OASIS (working title)

[johnparker007]

Made more progress over the weekend on the Layout Editor UI - here the Project window now has the basics of a file explorer to be able to view the assets in the project:


Also more improvements to the MAME downloader progress bar (bytes downloaded, % extracted).

[thealteredemu]

I’m a bit behind.   Are these running natively in mame now and are layouts .lay files or are you creating a hybrid system?

J

[johnparker007]

44 minutes ago, thealteredemu said:

I’m a bit behind.   Are these running natively in mame now and are layouts .lay files or are you creating a hybrid system?

J

mame.exe is doing the emulation, but I am doing the rendering (so no .lay files involved).

There is a plan later to have MAME .lay file exports, this will mainly be to add and update the internal layouts built into mame.exe itself - this is not integral to anything though, just improves MAME.

The Layout Editor will output compact 'built' layouts mapped onto the Cabinet they've been set up with in the editor (these are to be built in the Cabinet Editor from 3d models+textures out of Blender), to ultimately end up with the fully working 3d machines  

Then those machines can be played individually, or assembled into arcade layouts like the Arcade Sim one.

Edited October 5, 2025 by johnparker007

[johnparker007]

Started looking into the glass system, to get a break from the Editor UI   So I think the next test machine for a bit will be QPS Full Throttle as it runs in MAME (Door Open), and there are some super clean source artwork images for it - which saves me time having to manually draw these damn lines, which would be necessary on a less clean photo  

Here I've done most of the 'hard mirror' layer - so this is the 100% reflective mirror layer, usually used for outlines:


Next I need to do the transparent color 'inner outlines'.  They act like clear colored film, letting the light through...

[johnparker007]

And this is a start on the transparent color layer (mixed with the mirror outline layer).  Prob will just use this as it's tedious doing the outlines, I'm not an artist, or patient lol    It's only for testing anyway, so should do the job:

[dec1962]

Can I ask how you get the information from MAME for you to be able to do the rendering? I assume there’s a way of getting info such as whether a lamp is on or off and if it’s on what brightness it is. I didn’t know this was possible with MAME.

 

thanks

[johnparker007]

2 hours ago, dec1962 said:

Can I ask how you get the information from MAME for you to be able to do the rendering? I assume there’s a way of getting info such as whether a lamp is on or off and if it’s on what brightness it is. I didn’t know this was possible with MAME.

 

thanks

"and if it’s on what brightness it is"  - ha that is still to be implemented emulator-side, for now MAME is only modelling simply on/off   Will be done of course, not a priority issue at the mo...

In general, I'm currently pulling the data out in a text-based data stream.  This is currently over standard stdin/out, but I do plan to move that over to a network stream (which I believe will be faster and more suitable for video data).  Also, I haven't tackled getting at video output via this new (compared to the original Arcade Sim) technique yet.  Not sure if I'll pull it out via my Oasis Lua plugin as a pointer, or actually as raw 32 bit values over the network stream.

This class is a bit of a mess as I'm still experimenting with stuff, but it has most of the core c# side of the code that does the reading of data from mame.exe:

https://github.com/johnparker007/Oasis/blob/main/UnityProjects/LayoutEditor/Assets/_Project/Scripts/Oasis/Oasis.MAME/MameController.cs

And then here is the core Lua side of the code that allows for more custom interaction/access, as a custom Oasis 'plugin':

https://github.com/johnparker007/Oasis/tree/main/UnityProjects/LayoutEditor_ExternalAssets/Windows/MameLuaPlugins/oasis

That pretty much covers how it works so far - some nice bedtime reading!  
 

Edited October 8, 2025 by johnparker007

[dec1962]

Thanks for your reply and links.  I’ll take a look at the code this evening 

[Bozzy]

Genuinely exiting times. I was having a good read through all the discussions today. I wish I knew how to code to help out, but I only know Python.

Do current builds of MAME have FME support or is it only the dev builds?

[johnparker007]

4 hours ago, Bozzy said:

Do current builds of MAME have FME support or is it only the dev builds?

Current builds of MAME do have FME support, though a lot of work needs to be done on the emulation side of things.  There are a limited number of partially/fully complete 'classic' layouts built into the MAME exe itself.  For instance you could play Indiana Jones by JPM (mame rom name j6indy), that has a relatively complete clickable classic layout, there are plenty more   Some only have keyboard input though which is mapped unintuitively at present.

[Bozzy]

Fantastic! Just downloaded 0.281b and grabbed the Indy rom set, seems to work great to be honest, the core aspects are all there, pretty comes later which I assume is where you are at with the layout extraction and conversion. I'm surprised how far MAME has come....it's like going back 20 years and watching classics appearing on 'The Hovel' all over again!!!!

