Development Updates

[vectra666]

You need a 45o angle so the corners are used then you can make those machines in the centres of arcade , machine islands will we be able to change the style of carpet to suit 

I’d like a brown carpet that’s been there since the 70’s with fag burns and  greasy soil marks the ones where you drop a quid and it magically disappears into the Paisley pattern on the floor and some plastic palm trees and cheap maxi pac vending machines. Full of fags or cold hot chocolate and chicken soup, I loved chicken soup in those little paper cups  until i drank it and got third degree burns down my throat 

happy days 

[johnparker007]

12 minutes ago, slasher said:

Is it worth having the user select where to dump the machine? Thinking rollercoaster tycoon where you pick say a merry-go-round and it gives you it as a transparent image to place somewhere? Would make adding multiple units in one go a ball ache though I guess

I did originally think of doing it like that... I still might.... so if they just add a single machine then it does something like that, but if they add a bunch of machines, they appear on the 'spawning strip' next to the arcade ready to be selected/dragged to where they need to go  

 

[johnparker007]

18 minutes ago, vectra666 said:

You need a 45o angle so the corners are used then you can make those machines in the centres of arcade , machine islands will we be able to change the style of carpet to suit 

I’d like a brown carpet that’s been there since the 70’s with fag burns and  greasy soil marks the ones where you drop a quid and it magically disappears into the Paisley pattern on the floor and some plastic palm trees and cheap maxi pac vending machines. Full of fags or cold hot chocolate and chicken soup, I loved chicken soup in those little paper cups  until i drank it and got third degree burns down my throat 

happy days 

The extra angles are planned, I'm just doing the simple user-friendly mode first (the extra angles will be in the 'Expert Mode' that can be accessed with the switch at the bottom).

Carpets - I'm thinking it'll come with a good choice, but also the option to add your own texture... plus some other (optional) bits and bobs, to make it look less 'pristine'... things like stain decals, cigarette butts, the occasional dropped shiny coin, and all these elements would randomly placed on the carpet.

All stuff for later on though, just keeping focused on getting basic functionality in for now, as there's still lots to do there   

[Tommy c]

Excellent work again, thanks for the updates,

[johnparker007]

Made a start of getting some saving/loading working for the editor.  Still quite a bit to do on this yet (it's just saving to and loading from a fixed filename at present) 
 

 

[Zippy]

16 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

Made a start of getting some saving/loading working for the editor.  Still quite a bit to do on this yet (it's just saving to and loading from a fixed filename at present) 
 

 

Video made me feel hungry, I'll have some chips and a pickled egg with it

[niallquinn]

Nice moquette.

[johnparker007]

On 23/02/2021 at 14:59, niallquinn said:

Nice moquette.

And then I had to look up what a 'moquette' is - great word, so that's what repeating industrial design patterns are called!  Prob going to do a larger carpet texture at some point so it's not as repeaty, though I guess you'd see the repeat in the real world if you hovered above, and the arcade was completely empty  

Edited February 24, 2021 by johnparker007

[niallquinn]

I only know because of my love of trains, every company has, and always had, a different moquette.  ie, seat covering pattern. 

 

[Reg]

56 minutes ago, niallquinn said:

I only know because of my love of trains, every company has, and always had, a different moquette.  ie, seat covering pattern. 

 

Trains - you've never mentioned trains before ?

Have you tried Nimby rails ?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/

[Matty.n]

19 minutes ago, Reg said:

Trains - you've never mentioned trains before ?

Have you tried Nimby rails ?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/

Seen a lot of positive things said about this on Facebook and the proposed updates do make it more appealing, a shame my allocated game allowance has been spent on DLC/EP's but shall be grabbing it next month!

[johnparker007]

Been rewriting the Undo history system as it was too flakey.  I have a couple of minor new bugs with it now, but overall it's more solid.  On the toolbar it now shows how many Undo snapshots you have and where you are in the sequence e.g. 13/18.

Undo 'snapshots' and also the saved arcades save the editor camera position, which is making things a little more usable  

I needed to display the name of the arcade you are currently editing, so we now have a bar along the top of the screen to show this, also moved the Exit button to be a standard (X) close button on that new bar (it's better there as it's out of the way of the tools).  When you have unsaved edits to the current arcade, I show a * after the arcade name.

Copied the Machine Selector popup, to use in the frontend to select which arcade to load.

Loading/saving working, haven't done creating new files yet...

All fairly dry stuff for now, a few more nights on this, then I can start on properly doing loading into these arcades to play them... which will be a bit more exciting   All the stuff from the early gameplay videos was set up 'manually', making the arcade scene in the Unity windows application, so I've got to start from scratch - also I need to get rid of the various multiplayer stuff that it currently requires to work (and just have it as an optional extra for later on).

Quick vid of the latest changes in action:
 

 

Edited February 24, 2021 by johnparker007

[serene02]

Nice one JP

[johnparker007]

Fair bit of hacky stuff in here for now just to get this initially going, but now the Play option on the Main Menu loads the 'Dirty Verns' saved arcade.  So I can make changes in the editor, save them, load it via Frontend and then walk around in the edited arcade and play the machines.  Needs a lot of finishing up work, but nice to see these systems working together  

Here I add a couple of test Smash 'n' Grabs inside the 'V' of the 'DV' I've made out of machines, then save and have a play in the edited map:
 

 

[Tommy c]

Big up for Dirty Vernssssssssssssss haha great stuff jp love it.

