconstruct the layouts so the lamps/segment displays etc are all rendered in code and updateable (via data captured running from a 'data layout' in MFME via image scraping, to provide an attract mode recording of the pure data)

I suspect for your use case, option (a) would be better, as option (b) requires that you build a full 3d model of each individual fruit machine including lamps, displays etc just to add it.  With option (a), it's certainly much more straightforward to add new machines.

Though, I'm a bit hungover to be fair haha, and there could be a whole other approach I've completely missed    Look forward to seeing how you go about implementing the feature.  If you decide to go the route of option (b), I'm happy to share some code that would help you with that approach, but it does get fairly complicated and tedious - I only did it since I had to anyway to make the machines playable from live rom emulation... if they only had to do fixed attract modes, I'd have been more considering option (a) for minimal time investment to add new machines!

Good luck with this new wave of FruitBar2 dev  

Edited April 23, 2023 by johnparker007

[appstrader]

I will be looking around option A, it would take too long to recreate every cabinet I was hoping to do something with lighting but not entirely sure that will give a good enough effect although there is light cast over the cabinets I was thinking of adding additional spot lights on a few sections to simulate lights flashing or the other option is doing what is done on a DX but that also will require more work for the setup and not sure more people would bother.

Even though it could just be a case of adding a few images on a larger image along with coords like you would in CSS so not entirely sure but that would be simple to share online, dont really want to go down the route of animating by using a video as I just feel it could be a nightmare with two videos playing on each cabinet so there would be a slight lag loading all the video and you still have the problem of repetitive jumps so it will certainly be an obstacle to look at in some depth.

The more I think of it maybe a CSS type of animation could be a more viable option.

[Spidy21982]

6 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

@appstrader nice work on the 3d cabinet renderer!   

If you'd like the fruit machine models (and Electrocoin Goliath video game cab) in ArcadeSim I could provide the .fbx's for you - we'll have to check if @Spidy21982 is cool with that first..?   ...as most of the new versions of cabinets are his great work.

Looking forward to seeing FruitBar continue to evolve  

No problem with that. use what you need .

[appstrader]

Been busy couple of days but added some more parts to the settings which leads me to ask a question,

It's working to the point I can create the different cabinets and it will save and load all the images and details for all of them so settings is mostly done.

Which leads me to my question.

I have at least two choices I can either stick with one image for the actual main cabinet or I can stick with the different sections and then add the options to basically design the cabinet view in the effect that would allow the sections to be moved if they did not line up like I have shown in the image below.

Basically I would add up, down, left, right settings for the two or three images that make up the main cabinet display, I could go all designer so you could pretty must design the whole shape and layout of the main cabinet display but not today.

The other question is with this type of design interface is it too much to setup ? too complex too much time ?

 

What's your thoughts?

 

The good news is I am thinking of every rom having a hash which makes it individual so if I decided to put these cabinet files on a server it would be a simple process to download the cabinet kit and basically import the file so all the cabinet designs don't need to be done over and over it would just be a case of syncing, maybe a little over the top but I know some people like designing things so feel free to give your views on this too.

All the images I use for my cabinet designs are shrunk to a small size which makes the cabinets load really quick and so creating a file online to sync will actually be quite small, the video images would be about a mb or so I wouldn't be expecting the package to be too large but it would contain images, video, sounds and anything else that would be good to build into a cabinet.

Maybe a step to far eh !

Andrew

[appstrader]

Started to build the cabinet designer as you can see each section will allow it to be customised to fit, if its a different type of cabinet you simple select the other option as there are only two options currently but I guess you get the idea how this work work

Really simple I guess I will need to create an export option eh !

Finally made it to the weekend its been a long week so this is where the software is at currently I think its starting to take shape a little.

Ignore the main background cabinets they are just quick ones nothing special about them, your looking at the cabinet design in the settings page.

Andrew

[bungle]

Looking Awesome Andrew,Love the cab designer,Will you be able to design and export cabs for use in dx's? hehe

Look forward to test these new bits and pieces out.

Thanks for your hard work...