Development Updates

[niallquinn]

5 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

Some/all of the following MPU4 games will be broken for some users:

Action Bank
Andy Capp (BWB)
Viva Espana
Viz
Winner Takes All

This will be automatically fixed in a future patch with more work on the RAM management system, but this will not be out for a couple of weeks-ish.  If you want to fix manually to get them working straight away, you need to delete their named folders from:

C:\Users\____YOUR_WINDOWS_USERNAME_____\AppData\LocalLow\GyroxGames\ArcadeSim\data\Saves

So these folder names are the ones to delete (if present on your system):
Action_Bank_(Barcrest)
Andy_Capp_(BWB)
Viva_Espana_(Barcrest)
Viz_(BWB)
Winner_Takers_All_(BWB)

Apologies for the inconvenience!  

Ah, excellent, then they don't use the patched CHR roms - should fix the occasional weird issues I was having with them, ie Winner Takes All, when taking nudges on the feature board.

EDIT, yes it does fix Winner Takes All.

Great, stuff.

Edited December 29, 2021 by niallquinn

[johnparker007]

55 minutes ago, niallquinn said:

Ah, excellent, then they don't use the patched CHR roms - should fix the occasional weird issues I was having with them, ie Winner Takes All, when taking nudges on the feature board.

EDIT, yes it does fix Winner Takes All.

Great, stuff.

That's right  - this was part of fixing up that previous issue with the chr-free patched ROMs that had accidentally made it in from the other project... so shouldn't have those problems any more (or in future new MPU4 machines). 

[woodsy]

just been for a ride on a ROLLERCOASTER and i bloody loved it

[Mort]

Love it JP - so great, and a milestone (for me personally) to see and play Rollercoaster in the arcade.

Brilliant stuff, thanks so much for all your efforts.

[niallquinn]

Saving the new ones for tonight,

 

[cja272]

Fantastic , Great to see Rollercoaster!

[CBNMNIJ]

Continue to be marvelled by this amazing, selfless project.  Having hours of fun!  Just sent you a small donation as a token of my appreciation mate - if I ever come into money, I'll see you right for a proper drink!

[johnparker007]

18 hours ago, CBNMNIJ said:

Continue to be marvelled by this amazing, selfless project.  Having hours of fun!  Just sent you a small donation as a token of my appreciation mate - if I ever come into money, I'll see you right for a proper drink!

Pleased to hear you're having fun with it man!   Thanks very much for your donation, super appreciated  I've added to the donations sheet.

[Mort]

Happy New Year to you all.

I recall that TommyC released a variant 'alt' version of Dx03 for Rollercoaster (which is labelled as Dx03_Alt_8jp within the official dat set). The difference with this release was that he included superbright masks for the win values (when you get the rollercoaster feature) and he added blended lamps to the main rollercoaster decal on the top glass.

Whilst playing rollercoaster I wondered how Arcade sim would handle the super bright lamp feature, particularly with bloom enabled, but, unfortunately this didn't happen due to the use of the original Dx03_8jp layout.

I'm happy as pig in shit with the version you have used, but maybe one for the future to investigate hopefully.

Also to add it may well be that the lamp masks would not look correct in Arcade Sim any way, in which case, Dx03 as it stands would be the definitive version anyway.

Cheers,

Mort.

Edited January 1, 2022 by Mort

[woodsy]

Happy new year @johnparker007 and @Spidy21982 you’ve been bloody great in 2021!! 2022 is your year for the taking!!

[MonkeyTennis]

Happy New Year! Though 2022 has caused my version of Arcade Simulator to break.

It downloads patch 0.1.34 (from 0.1.31), decompresses and then just says "Updating Process Failed".

Any tips?

[johnparker007]

@Mort @MonkeyTennis Bear with me guys, having an Xmas / New Year's break, but will check into these in the next few days once I'm back on Arcade Sim  

[Mort]

Hi JP. No problem at all and no rush, this was just a bit of info. Hope you are enjoying the well deserved break. 

[Anubis]

So casually browning thought vrc it could be possable to modify the udon engine they have to work with mmfme as it uses a scripter client they made several arcade machine's using udon sharp it is a unity based engine for vr but it wortha test to see if you can manipulate the cabs into the game as a testing ground

[johnparker007]

16 hours ago, Anubis said:

So casually browning thought vrc it could be possable to modify the udon engine they have to work with mmfme as it uses a scripter client they made several arcade machine's using udon sharp it is a unity based engine for vr but it wortha test to see if you can manipulate the cabs into the game as a testing ground

Hi there, thanks for the input  

At this time, the online multiplayer is planned to be built natively in Arcade Simulator, using something like (probably) Photon for multiplayer services (set as up to 64 CCU / room), with user accounts being managed by a dedicated ArcadeSim server.

While VR Chat is a popular client, I'm not sure it's the best choice for a scalable industry-grade solution when compared to Photon, which seems a much cleaner scalable solution - there's a (very old) tech demo of ArcadeSim Photon multiplayer test (4x local clients) here:

Online multiplayer is on hold for a good while (along with native full VR) - as there's a great deal of work to do (read years) to get the single player experience up to scratch... this project is still very much in it's early stages!  