[johnparker007]

Did a stress test with a very large number of Indies onscreen at the same time    I'll be doing some optimisations, but it handled it fairly well, just too much CPU load causing minor framedrop and emulation timing issues.
 

 

[Ginge]

Loving the name Dirty Verns. Only thing Wrong with it@johnparker007 it’s not dirty enough verns arcade was one of my locals I used to visit many years ago as a teenager and as an adult the front of the arcade was all windows and glass doors and it was an annual event to see them get cleaned . Loving the updates  looking forward to having a go and creating my own version of dirty verns .

[Tommy c]

2 hours ago, Ginge said:

Loving the name Dirty Verns. Only thing Wrong with it@johnparker007 it’s not dirty enough verns arcade was one of my locals I used to visit many years ago as a teenager and as an adult the front of the arcade was all windows and glass doors and it was an annual event to see them get cleaned . Loving the updates  looking forward to having a go and creating my own version of dirty verns .

That was the frosted glass effect, did they never tell you

 

@johnparker007 looking great, cheers for the update.

[johnparker007]

Trying to catch up on real life jobs this weekend, but still getting sidetracked   So I've found the measurements for both the Eclipse and the Horizon cabinets.  The one I bought at the start that I though was Eclipse is apparently Horizon as it has the full moulded front plastic piece (rather than the black top/bottom bars and coloured straight side bars of the very similarly proportioned Eclipse cabinet in terms of the front glasses).

Anyway, here's what I believe are the Barcrest 80s cabs and the modern Horizon cab at the correct scales from my measurements... so if I've got it right, the newer cab is a bit taller than the older ones.  Couldn't find a photo of a new one next to an old one, so I'll just keep trusting the numbers, as I chip away at this...  

To be honest, the model I bought didn't match up with the measurements I had for Horizon cabinet, so now it does from me scaling it, and the angle of the bottom glass now looks too steep - I suspect the original 3d artist wasn't thinking it was that important to get it perfectly proportioned for an arcade simulator!  So I may need to get in there and cut some off the back to get the angles right again using my side profile technique...

   

Edited February 27, 2021 by johnparker007

[slasher]

I know I'm not really meant to be posting any more but this could well be important especially with the project well underway etc.

The horizon cabinet I thought was Barcrest's "bubble" or "ribbed Johnny" cabinet that has games like "take it or leave it £70" 

The eclipse cabinet is the one you find housing BFG and most rebuilds in pubs these days. It's the most common cab used at the moment, although some use the blueprint style Pluto 6 cab that I'm not sure on the name of. They're very similar to the eclipse cabs anyway except the top plastic where the logo usually is, is thicker, and it looks like they've patched up where a notey was expected to be on the bottom right of the top door under the reel glass.

[johnparker007]

1 hour ago, slasher said:

The horizon cabinet I thought was Barcrest's "bubble" or "ribbed Johnny" cabinet that has games like "take it or leave it £70" 

The eclipse cabinet is the one you find housing BFG and most rebuilds in pubs these days. It's the most common cab used at the moment, although some use the blueprint style Pluto 6 cab that I'm not sure on the name of. They're very similar to the eclipse cabs anyway except the top plastic where the logo usually is, is thicker, and it looks like they've patched up where a notey was expected to be on the bottom right of the top door under the reel glass.

That makes a lot of sense, thanks for the info - since doing the post I was looking around for cabs with an 'all in one' moulded plastic front, as I found a website describing Horizon cabinets... I originally thought that was talking about the 3d model I bought, I think that 3d model I bought is pretty much an artists interpretation of a fruit machine cabinet!  I'll get all this cab stuff figured slowly but surely  

Thanks for posting anyway, I didn't realise you were not posting any more, hope all is cool mate  

[slasher]

1 minute ago, johnparker007 said:

Thanks for posting anyway, I didn't realise you were not posting any more, hope all is cool mate  

All good mate! Just taking a step back due to drama on here of late and lack of moderation, it was starting to stress me out but I still enjoy your thread and following the progress of the project!

[Tommy c]

10 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

That makes a lot of sense, thanks for the info - since doing the post I was looking around for cabs with an 'all in one' moulded plastic front, as I found a website describing Horizon cabinets... I originally thought that was talking about the 3d model I bought, I think that 3d model I bought is pretty much an artists interpretation of a fruit machine cabinet!  I'll get all this cab stuff figured slowly but surely  

Thanks for posting anyway, I didn't realise you were not posting any more, hope all is cool mate  

This should help i hope.

[johnparker007]

8 hours ago, Tommy c said:

This should help i hope.

Brill thanks @Tommy c   That's great as I had the Horizon width measurement significantly wrong from a website I copied it from (I had 710mm not 650mm) - database updated with correct info now  

 

[johnparker007]

Started work on a proper Eclipse cabinet to replace the one I bought (which doesn't really seem to be any particular real cabinet)... once done will be the correct dimensions and hopefully fairly accurate relative ratios...