So is the concept that OASIS natively uses MAME over MFME for complete under the hood control?

[Altharic]

If you think of it as BFMulator and Jpemu were incorporated into MAME its not far off the truth.

[johnparker007]

1 hour ago, Bozzy said:

So is the concept that OASIS natively uses MAME over MFME for complete under the hood control?

Yes that is the plan for this new project 

[johnparker007]

Been a little more playing with the 'mirror mask' stuff, to simulate how there would be mirrored detailing on a lot of fruit machine art.  This isn't the finished thing, it's just a prototype of the effect, but it does seem to work  

Initially in this vid, I set the artwork texture to a random mainly black texture, so then the masked mirrored art areas are more clearly visible, reflecting the lit up Indy glass art.  Then I swap in the actual artwork texture that goes with that mirror mask, and then you can see the mirrored areas reflecting with the artwork also.
 

 

[johnparker007]

And another clunky demo of the above, with more brightly lit Indy art to reflect in the mirrored areas, viewed from a lower camera angle.  I think in a dim arcade, reflecting lots of bright flashing lights, screens etc it should work pretty well  
 

 

Edited October 9, 2025 by johnparker007

[thealteredemu]

Sweet

J

[johnparker007]

I've done a bit more on masked effects - so this is the unmasked colored outlines around text etc - that sometimes then has a second mirror outline.  I've also added a small amount of the reflection to the glass in the non-mirrored areas.  This will all be user-configurable, as some may prefer not having general glass reflection changing the look of the art  
 

 

[johnparker007]

And here's a view of lower down the glass showing the same color glow outlines, but with more different colored outlines on that part of the glass.  I suspect I'm going to need to tweak how it does the brightness as the yellow/white look a lot brighter compared to say red.  I'll check some youtube vids for reference  
 

 

[johnparker007]

Another update - I've added in the lamp mask and a yellow tint plus a few misc tweaks  
 

 

[Altharic]

You should probably get a dedicated site for this sadly it's been taken over by 'hey you cunts I'm an addict' posts again the front page is made up of non fme subjects

[johnparker007]

13 minutes ago, Altharic said:

You should probably get a dedicated site for this sadly it's been taken over by 'hey you cunts I'm an addict' posts again the front page is made up of non fme subjects

I think there's room for both things on this site  

If those posts bother you, and you wanted to get fancy, you could always write a chrome plugin that hides posts that contain keywords like gambling/addiction etc.

[Altharic]

Nah I quit leave Alex to his hoard fuck it 

[johnparker007]

I realised I'd been artificially down-rezzing some of my textures and using non-optimal texture compression, which was giving worse image quality than it should be the previous vids - this is with the correct settings, a little bit cleaner in places (bear in mind I also bodged these masks pretty quick just to make a test glass, a patient artist would be able to do a better job!) 

Lamps off:


Lamps on:

[johnparker007]

I've imported Full Throttle DX - then it seems the reel band values I had for Sc4 were off, so I've fixed those up to marry up with Full Throttle's reels.  Something weird going on, as when I got the bottom glass number reel aligned, the top glass number reel is not aligned correctly - could be Oasis bug, could be MAME bug.  It's roughly playable for now at least (in Door Open mode until we implement ccTalk in MAME).

I think after those initial lamp render tests (where I'm using a single shader to render the artwork+lamps+glows as simple layers - the next stage is getting into having it as individually controllable lamps.  This will involve a bunch of steps of the Layout Editor side, to pull out the perspective-removed glass panels to their own views.  Then something to initially predict and arrangement for the white plastic lamp trays, with the option to edit that layer as lines/curves with handles.  Though hopefully the predicted trays won't be too far off.  That then allows for simulation of cross-tray light bleed (usually where the foam tape has perished). 

I'm thinking then I could convert those tray boundaries to signed distance field data, that a compute shader can work with, so the bleed can all be done on the GPU (rather than having a prebaked illumination for each lamp).  It's all a bit bonkers, the idea being there will be a single GPU material instance per glass panel, which will just have a list of current lamp intensities from the emulation - and it will render all of the lighting effects internally in a single draw call on the GPU.  This is more complicated to develop, but then it'll be efficient (like original Arcade Sim), which later will be useful for better performance when lots of machines onscreen at once, which is always key.

Anyway, enough of that, here's a few credits on sc4 under the Layout Editor   

 

Edited October 12, 2025 by johnparker007

[thealteredemu]

Wow, sounds complex.  I love it

J