Thanks again for your suggestion though, it's a good idea (and probably achievable)... but feels like the wrong direction from my experience (for this particular project), as I'll be hitting issues that I will not have the power to solve by relying on it, compared to using Photon.  Also, it'd mean non-VR multiplayer users having to set up a VR chat account in addition to an Arcade Simulator account, again not ideal - I'd like to keep low level control over the infrastructure as much as possible, so it doesn't bite me later (for instance if VR Chat decide to make a change on their servers that breaks *everything* - I've seen this sort of thing happen in the past!).

Just had a quick look - as a real world example - stuff like this would quickly become a real pain in the arse if/when that multiplayer userbase grows:

https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/iw0lfv/help_4year_ban_for_modded_client_when_im_using/
(VR Chat banning Arcade Sim accounts for whatever internal reason they choose, and I can't fix it).

 

[jabbathehut]

Happy New Year.

Thanks for the latest update but i have now encountered a problem i can play 2 or machines and then it just won't load anymore machines. I can leave the machine and try another with the same result.Eventually i will get an error message do you want to exit or wait.If i then exit and go back into it still nothing will load.

 

 

[johnparker007]

11 hours ago, jabbathehut said:

Happy New Year.

Thanks for the latest update but i have now encountered a problem i can play 2 or machines and then it just won't load anymore machines. I can leave the machine and try another with the same result.Eventually i will get an error message do you want to exit or wait.If i then exit and go back into it still nothing will load.

 

 

If you restart your PC and then re-run Arcade Simulator, does this happen every time?  Or is it a rare issue (from startup)?

[jabbathehut]

it happens every time.Played 3 machines the 4th wouldn't start.Restarted my computer played 2 more then next machine wouldn't start eventually after trying another 2 or 3 all not starting it crashed.

[johnparker007]

1 hour ago, jabbathehut said:

it happens every time.Played 3 machines the 4th wouldn't start.Restarted my computer played 2 more then next machine wouldn't start eventually after trying another 2 or 3 all not starting it crashed.

It crashes (rarely) on mine, but in the exact same way, so I have seen this... I believe it's due to me using MFME I'm having to do a load of actual hacking to hook into it and control it (as the source code is lost).  So we get some kind of 'lock' which hangs MFME process.

All I can say for now is sit tight unfortunately... I have currently started work on improving the UI so I can easily include plenty more options.  I will be added a few related to capturing, and may rewrite/tweak the capture to work in a different way - this may lead to more stability, though this isn't a certainty at all guaranteed... but attempting to improve the capturing is one of the easier options in order to get working with MFME more stable (I won't have these particular problems with MAME depending on how I integrate it/customise MAME build - as then hacking won't be required).

In the meantime, it's just a case of restarting Arcade Sim when it crashes (not great I know lol!).  You may be able to get away with just Alt-Tabbing to switch to MFME and force closing that process, rather than restarting ArcadeSim as well.

I've added a bug to the list specifically about this, and made a note that it affects your system very frequently... so when I get some of the new scraping work developed, I'll tag you and suggest some new settings to try.
 

Edited January 4, 2022 by johnparker007

[johnparker007]

On 01/01/2022 at 19:48, MonkeyTennis said:

Happy New Year! Though 2022 has caused my version of Arcade Simulator to break.

It downloads patch 0.1.34 (from 0.1.31), decompresses and then just says "Updating Process Failed".

Any tips?

Hiya there   

Sorry to hear about this - I'm still not convinced of the robustness of my patching system to be honest.  In this instance, I'd suggest deleting this folder:

C:\Users\___YOUR_WINDOWS_USERNAME___\AppData\Local\Arcade Simulator

(replacing 'your windows username' above with whatever your username is).

Then go to http://arcadesimulator.net/ and download the installer, and reinstall.

Not a great solution, but if it works...   If that doesn't work, lemme know and we can try some other things...
 

[woodsy]

Welcome back Jon hope you had a great Xmas drink and time off!! Thanks for the new faves too!! Really looking forward to the year ahead with your progress!!

[johnparker007]

1 hour ago, woodsy said:

Welcome back Jon hope you had a great Xmas drink and time off!! Thanks for the new faves too!! Really looking forward to the year ahead with your progress!!

Plenty of Xmas booze and food lol, must've put on a stone!  

Started on some new UI stuff needed for expanding options menus for the first task of 2022...


 

[MonkeyTennis]

Thanks @johnparker007, the nuclear option worked.

[johnparker007]

1 hour ago, MonkeyTennis said:

Thanks @johnparker007, the nuclear option worked.

Thanks for letting me know   One day I'll have to spend some more time on the patch system to iron out these issues... but it's finding the dev time!

[johnparker007]

Update - new settings menu roughly working Just has old options for now - allows for many settings pages, with a sidebar for navigation.  The main point of this was to get the pages scrolling, so a page isn't limited to screen height. 

Moved some settings out of Experimental page to Graphics page.  Next will probably be making sliders, for Bloom/FOV settings...